Disappointment, big disappointment, for all the users who were waiting (we are) for Bard to come to Spain. Among the most important announcements of the Google I/O 2023 presentation and as part of its huge block dedicated to artificial intelligence, the company told us that its chatbot no longer has a waiting list and that its scope has been expanded immediately. became available from at least 180 countries. This logically made us think that we already have access to it from Spain, although the list with them will not be published at first.

Did it make sense to think that Spain would be among those 180 countries? The answer is a resounding yes, and not because of ego, but because the full list of countries in the world doesn’t list a number much higher than this expansion’s number. The United Nations currently recognizes 193 countries and two observer states (Vatican and the Palestinian Authority), it is true that the other territories are not recognized as countries globally, but even if we take them into account, the number is not too far from 200.

So, yes, it was logical to think that the Bard would come to Spain… but it wasn’t. Despite the fact that two days have passed since the said notification, when trying to access the service from our country, we continued to get the already more than familiar response “Bard is not currently supported in your country. Stay tuned!«, and it is useless to reload the page, empty the cache, change accounts, browsers… the chatbot is still unavailable from our country.

Now it finally seems like we have an explanation, even if it’s not official. The company published a list of 180 countries with access, and as we can see in it, Google does not allow access to Bard from Europe or Canada. A decision that may seem surprising at first (aside from being somewhat disappointing, of course), but which can actually be understood considering the current state of AI on the old continent.

As you may recall, Italy blocked access to ChatGPT at the end of March, and other European regulators have launched similar investigations to the one conducted by Italy. It’s true that the Alpine country recently lifted said blockade, so access to the OpenAI chatbot was restored, but that didn’t end concerns about the future of AI, especially from movements like Geoffry Hinton. Europe intends to regulate the use of artificial intelligence in the common space in record time (by the end of this year). In other words, the waters on this side of the pond are going down in confusion.

So it makes sense that Google has preferred not to bring Bard to Europe yet, at least until the situation is a bit clearer, because after a failure like the launch of the service, it had to go through a situation similar to that experienced by OpenAI in Italy , it can be a big image problem for the company even for the Bard.

However, we must not forget that Microsoft jumped into the Bing pool from the startalthough it is true that this happened before the ChatGPT problems, and that Microsoft can therefore use this to strengthen its presence in Europe, in the face of Google, whose caution may ultimately come at a cost.