Google announced on Monday that it would release a conversational chatbot called Bard, sparking an artificial intelligence showdown with Microsoft.
In his blog post on Monday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that Google’s Bard conversational AI was to go out for testing with a plan to make it more widely available to the public “in the coming weeks.”
Google’s Bard is based on LaMDA, the firm’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications system, and has been in development for several years.
“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models,” Pichai said, referring to the technology behind ChatGPT-like AI.
“It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses,” he added
Google’s announcement came on the eve of an AI-related launch event by Microsoft, further that the two tech giants will do battle over the technology, also known as generative AI.
Microsoft has invested billions in the developers of ChatGPT, a bot that convincingly mimics humans..
Microsoft announced last month that it was backing OpenAI and has begun to integrate ChatGPT features into its Teams platform, with expectations that it will adapt the app to its Office suite and Bing search engine.
ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI in San Francisco, caused a sensation for its ability to write essays, poems or programming code on demand in seconds, sparking widespread fears of cheating or making entire professions obsolete.
