The success of the ChatGPT chatbot is forcing big tech to react. Users have taken a liking to talking to a machine that apparently understands what is being said and responds accordingly. Nobody wants to miss the train of generative artificial intelligence, which is how the technology that makes these chatbots possible is known. If Microsoft announced two weeks ago the investment of 10,000 million in OpenAI, the company that has developed ChatGPT (of which it was already a partner), Google made a move yesterday by presenting Bard, its own intelligent chatbot.
The tool, which is currently in the testing phase, works very similar to that of ChatGPT, although its promoters say that it is more powerful and reliable. “Bard takes information from the internet and uses it to provide high-quality, current answers. It can serve to satisfy curiosity or to unleash creativity. It can be used to explain to a 9-year-old child the latest discoveries of the space telescope James Webb or to learn things about the best scorers on the current football scene and then create training routines that help you improve your skills, ”explained the company’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, yesterday in a statement.
Bard is a pocket version of LaMDA (Language Model for Dialog Applications), one of Google’s most advanced language modeling projects. Introduced two years ago, LaMDA grabbed international headlines last summer, when engineer Blake Lemoine, who was commissioned to review the ethical grounds of the robot’s responses, said that, in his opinion, that artificial intelligence had gained consciousness.
The Google developer team has made Bard, the stripped down model of LaMDA, available to a group of engineers who are testing it for bugs. As soon as it has some filming and the necessary improvements are applied, it will be offered to the general public. The goal is for the engine to be able to provide responses “with a high level of quality, security, and based on real-world information,” Pichar said. Google tries to prevent its version of the chatbot from making the same mistake as ChatGPT: making up answers when you don’t know what to say. If the way to interact with the most famous search engine in the world is a chat, it is essential that the content returned to the questions is appropriate.
Bard is part of a series of tools based on generative artificial intelligence that Google is launching on the market. One of the latest is MusicLM, capable of creating original music from a text provided by the user. “We are creating completely new ways of interacting with information, be it in the form of language, images, video or audio. And we are working to incorporate these AI advances into our products, starting with the Search Engine”, indicated the CEO of the Californian multinational.
The generative AI earthquake
Google is one of the companies that has dedicated the most time and money to basic and applied research related to artificial intelligence. Its Google Brain division and the British company DeepMind, which it acquired in 2014, are among the world’s elite in the discipline. In fact, the Transformer research project and its founding article, presented in 2017, is the touchstone on which the scientific community has built the so-called advanced generative artificial intelligence.
Last summer several projects related to this technology saw the light of day, such as the Dall-E2 or Midjourney text-based image generators, which astonished the public. In November, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, a chatbot in beta version capable of following conversations with apparent reliability. The tremendous popularity garnered by the robot in recent months has meant that in the high offices of the bigtech It has been decided to speed up existing projects to incorporate similar tools. Google has been the last, for now, to join the wave.
“Artificial intelligence (AI) is already helping the general public to access information in their language and doctors to detect diseases early. For this reason, about six years ago we reoriented our company towards AI, since we consider it the best way to fulfill our mission: to organize the world’s information and make it accessible and useful for everyone”, Pichai said yesterday.
The race to lead the applications of generative artificial intelligence continues. “The computing power of the most powerful AI doubles every six months, which is far in excess of Moore’s Law,” recalls Pichai. The president of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, and that of OpenAI, Sam Altman, slipped yesterday on Twitter that today they would make an announcement in this regard. The battle continues.
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Source: EL PAIS
