Bard (chatbot)

Bard is a conversational artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Google, based on the LaMDA family of large language models. It was developed as a direct response to the rise of OpenAI's ChatGPT, and was released in a limited capacity in March 2023 to lukewarm responses.

Background

In November 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a chatbot based on the GPT-3 family of language models. ChatGPT gained worldwide attention following its release, becoming a viral Internet sensation. Alarmed by ChatGPT's potential threat to Google Search, Google executives issued a "code red" alert, reassigning several teams to assist in the company's AI efforts. In a rare and unprecedented move, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who had stepped down from their roles as co-CEOs of parent company Alphabet in 2019, were summoned to emergency meetings with company executives to discuss Google's response to ChatGPT. When asked by employees at an all-hands meeting whether LaMDA, Google's large language model (LLM) introduced earlier that year, was a missed opportunity for Google to compete with ChatGPT, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Google AI chief Jeff Dean stated that while the company had similar capabilities to ChatGPT, moving too quickly in that arena would represent a major "reputational risk" due to Google being substantially larger than OpenAI. In January 2023, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis teased plans for a ChatGPT rival, and Google employees were instructed to accelerate progress on a ChatGPT competitor, intensively testing "Apprentice Bard" and other chatbots. Pichai assured investors during Google's quarterly earnings investor call in February that the company had plans to expand LaMDA's availability and applications.

History

Announcement

On February 6, Google announced Bard, a conversational AI chatbot powered by LaMDA. Bard was first rolled out to a select group of 10,000 "trusted testers", before a wide release scheduled at the end of the month. Bard is overseen by product lead Jack Krawczyk, who described the product as a "collaborative AI service" rather than a search engine. Pichai described how Bard would be integrated into Google Search, and the company is working to integrate Bard into the ChromeOS operating system. Reuters calculated that adding ChatGPT-like features to Google Search could cost the company $6 billion in additional expenses by 2024, while research and consulting firm SemiAnalysis calculated that it would cost Google $3 billion. The technology was developed under the codename "Atlas", with the name "Bard" in reference to the Celtic term for a storyteller and chosen to "reflect the creative nature of the algorithm underneath". Multiple media outlets and financial analysts described Google as playing "catch-up" to Microsoft, as well as "rushing" Bard's announcement to preempt Microsoft's February 7 event unveiling its partnership with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into its Bing search engine. Tom Warren of ''The Verge'' and Davey Alba of Bloomberg News noted that this marked the beginning of another clash between the two Big Tech companies over "the future of search", after their six-year "truce" expired in 2021; Chris Stokel-Walker of ''The Guardian'', Sara Morrison of ''Recode'', and analyst Dan Ives of investment firm Wedbush Securities labeled this an AI arms race between the two.

After an "underwhelming" February 8 livestream in Paris showcasing Bard, Google's stock fell eight percent, equivalent to a $100 billion loss in market value, and the YouTube video of the livestream was made private. Many viewers also pointed out an error during the demo in which Bard gives inaccurate information about the James Webb Space Telescope in response to a query. Google employees criticized Pichai's "rushed" and "botched" announcement of Bard on Memgen, the company's internal forum, while Maggie Harrison of ''Futurism'' called the rollout "chaos". Pichai defended his actions by saying that Google had been "deeply working on AI for a long time", rejecting the notion that Bard's launch was a knee-jerk reaction. Alphabet chairman John Hennessy acknowledged that Bard was not fully product-ready, but expressed excitement at the technology's potential. A week after the James Webb debacle, Pichai asked employees to dedicate two to four hours to dogfood testing Bard, while Google executive Prabhakar Raghavan encouraged employees to correct any errors Bard makes. 80,000 employees responded to Pichai's call to action. After Pichai suddenly laid off 12,000 employees later that month due to slowing revenue growth, remaining workers shared memes and snippets of their humorous exchanges with Bard soliciting its "opinion" on the layoffs.

Launch

Google opened up early access for Bard on March 21 in a limited capacity, allowing users in the U.S. and UK to join a waitlist. Unlike Microsoft's approach with Bing, Bard was launched as a standalone web application featuring a text box and a disclaimer that the chatbot "may display inaccurate or offensive information that doesn't represent Google's views". Three responses are then provided to each question, with users prompted to submit feedback on the usefulness of each answer. Google vice presidents Sissie Hsiao and Eli Collins framed Bard as a complement to Google Search and stated that the company had not determined how to make the service profitable. Among those granted early access were those enrolled in Google's " Pixel Superfans" loyalty program.

Shortly after Bard's initial launch, Google reorganized the team behind Google Assistant, the company's virtual assistant, to focus on Bard instead. Google researcher Jacob Devlin resigned from the company after claiming that Bard had surreptitiously leveraged data from ChatGPT; Google denied the allegations. Pichai revealed on March 31 that the company intended to "upgrade" Bard by basing it on PaLM, a newer and more powerful LLM from Google, rather than LaMDA. The same day, Krawczyk announced that Google had added "math and logic capabilities" to Bard.

Reception

James Vincent of ''The Verge'' found Bard faster than ChatGPT and Bing, but noted that the lack of Bing-esque footnotes was "both a blessing and a curse". His colleague David Pierce was unimpressed by its uninteresting and sometimes inaccurate responses, adding that despite Google's insistence that Bard was not a search engine, its user interface resembled that of one, which could cause problems for Google. Cade Metz of ''The New York Times'' described Bard as "more cautious" than ChatGPT, while Shirin Ghaffary called it "dry and uncontroversial" due to the reserved nature of its responses. Associate professor Ethan Mollick of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania was underwhelmed by Bard's artistic ineptitude.

See also

* Poe (chatbot)
* Tay (chatbot)

References

External links

*

Press release

White paper

{{Natural language processing

2023 software
Chatbots
Google software
Virtual assistants