Google unveils ‘Bard’ AI, Baidu comes up with ‘Ernie Bot’ to take on rival ChatGpt

Google has announced an experimental AI-powered chatbot called Bard in a bid to catch up with its rival OpenAI’s wildly popular chatbot ChatGPT, which is backed by Microsoft.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai in a blog post on Tuesday wrote that Bard is an experimental service that will be made available for public testing.

Pichai’s announcement comes even as Google gets ready to host an AI event on Wednesday.

The new AI-powered conversation service is based on Google’s LaMDA technology, which is known as Language Model for Dialogue applications.

LaMDA was in the news recently after aGoogle engineer claimed that the chatbot was sentient.

Based on the screenshots Google shared, it is understood that Bard will be able to answer in a conversational manner, with longer paragraphs similar to how ChatGPT works at the moment.

It will help users understand complex topics such as understanding the James Webb Space Telescope, or provide detailed answers to user prompts such as "plan a friend’s baby shower", "compare two Oscar-nominated movies," or "get lunch ideas based on what's in your fridge".

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“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.”

Pichai said Bard is a much smaller and lightweight model compared to ChatGPT and it which will “require significantly less computing power, enabling us to scale to more users, allowing for more feedback.”

Pichai’s blog post also made it clear that the company plans to integrate AI-powered features in its search engine.

China’s Baidu joins AI race

China’s multinational tech conglomerate Baidu Inc. on Tuesday announced that it would complete the internal testing of an AI-chatbot project called “Ernie Bot” in March, joining the global race of the AI age.

Ernie, which means meaning “Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration,” is a large AI-powered language model introduced in 2019, Baidu said.

It has gradually grown to be able to perform tasks including language understanding, language generation, and text-to-image generation, it added.

Search engine giant Baidu’s Hong Kong-listed shares jumped as much as 13.4% on the news.

Reuters quoting a person familiar with the matter reported that Baidu was planning to launch such a service in March.

(With inputs from agencies)

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