What is Bard?

26-08-2023

11:51 AM

1 min read

Prelims: Science & Technology

What’s in today’s article?

Why in News?
What is ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer)?
What is Bard?
Is Bard Better than ChatGPT?
Why has Google Announced Bard Right Now?
What are the Limitations of such AI Chatbots?

Why in News?

Google has finally decided to answer the challenge and threat posed by Microsoft-backed OpenAI and its AI chatbot, ChatGPT.
The search giant confirmed it will soon start public testing for a new AI chatbot of its own called Bard, based on the company’s Language Model for Dialogue Application (LaMDA).

What is ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer)?

Technically, ChatGPT can be categorised as a type of generative AI - a broad label that's used to describe any type of artificial intelligence (AI) that can be used to create new text, images, video, audio, code or synthetic data.
Thus, ChatGPT is a complex machine learning model developed by OpenAI (a research firm founded by Elon Musk), that is able to carry out natural language generation (NLG) tasks with a very high level of accuracy.
It is built on a large language model (LLM - a type of deep neural network that uses billions of parameters and is trained with petabytes of data) called GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3).
Tasks ChatGPT excels at include - providing answers to questions, completing a given text or a phrase, writing fiction and non-fiction content from prompts, producing humanlike chatbot responses, translating text from one language to another, etc.

What is Bard?

Bard is Google’s own conversational AI chatbot and is based on LaMDA. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses.
In short, it will give in-depth, conversational and essay-style answers just like ChatGPT does right now.
A user will be able to ask Bard to explain new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old, or learn more about the best strikers in football right now, and then get drills to build your skills.

Is Bard Better than ChatGPT?

Bard is built on Transformer technology - which is also the backbone of ChatGPT and other AI bots.
Transformer technology, pioneered by Google and made open-source in 2017, is a neural network architecture, which is capable of making predictions based on inputs.
Currently, Bard looks like a limited rollout and it is hard to say whether it can answer more questions than ChatGPT.
Google has also not made clear the amount of knowledge that Bard possesses. For instance, with ChatGPT, we know its knowledge is limited to events till 2021.

Why has Google Announced Bard Right Now?

It comes as Microsoft has invested $10 billion this year in OpenAI and is preparing to -
Announce an integration of ChatGPT into its Bing Search engine.
Offer ChatGPT to its enterprise customers as part of the Azure Cloud services.
Google might have invented the ‘Transformer’ technology, but it is now being seen as a latecomer to the AI revolution.
For Google, whose core business is search, this has resulted in a ‘code red’ at the company, calling in founders to review plans around AI.

What are the Limitations of such AI Chatbots?

They sometimes write plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers.
The models are often excessively verbose and overuse certain phrases.
While efforts have been made to make these models refuse inappropriate requests, it will sometimes respond to harmful instructions or exhibit biased behaviour.
Running these models requires significant computing power (ChatGPT is powered by Microsoft’s Azure Cloud services).
This explains why the service often runs into errors at times, because too many people are accessing it.

Q1) Who are the developers of ChatGPT and Bard?

ChatGPT is a complex machine learning model developed by OpenAI (a research firm founded by Elon Musk). Bard is Google’s own conversational AI chatbot and is based on LaMDA.

Q2) What is common between ChatGPT and Bard?

Bard is built on Transformer technology - which is also the backbone of ChatGPT and other AI bots. Transformer technology, pioneered by Google and made open-source in 2017, is a neural network architecture, which is capable of making predictions based on inputs.

Source: What is Bard, Google’s answer to ‘ChatGPT’ | IE