Google Launches Bard

BARD aims to enhance productivity, creativity, and curiosity while addressing potential biases and misinformation.

Welcome Back,

I’m finally back from my Visa trip to Singapore, so regular posts should be resuming this or next week.

After a day when ChatGPT went down and people could see the histories of other users, we needed a refresh.

From Tuesday users can join waiting list for access to technology that firm hopes will rival Bing Chat and ChatGPT.

Google has been working on Big Bard, it’s upgraded version of Bard, one of the chatbots along with DeepMind’s sparrow that is seen as a direct competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

After a week when GPT-4 and Claude launched, as well as Midjourney V5 and other spectacular Generative A.I. tools, we come to this.

Google @Google

Today we're starting to open up access to Bard, our early experiment that lets you collaborate with generative AI. You can use Bard to boost your productivity, accelerate your ideas and fuel your curiosity. Learn more, including how to sign up ↓

goo.gleTry Bard and share your feedbackBard is an early experiment from Google that lets you collaborate with generative AI. If you’re in the U.S. and U.K., you can sign up to try it.

As much time as Google took to train and test Bard, these Conversational AIs will be far from free from hallucinations. Google’s LaMDA and PaLM really will be the basis for so many things. The latest ChatGPT outage comes amid increasing concern over the damage that artificial intelligence could do to artists and other industries.

I found this Bard vs. Bing video somewhat illustrative of just how many chatbots we are now being bombarded with.

While some journalists seem primed to push yet another chatbot to the brink, I have more faith in Google’s Bard and Sparrow and PaLM based tools than a host of the other Conversational AIs and tools, outside of Anthropic AI’s Claude, which seems built for trust and safety first.

There is something poetic about the battle of the text-to-image generators and Conversational AIs, it’s early days but the competition appears healthy. BigTech is now basically funding the top startups in the domain around their Cloud services with Microsoft, Google and even Amazon well represented.

There is also something eventful about Microsoft trying to take on Google in search, for however much of the Search Ad market that’s worth. And trained with human feedback? Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees in a memo on Tuesday that user feedback will be critical to its chatbot (Bard’s) success. 80,000 employees participated in testing Bard, Pichai wrote.

If Ron DeSantis says Google must be broken up, the reality is its A.I. products are just getting started. Corporations too powerful? You haven’t seen anything yet. Google plans around twenty A.I. related products in 2023 and 2024.

Until now, Google’s chatbot was only available to what it’s called “trusted testers”. The ChatGPT glitch really is the perfect week to give Bard a bigger audience. You can interact with Bard to ask questions and refine the answer with follow-up queries.

You can use Bard to boost your productivity, accelerate your ideas and fuel your curiosity. You might ask Bard to give you tips to reach your goal of reading more books this year or about what to do as you travel. It’s nice to know that we aren’t locked into spending $20 on ChatGPT, there are so many alternatives.

Just keep in mind that data you feed into these Chatbots will be used for data collective and personalized Advertising purposes and maybe even more sinister profiling. As someone who is moderately privacy conscious I cannot quite imagine how gullible people are to share very personal information with corporations so easily.

Give it to me straight Generative A.I., let me see where your Conversational A.I. is at.

Thanks for reading!