Wed 22 March 2023:
As it continues on its gradual path to catch up with the Microsoft-backed ChatGPT, Google has invited users in the UK and the US to test out its AI chatbot, Bard.
Bard, ChatGPT, and other similar artificial intelligence apps churn out essays, poems, or computer code on command and have taken the world by storm as the most exciting new thing in technology since the iPhone’s launch.
After testing Bard with 80,000 Google employees, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said on Tuesday that the chatbot would then be tested with the US and UK public as a “first step” before expanding to more countries in other languages.
“As more people start to use Bard and test its capabilities, they’ll surprise us,” Pichai said in a memo to staff seen by AFP.
“Things will go wrong. But the user feedback is critical to improving the product and the underlying technology,” added Pichai, who has faced some criticism within the company for rushing to catch up with Microsoft.
In the launch, people wishing to play with Bard can sign onto a waiting list at the bard.google.com website, distinctly separate from the tech giant’s search engine.
MICROSOFT PUTS CHAT LIMITS WITH BING AI AS CHATGPT GOES HAYWIRE
Google only announced Bard in February, revealing the conversational AI in response to the runaway success of ChatGPT. A few days after Google’s announcement, Microsoft went one further, revealing and launching Bing Chat, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 language model.
WITH ‘HUMAN-LEVEL’ PERFORMANCE, OPENAI UNVEILS CHATGPT SUCCESSOR
Unlike those two systems, Bard is based on Google’s own language model, called LaMDA, which hit headlines in June 2022 after an engineer, Blake Lemoine, was put on leave for publishing transcripts that he said demonstrated the system was sentient.
The company has long been a forerunner in AI technology, even inventing the “transformer” technology in 2017 that became the T in “GPT”. But it has historically struggled to ship products based on that research, which insiders have blamed on a mixture of organisational dysfunction and a fear that AI technology could harm the company’s profitable core businesses.
Privacy breach
On Monday, a privacy breach at OpenAI exposed users’ chat histories. The service was shut down while the company investigated the breach, and many users were still unable to access the history feature as of Tuesday morning.
Such flaws could jeopardize the company’s efforts to position itself as a viable provider of services to corporate customers like PwC, which signed an international deal last week to use Harvey, an OpenAI-backed legal chatbot.
SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
FOLLOW INDEPENDENT PRESS:
TWITTER (CLICK HERE)
https://twitter.com/IpIndependent
FACEBOOK (CLICK HERE)
https://web.facebook.com/ipindependent
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
