AI-powered chatbots could be the next big thing for internet search engines. Microsoft certainly believes so, and he recently invested $10 billion in OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT. Microsoft announced that AI models will be integrated into Bing and Edge. Bing and Edge are the company’s search engines and browsers that lag far behind Google’s alternatives in terms of market share.
Google has similar plans, but with internal research. CEO Sundar Pichai introduced his Bard, an “experimental conversational AI service.” It will be integrated into Google’s core product, search, first available to “trusted testers” and then to the general public “in the next few weeks.”
Bard can answer questions directly instead of just showing you sites where answers may be found
What can you do with Bard? Instead of entering keywords to find sites that have answers to your questions, you can ask the AI. Use multiple sources to pull fresh information from the web and organize it into something easy to read.
For example, if you want to learn to play an instrument, you can use Bard to determine if guitar or piano is easier. How much practice do you need? Multiple sites provide multiple answers, and Bard summarizes them in a few easy-to-read paragraphs.
There’s the question of how much you can trust that answer.For example, someone said that the information from the video demo below is error – In fact, JWST has not taken the first photo of a planet outside our solar system. A quick Google search reveals this article from 2008, showing that the Hubble telescope took the first photo of an exoplanet (and previous claims of such photos are widely accepted). It also explains why not).
Bard is built on Google’s LaMDA (short for Language Mode for Dialog Applications), specifically a lightweight version of LaMDA. Since it is smaller than the full model, it requires less computational power to provide an answer. This will be important as Google tries to scale Bard to answer questions from millions of users.
For accuracy, our internal team and testers provide feedback to ensure that the answers you get from Bard are safe and well-founded. You can read this post from last year. This article describes the primary goals of quality, safety and groundability and how we achieved them through training and fine-tuning.
Google will use its AI technology in its own products, but starting in March, it will invite individual developers, creators and companies to join in and build new ones using the Generative Language API. This is (at least initially) powered by LaMDA.
In other words, there could be a Cambrian explosion of chatty AI in the coming months, changing the way we browse the internet. Pichai also promised that AI-related announcements, not just the Internet, will be coming soon.
PS. If you’re wondering if ChatGPT correctly answers questions about James Webb’s Space Telescope, the answer is no. ChatGPT was trained on old data (circa 2020) before the JWST was launched, so it only talks about what the telescope can discover in the future tense. This is one of the reasons why Google emphasizes that Bard is using the latest data, which means it can give you the most up-to-date answers.
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