Google Provides Limited Access to Bard, Its “Early Experiment Chatbot”

By
IBL News
-

IBL News | New York

Yesterday, Google began providing limited access to Bard, its rival to ChatGPT, to selected users in the United States and the United Kingdom. The date for full public access has not been announced yet. Users can join a waitlist for Bard at bard.google.com.

Google stresses that Bard is a “complement to search”, not a replacement, given the tendency of these bots to invent information or hallucination, as users notice in OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot. It all underscores the experimental nature of the technology.

The search giant describes Bard as “an early experiment, intended to help people boost their productivity, accelerate their ideas, and fuel their curiosity.”

In a demo for The Verge, Bard — based on Google’s AI language model LaMDA — generated three responses to each user query, with minimal variation in their content. Underneath each reply is a prominent “Google It” button.

Bard’s interface is festooned with disclaimers such as “Bard may display inaccurate or offensive information that doesn’t represent Google’s views.”

Bard lacks Bing’s clearly labeled footnotes, which Google says only appear when it directly quotes a source like a news article.
A GIF showing Bard responding to a query about how to introduce your daughter to flyfishing.

According to a report in TechCrunch, Google’s Bard is lagging behind OpenAI’s GPT-4, and Anthropic’s Claude in a head-to-head comparison on a few example prompts.

“Overall GPT-4 is unambiguously ahead of the others, though depending on the context Claude and Bard can be competitive. Importantly, however, both Claude and Bard gave factually incorrect answers at times, and Bard even made up a citation to support its assertion about GDPR enforcement.”