Google's Bard will switch to a more powerful language model

(Image: Getty Images)

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has confirmed that Bard, the tech giant's answer to the popular ChatGPT, will switch over to a more powerful language model, as generative AI emerges as the new tech frontier.

In The New York Times podcast Hard Fork, Pichai said Bard would move from the LaMDA model it uses to a larger PaLM model.

Also Read | United States District Court orders Github to identify who leaked Twitter's source code

"We clearly have more capable models," said Pichai. "Pretty soon, maybe as this goes live, we will be upgrading Bard to some of our more capable PaLM models, so which will bring more capabilities, be it in reasoning, coding."

As Engadget notes, LaMDA has been trained on 137 billion parameters. In comparison, PaLM is said to have been trained on 540 billion parameters, making it more efficient when it comes to analysing prompts.

Both OpenAI and Microsoft have struck gold with ChatGPT and Bing AI. They have controlled the conversation online by becoming an internet phenomenon, forcing Google to play catch-up with Bard.

Reaction to Google's chatbot has been mixed so far, with people saying the answers weren't as detailed or context-sensitive like those of its rivals.

Also Read | OpenAI's ChatGPT blocked in Italy: Privacy watchdog

In the podcast, Pichai admitted that launching Bard with LaMDA limited its scope but added that the lower computing power required to keep it online meant more people got to try it out and give feedback.

He said that the company won't release a "more capable model before we can fully make sure we can handle it well. We are all in very, very early stages. We will have even more capable models to plug in over time. But I don’t want it to be just who’s there first, but getting it right is very important to us".