Google launches, in test, its version of ChatGPT

UPDATE ; DAY

Google announced Monday the launch in the test phase of its conversational robot, called Bard, a few months after that of ChatGPT, the software of the American startup OpenAI which unleashes passions.

“Bard aims to combine the breadth of knowledge of the world with the power, intelligence and creativity of our great language models”, explained Sundar Pichai, general manager of Alphabet, parent company of Google, quoted in a press release. .

The software “leverages information from the web to provide up-to-date, high-quality answers,” said the manager, for whom “Bard can be a breeding ground for creativity and a launching pad for curiosity.

The chatbot is able to “explain NASA's latest findings from the James Webb telescope to a 9-year-old child, or tell you about the best strikers in football today, and then tell you offer specific training to improve you”.

Bard relies on LaMDA, a computer program designed by Google to generate conversation robots (chatbots), whose Mountain View (California) group unveiled the first version in 2021.

LaMDA had made talk about him in June 2022 when a Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, claimed that artificial intelligence programs were becoming “self-aware”. An opinion much criticized in the community, who considered it absurd or, at best, premature.

While artificial intelligence has been pervasive in the tech industry and beyond for years, if not decades, the release of ChatGPT in November has changed the general public's view of its capabilities.

There is no t is not the first software of its kind, but it surprised by the quality of its responses, whether writing a text on a given topic, explaining a complex subject in an intelligible way, or even creating a poem or song lyrics.

Already a partner of Open AI, the creator of ChatGPT, Microsoft announced at the end of January that it would invest “several billion dollars” to expand their collaboration, having made two investments in 2019 and 2021.

Microsoft, Google, but also Meta and Amazon are among the most important players in artificial intelligence, a technology to which they devote colossal investments.

According to several American media, the arrival of ChatGPT has shaken up Google, which already had LaMDA but which has since worked hard to offer a product similar to the OpenAI conversational robot within tight deadlines.

Google said on Monday that it was launching Bard with a “lite version” of LaMDA, “requiring less computing power” to enable use by “more users” and “to process a volume more feedback.”

 For now, use of the software will be limited to “trusted testers, before making it more widely available in the coming weeks,” said clarified Sundar Pichai.

This testing phase aims in particular to “ensure that Bard's answers reach a high level in terms of quality, security and anchoring in real-world information”, according to him.

Like ChatGPT, conversational robots fascinate as much as they worry, between e tools likely to save humans from tedious tasks and threat to many jobs whose usefulness they could question.