Google unveils Bard, its rival to ChatGPT

Google on Monday unveiled a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool called Bard, its rival product to the increasingly popular ChatGPT tool.

With Bard, individuals can “simplify complex topics” by using the AI tool to get highly detailed responses to queries. For example, a user can ask Bard to explain discoveries from a NASA telescope to a 9-year-old, according to Google’s blog post. 

The release of Bard comes after competitor Microsoft announced a multibillion-dollar investment into OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool.

The feature will be opened up to a group of “trusted testers” and made “more widely available” to the public “in the coming weeks,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in the blog post. 

The tech giant is looking to introduce more AI-powered tools across its search function, in addition to Bard, which is powered by Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA. 

The blog post showed an example of an AI-powered response to a user’s query that appeared in a blurb before the search results linking to other websites. Google did not detail a timeline for when users can expect to see those changes, other than saying it is coming “soon.” 

Google’s rollout follows the rise in popularity of ChatGPT, which saw 28 million visits from 15.7 million unique visitors during its peak on Jan. 31, according to data published by SimilarWeb. The data shows a fairly steady incline in the number of daily visits to the site since it launched to the public at the end of November.

Along with the rise in popularity, ChatGPT has attracted a fair amount of scrutiny and concern — including from schools and educators who are worried about how the tool may be used by students.

Some schools banned the use of ChatGPT from their devices and networks over concerns about cheating or a negative impact on learning. 

—Updated at 4:22 p.m.