Google sees its upcoming AI chatbot, Bard, as more than just a resource for finding information. What exactly Bard is supposed to be able to do remains unclear.

After Bard’s botched launch a month ago, Google has taken some time to research where it plans to go with the AI ​​chatbot. At first it looked like Google Bard would become a competitor for ChatGPT and Bing Chat, but now the tech giant is taking a different tack. That’s what chief engineer Jack Krawczyck said verbatim at an internal meeting.

“Bard is not a search engine,” CNBC quoted the engineer as saying. “Bard and ChatGPT are language models, not knowledge models. They are great at generating human text, but less good at making sure the text is factually correct. So why should information search be its greatest application? We already have a good tool for this: Search,” says Krawczyck.

Krawczyck therefore sees Bard more as a “creative partner”, although it remains unclear what exactly that means. According to Krawczyck, it will be inevitable that people will want to use Bard as a search engine. Google is internally testing a feature designed to distract users from information-based searches.

Hasty answer

In the meantime, Google is falling behind Microsoft, which has been making Bing Chat available to the general public (by invitation) for a few weeks and is now also bringing the search function to Windows 11. Although the experiment is not without problems either; Microsoft has limited the number of questions you can ask per session to avoid confusing Bing.

Google employees continue to watch the rise of Bing Chat with concern, and the internal meeting couldn’t dispel those doubts. One staffer called Bard a “hasty reaction with no strategy behind it.” According to Big Boss Sundar Pichai, an unjustified comment. “We have been working with AI for a long time. The things we build have to have an impact, so getting it right is important,” Pichai said during Question Time.