- Google is releasing it initially with its lightweight model version of LaMDA.
- AI is the most profound technology that is being worked on today.
Google has today announced its new experimental conversational AI service, Bard, which is powered by Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA).
According to a statement by Google, this service has been opened up to trusted testers ahead of making it widely available to the public in the coming weeks.
Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said that Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of Google’s large language models.
Bard draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses.
Pichai also said that Bard can be an outlet for creativity and a launchpad for curiosity.
“It can help explain new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb space telescope to a nine-year-old, or even learn more about the best strikers in football right now and then get drills to build your skills,” he said.
Google is releasing it initially with its lightweight model version of LaMDA.
This much smaller model requires significantly less computing power, which enables Google to scale more users, allowing 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,” Pichai said.
“We’re excited for this phase of testing to help us continue to learn and improve Bard’s quality and speed.”
Next month, Google will also start onboarding individual developers, creators, and enterprises so that they can try the company’s Generative Language API, initially powered by LaMDA with a range of models to follow.
Over time, Google intends to create a suite of tools and APIs that will make it easy for others to build more innovative applications with AI.
“Having the necessary compute power to build reliable and trustworthy AI systems is also crucial to startups,” Pichai said.
“We are excited to help scale these efforts through our Google partnerships with Cohere, C3.ai, and Anthropic which was announced last week.”
AI is the most profound technology that is being worked on today.
Whether it is helping doctors detect disease earlier or enabling people to access information in their own language, AI helps people, businesses and communities unlock their potential.
It also opens up new opportunities that could significantly improve billions of lives.
Six years ago, Google re-oriented the company around AI and has since been making investments across the board, with Google AI and Deep Mind advancing the state of the art.
According to Sundar Pichai, the scale of the largest AI computations is doubling every six months, far outpacing Moore’s law.
“Advanced generative AI and large language models are capturing the imaginations of people around the world,” he added.
“Google’s transformer research project and field-defining 2017 paper as well as advances in its diffusion models, are now the basis of many of the generative AI applications we see today.”
Google has been using AI to improve search for billions of people.
BERT, one of its first Transformer models, was used in understanding the intricacies of human language.
Two years ago, Google also introduced MUM, which has a multilingual understanding of information that can pick out key moments in videos and provide critical information including crisis support in more languages.
Users are expected to see AI-powered features in Search.
These features will break down complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats so that a user can quickly understand and learn more from the web.