In news– Google has confirmed that it will soon start public testing for a new AI chatbot of its own called Bard, based on the company’s Language Model for Dialogue Application or LaMDA.
What is Bard?
- Bard is based on LaMDA and Google’s own conversational AI chatbot.
- Google will be opening it up to trusted testers ahead of making it more widely available to the public in the coming days.
- According to Google, Bard “draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses.”
- In short, it will give in-depth, conversational and essay-style answers just like ChatGPT does right now.
- A user will be able to ask Bard “to explain new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old, or learn more about the best strikers in football right now, and then get drills to build your skills,”
- However, Google has also said that the model is currently a “lightweight” version of LaMDA, and the one being “requires significantly less computing power, enabling us to scale to more users, allowing for more feedback.” Remember running these models also requires significant computing power.
What is LaMDA?
LaMDA, which stands for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, is a family of conversational neural language models developed by Google. The first generation was announced during the 2021 Google I/O keynote, while the second generation was announced in 2022.
Comparison of Google’s Bard with ChatGPT of Microsoft-backed OpenAI-
- It appears that to take on ChatGPT, Google has an ace up its sleeve: the ability to draw information from the Internet. “It (Bard) draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses,” Google said in its blog post.
- ChatGPT has impressed with its ability to respond to complex queries — though with varying degrees of accuracy — but its biggest shortcoming perhaps is that it cannot access real-time information from the Internet.
- ChatGPT’s language model was trained on a vast dataset to generate text based on the input, and the dataset, at the moment, only includes information until 2021.
- According to a demo shown by Google, it appears that for questions where there might not be a clear-cut answer, Bard will synthesise a response that reflects differing opinions.
- Bard looks like a limited rollout right now. Google is looking for a lot of feedback at the moment around Bard, so it is hard to say whether it can answer more questions than ChatGPT.
- Google has also not made clear the amount of knowledge that Bard possesses.
- For instance, with ChatGPT, we know its knowledge is limited to events till 2021. Of course, it is based on LaMDA, which has been in the news for a while now. Bard is also built on Transformer technology—which is also the backbone of ChatGPT and other AI bots. Transformer technology was pioneered by Google and made open-source in 2017.
- Transformer technology is a neural network architecture, which is capable of making predictions based on inputs and is primarily used in natural language processing and computer vision technology.
Further reading: https://journalsofindia.com/openais-chatgpt/
Source: The Indian Express
