According to its creators, it would be able to "explain NASA's latest discoveries from the James Webb telescope to a 9-year-old child, or tell you about the best strikers in current football, then offer specific training for you. improve ".
Google announced on Monday the launch in the test phase of its conversational robot, called Bard, a few months after that of ChatGPT, the software of the American startup 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.
The software "leverages information from the web to provide up-to-date, high-quality answers," said the manager, for whom it can "be a breeding ground for creativity and a launching pad for curiosity."
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Read alsoChatGPT: we wrote a book using this artificial intelligence (and we put it on sale on Amazon)
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.
According to several American media, the arrival of ChatGPT has shaken up Google, which already had the technology necessary for the development of an AI but which has since worked hard to offer a product similar to the conversational robot within tight deadlines. from OpenAI.
Bard relies on LaMDA, a computer program designed by Google to generate conversation robots (chatbots), of which the Mountain View group (California) had unveiled the first version in 2021. LaMDA had been talked about 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.
ChatGPT surprised the tech giants
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 larger volume of returns.
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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 expand 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.
