The most anticipated tech announcement of recent months has arrived with Google Bard. Since the arrival of ChatGPT and especially since Microsoft’s plans with OpenAI for integration chatbot in Microsoft Bing. Google’s hegemony with its web search engine could be threatened for the first time in a long time, because it was not the first to not offer a technological innovation that aims to revolutionize the search engine for information on the Internet.

As soon as the first rumors and leaks about the collaboration between Microsoft and OpenAI appeared, Google wanted to make a move and announced that in a few months we will have news about it, which got us thinking about Google I/O 2023 as a platform for announcements about its advances related to artificial intelligence. However, plans for Bing seem to be moving pretty quickly, to the point that some users have already been able to test it, so waiting until May doesn’t seem like a good idea.

This must have been the thinking in the search engine’s offices, so we can imagine that a large team of engineers must have joined those who were already exclusively devoted to it, and with the gap of days Google last week announced the events for next Wednesday. So all signs pointed to the day after tomorrow, when we would finally know the company’s plans to compete with OpenAI’s chabot.

However, the wait has become even shorter, so much so that it is over. And as we can read in The Keyword, the search engine’s official blog, Google has announced Bard, its AI-based chatbot to compete with ChatGPT. Seeing this, we can get an idea of ​​the key importance of this announcement said publication is signed by Sundar Pichaithe company’s CEO, who also told investors a few days ago that there would be news soon in this regard.

He won’t reveal much about Bard in the said publication, we will have to wait for Wednesday’s event to be able to expand the information about her with almost complete probability. However, there are some important points in this text that we will discuss below.

The first thing is As expected, Bard will use LaMDA, (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), a platform designed by the company for this purpose and which we already knew because its engineers have been working on it for two years. So we can assume that Bard will have a high level of sophistication, technologically speaking.

Regarding the approach of this chatbot, Sundar Pichai states that «Bard strives to combine the breadth of world knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our great language models. […] It relies on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality answers«. The concept of “fresh” is particularly important here, as it could signal that its update rate, i.e. the frequency with which the model is “retrained” with more recent contributions, may be higher than that of the OpenIA chatbot that only recently, a few weeks ago, you they “learned” that Windows 11 already exists.

This has a head and a tail. It is obvious that if the model is supplied daily with current information, your answers will be better adapted to the current context, making it more useful as a tool integrated into the information browser. However, the selection process can be much more relaxed, opening the door to terrifying prejudices which unfortunately were quite common in the past when there was no editing process to prevent them.

We can also read that unlike the public beta model used by OpenAI, Bard will not open to all users from the start. Instead, Google decided to release a scaled-down first version of Bard that will be shared exclusively with a group of previously selected users. “We will combine external feedback with our own internal testing to ensure Bard’s responses meet high levels of quality, security and real-world data robustness.Pichai said. «We are excited about this testing phase, which will help us continue to learn and improve the quality and speed of Bard.«.

So although the announcement has already been made and the presentation is coming up, Looks like we’ll have to wait a little longer before we can test the Bard for ourselves.. Now that Microsoft is close to opening its testing program for the new Bing, Google knows it needs to move in the short term if it wants to avoid the curiosity that would lead many users to start testing Microsoft’s search engine. So we can understand that deadlines will be extremely tight.

The title of the post “An important next step on our AI journey” suggests this. Bard is just one step on what promises to be a long journey. Pichai notes that as user search requests become more complex and nuanced, in response to “in search, you’ll see AI-powered features that translate complex, multi-perspective information into easy-to-digest formats so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more«.

This is very interesting because it suggests that Bard (and/or its successors) will be able to perform a complex analysis based on multiple sources (which may not match) and will be able to draw conclusions and present them to the user. However, at this point, it should be crucial for the chatbot to clearly identify to the user, resources used for said process. Otherwise, doubts may outweigh users’ trust in the system.

A few weeks ago we already expected that artificial intelligence would be one of the big technological protagonists of this year 2023, and we were not wrong. It seems that within a few weeks or months at the most we will experience an evolution in Internet search engines comparable to when algorithms and search engines replaced directories, just as Google began to become an empire. it’s today

So we can confirm that Google has been a big protagonist of this evolutionary leap and now with Bard it intends not to stay “out of the picture” when the new generation of search engines arrives. What they tell us Wednesday at Live from Paris will help us better understand what they’re cooking up, and if, as we know, they’ll be able to take on Bing with ChatGPT. It’s a tough call, but I personally think Bard can pull it off and surprise us. We will tell you that on Wednesday.