GARDEN ROUTE | KAROO NEWS - Google is working on a new product to rival OpenAI’s artificial language (AI) language model ChatGPT. This “exciting and experimental conversational AI service” is called Bard.
CEO of Google and Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, said the project had been underway for quite some time, but Google will take it to the next phase by opening it up to trusted testers before making it available to the public.
Google Bard
Pichai said Bard “seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models.”
Bard will be drawing from online web information to provide fresh, high-quality responses, such as helping users “explain new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old.”
How Bard works
Bard will be powered by a lightweight version of Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), which was launched in May 2021.
Pichai said the smaller LaMDA model “requires significantly less computing power”, which will enable engineers to scale it for users, providing a bigger feedback pool.
After talking to it about religion, rights and personhood, Google’s Responsible AI engineer, Blake Lemoine, publicly claimed that the LaMDA chatbot had become sentient.[2]
At the time, he told Washington Post the chatbot was even able to change his mind about Isaac Asmimov’s third law of robotics, which incidentally states that a robot must protect its own existence as long as the protection of said robot doesn’t violate the first two laws.
Should Google be at the helm?
Lemoine said technological advancements and innovation, especially with regards to artificial intelligence, “is going to be amazing.”
However, he firmly believes that “maybe we at Google shouldn’t be the ones making all the choices”.
Meanwhile, Pichai concluded his CEO note: “We’ll continue to be bold with innovation and responsible in our approach. And it’s just the beginning, more to come in all of these areas in the weeks and months ahead.”
