Google has just announced the launch of its own AI chatbot, “Bard”, which is an “experimental conversational AI service”. According to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Bard aims to bring together the vastness of the world’s knowledge with the intelligence, power, and creativity of Google’s large language models. This is accomplished by drawing information from the web to provide relevant and high-quality responses to users.
Bard will be powered by a lightweight version of Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications, also known as LaMDA. This technology will allow Bard to support a larger number of users and thus provide more feedback, which will help to ensure that the responses generated by Bard are of high quality, safe, and grounded in real-world information.
However, this is a significant challenge for the developers of Bard, as AI software has a tendency to go astray in some negative ways. For example, last week, 4chan users utilized an AI speech synthesis tool called Voice Lab to generate audio clips of celebrities making racist and homophobic statements. And, just today, a popular AI-powered Seinfeld bot was suspended from Twitch after making unexpected homophobic and transphobic jokes.
The primary issue lies in the fact that AI is trained by humans, who are not always the best teachers. This problem is further compounded by the fact that AI is subject to the biases of its trainers, which can lead to unintended and unwanted consequences. Despite these difficulties, it is not surprising that Google has entered the AI development market with Bard. Microsoft recently announced a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and DALL-E, and is reportedly planning to incorporate ChatGPT technology into its Bing search engine to provide more human-like responses to queries.
Bard is currently available for trusted testers, and will be opened to the public in the coming weeks.
