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The tech giant Google recently launched its own AI chatbot named Bard to the public for usage and access. Given that the race for AI dominance has been on for quite some time now, Google’s response to its popular rival—ChatGPT—took slightly longer than expected. However, now that public access is finally available to users, it is now increasingly apparent that more chatbots will continue to make their way into the market over time. Now that Bard is finally out to the public after a fairly extended period of speculative waiting, it is important to analyze what it has to offer since the chatbot and language model environment has already gotten considerably competitive, with numerous firms feverishly working toward releasing their own AIs.
What is Bard?
Primarily based on conversations and dialogue, Google’s Bard AI is based on a language model named LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications. Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Bard, too, is built as an interface to allow users to interact with a generative AI based on a large language model. Despite its recent launch, Google’s explorations into neural networks and language models date back to 2015, with the company exploring neural conversational models and their applications to further its products’ capabilities. The findings in this project were further enhanced by the firm’s pointed efforts in another project in 2017, titled the “Transformers Project.” Bard is capable of responding to user prompts following an analysis of both the textual content and the underlying context of the prompt entered by the users. Among the core differences between Bard and OpenAI’s ChatGPT lies in their connectivity to the internet. While the latter has access to data until September 2021, Bard can freely connect to the internet to allow users to view data in real-time.
Google’s AI chatbot is based on a language model project titled LaMDA.
For its initial days of operation, Bard ran on a truncated or lightweight version of LaMDA, as this allowed the conservation of computing power while allowing developers to understand operational metrics and performance. Ever since, Bard has shifted to using the more capable PaLM series of language models, with the more recent move to PaLM 2. PaLM 2 has found extensive use cases and has even supported the medical chatbot framework conceptualized by Google, which is now called Med-PaLM 2. The company is seemingly approaching the wave of public testing with considerable caution to avoid negative occurrences known to stem from chatbots. These commonly involve biased responses, incorrect information, and the hallucination of facts. Despite limited technical information being available, Google has primarily positioned its generative AI to provide users with a wide range of information and data in response to specific queries. The core function around which Bard plays a role is to provide more depth and pointed information for prompts that might require an additional degree of fact-based explanation or those that require an exposition of currently available data. This makes Bard an instrument to engage users in the exploration of new topics and subjects more interactively and interestingly.
The Capabilities of Google’s Chatbot
The current version of Bard is rather limited in its capabilities to allow evaluators to gauge its performance.
Bard’s primary function is to allow users to collaborate with generative AI through conversations. Much like its rivals, Bard, too, answers questions and is capable of holding long discussions with its users. The AI then uses metrics and data from these interactions to improve its overall performance and quality of responses. Unlike its rival ChatGPT, Bard can provide numerous iterations of responses to a user query instantly. Known as drafts, these iterations provide users with an array of responses, allowing them to gauge the extent of Bard’s accuracy and proficiency in construing answers to user prompts. All of this occurs while the AI remains perceptive of the overall context of the conversation and the prompt in itself. Capable of summarizing information, Google Bard can explain complex concepts and topics tailored to fit the user’s intent and level of understanding based on the prompts entered. In its initial days of operation Bard only understood and responded in English. Ever since, the chatbot has been upgraded to support over 40 global languages and has garnered a multilingual reputation.
While coding and debugging code has been another impressive feature of other language models, Bard brought the feature to users after running through a fair degree of testing. Currently, Bard supports both writing fresh code as well as existing code written by users. On the other hand, Google has dedicated a separate chatbot assistant named Codey to assist programmers and developers with their coding efforts. This chatbot along with Bard will compete with ChatGPT’s Code Interpreter plugin, which also serves to fit similar use cases. As far as unique responses go, Bard does have guidelines in place to ensure the chatbot remains neutral in its responses; however, its parent company has stated that it is capable of developing a “personality” that might tend to respond in an opinionated manner. This is possibly due to the dataset that Bard has trained on, aimed at providing its users with a more human experience when using the AI interface.
The Future of LaMDA and Bard
Though currently limited, Bard’s capabilities will be scaled progressively.
With the race to create and sustain efficient chatbots and language models gaining steam, Google’s AI chatbot seems to have entered late and with limited functionality. It is also important to note that the events in the tech world are bound to impact other sectors as well, with AI’s impact on education being one among the more important concerns of modern times. Following the incident where Bard’s wrong answer sent its parent company’s shares crashing, Google seems to have adopted a more cautious yet observant approach to the development of its chatbot. However, regardless of initial setbacks, Google does have an effective method to assess and evaluate Bard’s responses objectively. These include specificity, sensibility, and how interesting its responses are. Based on these three parameters, evaluators can make sense of how accurate, coherent, and intuitive their language model is, allowing them to promote improved responses while weeding out those that are subpar.
LaMDA has been judged by crowdsourced evaluators that have relied on these metrics to fine-tune its responses, which witnessed further improvement as more users began turning in their feedback to the interface before Google switched to the PaLM models. Though not explicitly modeled to act as a search engine, Bard’s capabilities might eventually become an additional feature of Google’s celebrated search feature. With numerous speculations and assumptions surrounding the language model, progressive development of the interface will bring more clarity to Bard’s purpose and use case. As more companies battle it out in the AI space, specificity and relevance are key for language models to become successful. The outcomes of these developments will have an impact on the education sector, as AI’s prospects of entering the edutech space grow bigger by the minute. With numerous students having used AI to generate key assignments and papers in the recent past, it becomes increasingly important for companies to include advanced protective guardrails that keep a check on misinformation while also serving to protect academic integrity. Though education’s future looks increasingly tech-influenced, sufficient precaution with a commitment to accuracy can ensure learning outcomes remain unaffected.
FAQs
1. Is Bard connected to the internet?
Yes, unlike its major competitor—ChatGPT—Google Bard is connected to the internet and can provide answers from real time information pulled from web sources.
2. Is Google Bard free?
Yes, Google Bard is completely free for the time being and allows users from a vast number of regions across the world access to the interface. Bard can be accessed from over 230 countries and territories, with multilingual support and interaction offered in 40 languages.
3. Is Google Bard safe to use?
While Google does mention that Bard is experimental, it takes enough care to ensure the interface is secure. However, Bard does tend to hallucinate and might provide responses that are either biased or inaccurate. The chatbot has a number of the limitations faced by most chatbots and is still a work in progress.