Is Google still punching below its weight in the chatbot wars?

Google challenges ChatGPT (above) with Bard. Google is also trying out new designs for search pages that use chat technology. (Image: Screenshot)

It has to be said: Google won't let Microsoft or anyone else take over as the top search engine without a fight. So, earlier this week (on February 6, 2023), Google announced its own chatbot, Bard, would come out in the next few weeks. Bard is Google's response to ChatGPT, the popular AI chatbot made by OpenAI with Microsoft's help.

In a blog post, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the project. He called Bard an "experimental conversational AI service" that will answer users' questions and participate in conversations. Today, a group of "trusted testers" are using the software. "In the coming weeks, the public will be able to use it more," Pichai wrote.

Also read: Why Google's LaMDA is more like an MBA aspirant than a chatbot with a conscience

Bard uses a smaller version of LaMDA, a powerful AI model that Google first talked about in May 2021, which is based on the same technology as ChatGPT. Google said that this will let it offer the chatbot to more people and get feedback to help it improve the quality and accuracy of its answers.

Although the specific capabilities of Bard are unknown, the chatbot will be just as adaptable as OpenAI's ChatGPT. For example, users are encouraged by a prompt to ask Bard practical questions like how to organize a baby shower or what kinds of meals may be produced with a list of ingredients.

Pichai wrote: "Bard can be a way to express your creativity and get you interested in new things." Pichai also said that Bard "uses information from the Internet to give fresh, good answers". It means that it can answer questions about recent events, which is hard for ChatGPT to do.

Even though the technology behind ChatGPT is not new, OpenAI's decision to make the system available for free on the web let millions of people learn about this new way for computers to write text. As a result, ChatGPT's effects on education, work, and internet search—especially for Google—have been widely discussed.

Also read: Amazon jumps into fray with generative AI better than GPT-3.5

Microsoft has also taken advantage of the situation by putting billions of dollars into OpenAI. As a result, ChatGPT is reportedly being included in Bing and other office software packages. Last week, screenshots that supposedly showed a ChatGPT-enhanced Bing were leaked.

Google has a lot of experience with the kind of AI that powers ChatGPT. The company invented the critical technology, the transformer, which is the "T" in GPT. However, the company has been more cautious about letting the public use its tools. Google's AI Test Kitchen app used to give access to LaMDA, the language model that Bard is built on. But even this version is minimal and can only make the text for a small number of queries.

Conclusion

Google and OpenAI both use text generation software to build their bots. This software makes decent sentences but can also pick up misinformation and wrong ways of talking that it finds online. The need to fix these problems and the fact that this kind of software can't be easily updated with new information make it hard to build robust and profitable new products on top of it, such as the idea that chatbots could change the way people search the web.

Furthermore, Google's approach to this technology will change when Bard comes out. In his blog post, Pichai said that Google will use "external feedback and our internal testing to make sure Bard's answers meet a high bar for quality, safety, and being based on real-world information."

However, it's almost certain that the system will make mistakes, some of which could be serious.