Google announced on Monday February 6 the launch in the test phase of its conversational robot, called Bard, a few months after that of ChatGPT, the software of the American start-up OpenAI which unleashes passions.
“Bard’s ambition is to combine the breadth of knowledge in the world with the power, intelligence and creativity of our great language models,” said Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, parent company of Google, quoted in a statement.
“A ground of expression for creativity”
The software “leverages information from the web to deliver up-to-date, high-quality answers,” said the manager, for whom “Bard can be a breeding ground for creativity and a launching pad for curiosity.” »
The chatbot is able to “explain the latest NASA discoveries from the James Webb telescope to a 9-year-old child, or tell you about the best strikers in current football, then offer you specific training to improve you” .
Bard relies on “LaMDA”, a computer program designed by Google to generate conversation robots (chatbots), of which the Mountain View (California) group unveiled the first version in 2021.
“LaMDA” made headlines in June 2022 when a Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, claimed that artificial intelligence programs were becoming “conscious”. An opinion much criticized in the middle, which considered it absurd or, at best, premature.
More widely available soon
While artificial intelligence has been pervasive in the tech industry and beyond for years, if not decades, the release of ChatGPT in November changed the general public’s view of its capabilities.
It is not the first software of its kind, but it has surprised by the quality of its responses, whether writing a text on a given topic, explaining a complex subject in an intelligible way, or even creating a poem or the lyrics of a song.
Already a partner of Open AI, the creator of ChatGPT, Microsoft announced at the end of January that it would invest “several billion dollars” to extend their collaboration, after having made two investments in 2019 and 2021. Microsoft, Google, but also Meta and Amazon are among the most important players in artificial intelligence, a technology to which they devote colossal investments.
Double bites
According to several American media, the arrival of ChatGPT has shaken up Google, which already had “LaMDA” but which has since worked hard to offer a product similar to the OpenAI conversational robot within tight deadlines. Google said on Monday that it was launching Bard with a “lite version” of “LaMDA”, “requiring less computing power” to enable use by “a greater number of users” and “to process a higher volume great feedback. »
For now, the use of the software will be limited to “trusted testers, before making it more widely available in the coming weeks,” said Sundar Pichai. This testing phase aims in particular to “ensure that Bard’s answers reach a high level in terms of quality, security and anchoring in real-world information”, according to him.
Like ChatGPT, conversational robots fascinate as much as they worry, between tools likely to spare humans tedious tasks and a threat to many jobs whose usefulness they could question.
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