“Happy Hunger Games! And may the odds be ever in your favour!” Google presents Bard.

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What is Google Bard AI? How to use it? Features, use cases, and limitations  - HGS

Over the past few years, we have been constantly hearing about artificial intelligence. “AI won the art contest”, “AI predicts cancer”, “AI defended a diploma” and many other news headlines, the veracity of which has always been relative. But over the past few months we were able to meet AI “face to face”. ChatGPT. We can’t say ChatGPT changed the rules of the game, but it was the flare gun that started the “race”. And I guess now it is time for companies to present their “cars”. And our today’s hero is Google Bard.

After successful launch of ChaGPT and presentation of Bing update (my blog from 17.02.2023) it was vital for the company to respond to competitors. And Google did it. Bard is an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA (Illustration 1). LaMDA is a Language Model for Dialogue Applications based on Transformer (a neural network architecture that Google Research invented and open-sourced in 2017), as well as GPT-3.

Is LaMDA Sentient? — an Interview - Notes - e-flux
Illustration 1. Google LaMDA LOGO.

So, what is Bard needed for? It is made to analyse and summarise information from the web and provide users with relevant an high quality answers on their questions (Illustration 2). For example, you can ask 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.

Illustration 2. Bard work examples from blog.google.com

It should also be mentioned that Bard made a mistake on the presentation. My colleague has written an entire blog about it: “EXPENSIVE GOOGLE’S MISTAKE“. If you want to know more about this accident, I strongly recommend you to read it. In short, it offered the response that the telescope was the first to take pictures of a planet outside the earth’s solar system, when in fact that milestone was claimed by the European Very Large Telescope in 2004 – a mistake quickly noted by astronomers on Twitter. After this, shares in parent company Alphabet sank more than 10% (Illustration 3).

`Illustration 3. GOOG stock price chart (days).

Nevertheless, Bard is still on the test stage. It was mentioned on the presentation that now Bard is available only for the group of testers, but in a few weeks it will be opened for all users.

In conclusion, AI is the future. And after the OpenAI and Microsoft presentation of their products based on GPT, the game was started. Apparently in the near future we will see many projects of different companies based on AI technologies. I believe that the market is going to change due to this competition, and I will watch the development of events with great interests.

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One thought on ““Happy Hunger Games! And may the odds be ever in your favour!” Google presents Bard.

  1. 49810 says:

    I’m writing this comment on 18.12.2023 and want to share my personal view. When I first discovered Google Bard, I used it for about a month for my daily tasks. I can’t say that it was a very good or very bad experience, however, using Chat-GPT 3.5 or Perplexity gave me more confidence and comfort. I don’t want to get deep into this, I just use AI engines for some usual tasks and sometimes for fun ;). Might also try the new Chat-GPT 4, I am eager to play with generating images feature.

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