Declaration of war on Microsoft: Google introduces ChatGPT competition

With its new speech AI PaLM 2, Google is competing with Microsoft and thus also with ChatGPT. At the developer conference, the company announced 25 innovations.

Mountain View – Google presented the company's new large-scale language model for the first time at its I/O developer conference: PaLM 2. The internet giant is thus positioning itself against rival Microsoft and the ChatGPT developer AI it finances. It will be a "busy year for artificial intelligence," said Google CEO Sundar Pichai. According to the FAZ, language models such as PaLM 2 are the basis for applications such as ChatGPT. They are trained with vast amounts of data and are thus able to answer even complex questions at a high level. The new model should be able to do this faster, better and more efficiently, Pichai said.

Google competition for ChatGPT

While the current models are mainly fed with English data, Google's new model is explicitly trained on more than 100 languages at a high level, it said. In this way, artificial intelligence can understand the nuances of individual languages, for example formulate poems and riddles. For example, previous models would have taken the German phrase "I only understand the train station" literally. PaLM 2, on the other hand, understands the real meaning. The model also has better logic capabilities, and programming capabilities are also at a new level.

According to the FAZ, PaLM 2 is available in four different sizes. According to Google, the smallest model even runs on smartphones. Which of the four sizes fits best depends on the application. The more specific the requirements, the smaller the model can be. The more general the scope becomes, the larger the model must be, because it needs more context.

Sundar Pichai, head of Google, speaks at the I/O developer conference. © Jeff Chiu/dpa

Google unveils chatbot with new AI

At the developer conference, Google announced 25 new products and applications. This includes Google's own AI chatbot Bard. Secretly, Google Bard recently switched from the previous LaMDA model to PaLM 2. Google wants to make Bard freely available in more than 180 countries. So far, only select users in the United States and the United Kingdom have been able to use the program. Bard now also understands Japanese and Korean, with 40 more languages to follow quickly with the help of PaLM 2. With the Bard innovation, Google is entering the race for artificial intelligence with Microsoft.

Bard should also soon be able to process images. Answers from Bard could also now be exported directly to Gmail or Google Docs. Other applications such as Gmail and Google Maps should also receive new artificial intelligence-based functions, it added.