DURHAM – The CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, announced in a blog post on Monday that it will release a new chat tool enabled with artificial intelligence.

Called “Bard,” the “experimental conversational AI service” will be made “more widely available to the public in the coming weeks,” according to a blog post from Pichai published on Monday.

ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, was released in November and was built on a language model.  The viral success of ChatGPT led to a major investment in the company that built it by Microsoft and to concerns about student plagiarism sweeping educational systems nationwide.

Even media organizations are adapting to use natural language artificial intelligence, including BuzzFeed and CNET, though CNET’s usage resulted in stories that were “plagued with errors,” according to a CNN report.

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Google’s announcement

The text of Google’s announcement follows, below, and was published by the company on its blog on Monday.

AI is the most profound technology we are working on today. Whether it’s helping doctors detect diseases earlier or enabling people to access information in their own language, AI helps people, businesses and communities unlock their potential. And it opens up new opportunities that could significantly improve billions of lives. That’s why we re-oriented the company around AI six years ago — and why we see it as the most important way we can deliver on our mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Since then we’ve continued to make investments in AI across the board, and Google AI and DeepMind are advancing the state of the art. Today, the scale of the largest AI computations is doubling every six months, far outpacing Moore’s Law. At the same time, advanced generative AI and large language models are capturing the imaginations of people around the world. In fact, our Transformer research project and our field-defining paper in 2017, as well as our important advances in diffusion models, are now the basis of many of the generative AI applications you’re starting to see today.

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Introducing Bard

Here’s how Google introduced its new service, Bard, in the blog post published on Monday:

It’s a really exciting time to be working on these technologies as we translate deep research and breakthroughs into products that truly help people. That’s the journey we’ve been on with large language models. Two years ago we unveiled next-generation language and conversation capabilities powered by our Language Model for Dialogue Applications (or LaMDA for short).

We’ve been working on an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA, that we’re calling Bard. And today, we’re taking another step forward by opening it up to trusted testers ahead of making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks.

Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses. Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity, helping you 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.

We’re releasing it initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA. This much smaller model requires significantly less computing power, enabling us to scale to more users, allowing for more feedback. 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. We’re excited for this phase of testing to help us continue to learn and improve Bard’s quality and speed.

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