Sundar Pichai says Google’s ChatGPT rival Bard will get upgrades and show progress soon
Google launched its own AI chatbot, Bard, last month in a somewhat chaotic way. Bard, aimed at giving competition to viral chatbot ChatGPT, was criticized for its inaccuracy shortly after its launch. Bard had made a factual error in its introduction advertisement and the same was pointed out by Reuters. Then, during a press conference in Paris, a goofup had left Google embarrassed when a demo phone went missing. Previous reports had also suggested that the launch of ChatGPT had paved the way for a ‘code red’ situation at Google offices. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has now said that in the days to come, Bard will get some major upgrades and function in a much better way.
Sundar Pichai talks about Bard
According to a report in The Verge originally attributed to The New York Times’ Hard Fork podcast, Pichai revealed that Bard is expected to generate better responses soon and will get major upgrades as soon as next week.
Saying that the company has more capable models, Pichai added, “Pretty soon, perhaps as this [podcast] goes live, we will be upgrading Bard to some of our more capable PaLM models, which will bring more capabilities; be it in reasoning, coding, it can answer maths questions better. So you will see progress over the course of next week.”
As of now, Bard is running on a ‘lightweight and efficient version of LaMDA’ Pichai noted. The AI language model is more focused on delivering dialogue. “In some ways I feel like we took a souped-up Civic and put it in a race with more powerful cars,” the CEO added.
Talking about a ‘code red’ situation at Google after ChatGPT’s arrival, Pichai said that that he himself never issued the ‘code red’ situation. However, he added that perhaps there were others in the company who “sent emails saying there is a code red.”
Pichai also confirmed that he was talking with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin about the work (“Sergey has been hanging out with our engineers for a while now”) and that while he himself never issued the infamous “code red” to scramble development, there were probably people in the company who “sent emails saying there is a code red.”
Meanwhile, Google had rolled out Bard for public testing recently. The chatbot was previously not available for use to the public. However, in a recent official blog post, Google announced that Bard will be available for testing to some selected users in the US and UK. People who wish to use the new AI chatbot in town must sign up for the waitlist and wait to get access.
At the time of rolling out Bard for the public, Google wrote in its blog, “You can use Bard to boost your productivity, accelerate your ideas and fuel your curiosity. You might ask Bard to give you tips to reach your goal of reading more books this year, explain quantum physics in simple terms or spark your creativity by outlining a blog post. We’ve learned a lot so far by testing Bard, and the next critical step in improving it is to get feedback from more people.”