Launching Bard, already in the first stage of public beta, It turns out to be somewhat disappointing in several ways.. As we told you a few days ago, Google finally opened a waiting list for users interested in trying out its chatbot, but unlike Microsoft and the global reach of the new Bing beta version, those from the search engine preferred to limit access. first phase, to users from the United States and the United Kingdom, in English only.

On the other hand, and as we already told you when Google first talked about Bard, its first implementation is based on LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), an artificial intelligence language model that focuses on providing dialogue and that the company is working on. for several years now. However, the company also expected to use a lightweight version of it, prioritizing the efficiency of the chatbot over the fact that it can offer more comprehensive and sophisticated answers, in addition to having a wider reach. its functions.

This limitation had a consequence that was a priori inferred, Bard’s first evaluations largely agree that the Google chatbot in its current state, significantly less useful than those they currently compete with, mainly Bing and ChatGPT. Even worse in the face of Microsoft, many users point out that the sources used by Bard are not reliable, meaning that any response generated by the model must be quarantined.

This is a fairly serious issue, to the point that it had to be the company’s own CEO Sundar Pichai who responded to the criticism and provided an explanation, as well as plans for the future. The manager was interviewed on The New York Times’ Hard Fork podcast, where, among other things, promised that Google will update Bard soon. “Very soon, perhaps around the time this podcast goes live, we will be upgrading the Bard to some of our more capable PaLM models that will bring additional capabilities; Whether in reasoning, coding, you can answer math questions better. So you will see progress over the next week.“.

Pichai also admitted that they haven’t raced in the best conditions yet,”In a way, I feel like we’ve taken an updated Civic and put it in a race against more powerful cars.“. This is something we’ve talked about on occasion, that Google’s fear and conservative attitude has also put the wheels in its own wheels.