United States and United Kingdom users are the first to trade. We still have to be patient.

With a blog post, Google opens the waiting list for Bard, which has to compete with ChatGPT and Bing Chat. At least if you live in the United States or the United Kingdom. When we try to sign up, we see that Bard is not yet available in our country. Google says it will soon be offering Bard in more countries and languages ​​without giving a timeline.

Bard is based on a “light” version of LamDA, an LLM model that Google developed internally. The tech giant sees the tool as a complement to its popular search engine. Bard’s capabilities are also similar to those of ChatGPT and Bing Chat. You ask a question in natural language and the AI ​​searches for the best possible answer. In the announcement, Google made it very clear that you cannot always expect a perfect answer.

Faster but more limited

Since we don’t have access to Bard yet, we’re basing it on the early experiences of The Verge, among other things. The American news outlet notes that Bard is significantly faster than its competitors, which is also due to the limited number of users. Due to ChatGPT’s popularity, servers sometimes get overloaded.

Bard also has more knowledge of current events than ChatGPT. Knowledge of the GPT language model that OpenAI operates on doesn’t extend beyond 2021, while Google says it will continually update Bard’s encyclopedia. But Bard can also tell total nonsense, notes The Verge. Therefore, for now, Bard shows three answers and testers can choose the best answer to improve the model.

A final finding from The Verge is that Bard is in a much tighter straitjacket than Bing Chat. Bing Chat’s debauchery in the first few weeks has become legendary, but Google doesn’t seem to want to make headlines with strange statements from Bard. The number of questions you can ask per session is also limited.

Cat and mouse

That may have something to do with the tumultuous start Bard had. The announcement went horribly wrong due to a factual error in promotional material and a botched event. Google has therefore become more cautious about opening up Bard, having been unable to move fast enough at the time Bing Chat was announced.

Google may have finally gotten into the AI ​​race, but it’s mostly chasing Microsoft right now. OpenAI last week announced GPT-4, the next generation of the LLM model. It supports more languages ​​and can “read” images. Bing will soon be able to create its own images thanks to the addition of Dall-E to the search engine.

In the future, Bard will be able to write code and process images, Google says, although it’s unclear when that will be. Previously, Google had also announced new (future) AI functionalities for the Workspace applications.