Google just unveiled its Microsoft-backed ChatGPT rival, Bard AI

Google unveiled their Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot called Bard to rival OpenAI's ChatGPT, backed by Microsoft, on Monday.

The technology will be opened to "trusted testers" before it is made widely available to the public in the coming weeks, the company said in a blog post.

Described as an "experimental conversational AI service', Bard is powered by Google's Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA for short. Ring a bell? Last year, a Google engineer claimed that LaMDA was human-like in its responses and sentient. Though the allegations were untrue, it was a peek into how much AI had grown.

What does Bard bring to the table in comparison to ChatGPT? Google's AI chatbot "draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses."

To illustrate, Bard can help explain discoveries from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to a nine-year-old, or learn more about the best strikers in football right now, and then get drills to build your skills, the company explained.

The answer to Google's "Code Red" situation

The release of ChatGPT, which could do just about anything — ranging from composing songs, breaking down complex subjects, and writing code, to generating ideas from scratch — sounded like the death knell for Google's main search business.

The company had issued a "Code Red" weeks after the launch of ChatGPT, following which Google planned to unveil more than 20 new products and demo a version of Google Search with AI chatbot features this year, The New York Times reported.

Bard's launch comes just in time after speculations of Microsoft integrating ChatGPT into its search engine Bing. Though ChatGPT is currently free to use, OpenAI recently announced ChatGPT Plus - a subscription tier with additional capabilities and features.

AI-powered features will soon be available in Search

In the blog post, Pichai mentioned that people are turning to search engineers for deeper insights and understanding, such as "is the piano or guitar easier to learn, and how much practice does each need?" as opposed to "how many keys does a piano have?" Answering such nuanced questions needs an answer based on opinions or perspectives.

"AI can be helpful in these moments, synthesizing insights for questions where there's no one right answer," Pichai wrote.

"Soon, you'll see AI-powered features in Search that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web: whether that's seeking out additional perspectives, like blogs from people who play both piano and guitar, or going deeper on a related topic, like steps to get started as a beginner. These new AI features will begin rolling out on Google Search soon," Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote.

Bard is launched with the model version of LaMDA

Releasing Bard with the lightweight model version of LaMDA has its advantages - the smaller model requires less computing power, thereby permitting the developers to scale to more users, resulting in more feedback. "We'll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to make sure Bard's responses meet a high bar for quality, safety, and groundedness in real-world information," the company wrote.

The blog post also mentions that Google will begin onboarding individual developers, creators, and enterprises to try the company's Generative Language API, initially powered by LaMDA. "Over time, we intend to create a suite of tools and APIs that will make it easy for others to build more innovative applications with AI," the company added.