Google AI Chatbot “Bard” Is Here, As The Search Engine Arms Race Begins
Google AI Chatbot “Bard” Is Here, As The Search Engine Arms Race Begins
The search engine giant clearly sees a huge threat from its competitors such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT – which is soon to be integrated into its main rival search engine, Microsoft Bing.
Image: Google
In what is likely a response to the recent popularity of AI chatbot ChatGPT, Google has just introduced its own AI-powered chatbot. Last month, Google declared “code red” internally, which signals an immediate threat to its businesses. Named “Bard” – the chatbot is currently undergoing preliminary testing through a small group of testers, and is expected to be released in the coming weeks.
Of course, Google didn’t just immediately came up with Bard in a few months or few weeks. The project started off as LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) two years ago – and Bard runs a lightweight version of it. “We’ll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to make sure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety, and groundedness in real-world information,” says Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and its parent company, Alphabet.
Image: Google / PCMag
With AI chatbots poised to reinvent search as we know it, expect search engines to look somewhat different as these chatbots get integrated into various search engines, including Google. CNBC reported that the company’s web designers are currently working on a new search function for conversational-based queries – the same thing that ChatGPT does today.
As for the ChatGPT itself – Microsoft has been on the record saying the AI chatbot will see its presence in Bing at some time in the future, and even gave away a sneak peek of it (the search box now says “Ask me anything…” instead). As of this writing Microsoft is hosting a press event – which sees the Redmond tech giant to have an updated version of ChatGPT called the “Prometheus Model”, infused into Bing and Edge.
Pokdepinion: While this is quite a revolution in how the search engines work moving forward – I imagine the traditional query-based search method will still find its place despite the AI’s presence. (I for one would just type a word instead of a full sentence if I know what I’m looking for, for example.)
