Google is opening up limited access to Bard, its ChatGPT rival, a major step in the company’s attempt to reclaim what many see as lost ground in a new race to deploy AI.
Bard will be initially available to select users in the US and UK, with users able to join a waitlist at bard.google.com, though Google says the roll-out will be slow and has offered no date for full public access, the Verge reported.
Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, Bard offers users a blank text box and an invitation to ask questions about any topic they like. However, given the well-documented tendency of these bots to invent information, Google is stressing that Bard is not a replacement for its search engine but, rather, a “complement to search” — a bot that users can bounce ideas off of, generate writing drafts, or just chat about life with.
In a blog post written by two of the project’s leads, Sissie Hsiao and Eli Collins, they describe Bard in cautious terms as “an early experiment … intended to help people boost their productivity, accelerate their ideas, and fuel their curiosity.” They also characterize Bard as a product that lets users “collaborate with generative AI” (emphasis ours), language that also seems intended to diffuse Google’s responsibility for future outbursts.
As with ChatGPT and Bing, there’s also a prominent disclaimer underneath the main text box warning users that “Bard may display inaccurate or offensive information that doesn’t represent Google’s views” — the AI equivalent of “abandon trust, all ye who type here.”
