Google unveiled “Bard,” a new chatbot tool, on Monday, in an apparent attempt to compete with the viral success of ChatGPT.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet, announced in a blog post that Bard will be available to “trusted testers” beginning Monday, with plans to make it public “in the coming weeks.”
Bard, like ChatGPT, which was publicly released in late November by AI research firm OpenAI, is based on a large language model. These models are trained on massive amounts of data collected online in order to produce compelling responses to user prompts.
“Bard aspires to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models,” wrote Pichai. “It uses web information to provide fresh, high-quality responses.”
The announcement comes as Google’s core product, online search, is widely regarded as facing its most serious threat in years. ChatGPT has been used to generate essays, stories, and song lyrics, as well as to answer questions that were previously searched for on Google, in the two months since it was made public.
The overwhelming interest in ChatGPT has prompted Google’s management to declare a “code red” situation for its search business. In a tweet last year, Paul Buchheit, one of Gmail’s creators, warned that Google “may be only a year or two away from total disruption” due to AI’s rise.