AI-powered chatbots could be the next big thing for internet search engines. Microsoft definitely believes that and recently invested $10 billion in OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. Microsoft just announced that the AI model will be integrated into Bing and Edge, the company’s search engine and browser that so far lags far behind Google’s alternatives in terms of market share.
Google has similar plans, though it will use its internal search. CEO Sundar Pichai introduced Bard, an “experimental conversational AI service”. It will be integrated into a core Google product, Search, and will first be available to “trusted testers” before becoming available to the general public “in the coming weeks.”
Bard can answer questions directly instead of just directing you to sites that may have the answer
What can you do with Bard? Instead of typing in keywords to find a site that might have an answer to your question, you can just ask the AI. It will pull new information from the web, using multiple sources and distill it into something easy to read.
For example, if you want to learn to play a musical instrument, you can use Bard to help you decide which: would a guitar or a piano be easier? How much practice do you need? More sites provide more answers, which Bard will summarize in a few easy-to-read paragraphs.
There is a question about how much you can trust his answers. For example, someone pointed out that the information from the demo video below is wrong – the JWST in fact did not take the very first photo of a planet outside our solar system. A quick Google search reveals this article from 2008, which claims the Hubble telescope took the first photo of an exoplanet (and explains why some earlier claims of such photos aren’t widely accepted).
Bard is based on Google’s LaMDA, short for Language Mode for Dialog Applications, more specifically a lightweight version of LaMDA. This is smaller than the full model, meaning it requires less computing power to provide answers, something that will be important as Google looks to scale Bard to the point where it can answer questions from millions of users.
As for accuracy, Google’s internal team and soon testers will provide feedback to make sure the answers Bard gets are safe and well-founded. You can read this post from last year, which describes the key objectives – Quality, Safety and Rooting – and how they were achieved 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 enterprises to join and create new things using the Generative Language API, which will (at least initially) be powered by LaMDA.
In other words, there will be a Cambrian explosion of talkative AIs in the coming months that could change the way we navigate the Internet. And not just the internet, Pichai promised more AI-related announcements to come soon.
PS. if you’re wondering if ChatGPT correctly answers the question about the James Webb Space Telescope, the answer is no. ChatGPT was trained on old data (around 2020), before the JWST was launched, so it only talks about what the telescope might discover in the future. This is one reason why Google emphasizes that Bard uses up-to-date data, which means it can provide up-to-date answers.
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