When it comes to the development of artificial intelligence (AI), the American company Google (Alphabet) is actually clearly at the forefront. For example, Google’s AI has long automatically recognized the content and faces in photos and sorted them accordingly.
But last year, Google itself was overwhelmed by the AI revolution when the company OpenAI presented the text robot ChatGPT. Anyone who talked about artificial intelligence from now on primarily meant this smart interlocutor and no longer the services of Google.
At the end of March this year, Google presented its answer to ChatGPT: until now, however, the chatbot Bard was only available in a small part of the world and spoke only Japanese and Korean in addition to English.
From today you can also talk to Bard in Switzerland. What it does better than ChatGPT and what the AI journey could lead to. The answers to the most important questions.
How is Bard different from ChatGPT?
Both text robots are large language models and are trained on a huge amount of text from the Internet. The models work with probabilities and calculate which word is most likely to follow the previous one. For example, in the case of “Today it seems …”, the language models can predict that the word “Sun” should most likely be used.
Both Bard and ChatGPT allow you to type the questions in writing or verbally over the microphone. You can access the Google chatbot at bard.google.com.
Unlike the ChatGPT presented at the end of November 2022, Bard is connected to the internet and is therefore aware of current events. ChatGPT is only trained with information until September 2021.
What else can Bard do besides write lyrics?
With Bard’s expansion into Europe, Google is also building new features into the AI engine. It will now be possible not only to read Bard’s answers, but also to listen to them. You can also save the conversations and share them with others.
In the future you will not only be able to feed the bot with text, but also with images. However, this application is initially only available in English.
How much is Bard?
Bart is free. However, you do need a Google account. The service is available from the age of 18.
Why did it take Bard so long to come to Switzerland?
“There were two main reasons for this: language and data protection,” said Jack Krawczyk, Bard’s product manager, in an interview with CH Media. The text robot now understands more than forty languages, including German, French, Italian, Arabic and Chinese.
It’s important that Bard be taught what hurtful statements are in any language, says Krawczyk: “Our goal is to maximize utility while minimizing harm.”
The second reason for the delay is data security. According to Krawczyk, Bard will not be made available in a country until it is clear that the service complies with local data protection regulations.
The hurdle here was probably not Switzerland’s data protection law, which is very liberal, but rather the EU’s strict General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). According to Krawczyk, the service would be rolled out in all European countries at once.
Why did Google initially slack off on the AI chatbot revolution?
Those who dominate a market have no interest in changing it. This also applies to Google. The group’s main revenue comes from advertising, specifically the sponsored links that appear at the top of search results. If you don’t google information, but ask a chatbot, you don’t need such links anymore.
Of course, Google doesn’t say that publicly. It sounds more like this: they initially wanted to make Bard only available to a select group of people to let their feedback flow in and only roll out the bot widely once it met Google’s high quality, security and reliability requirements.
Nevertheless, the shock must have been profound, because after the release of ChatGPT, the company brought back Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who had taken a back seat, to get the AI curve back with their help.
Krawczyk says the technology is still in its infancy and the journey is long, a few months are not important. Most of them still haven’t come into contact with ChatGPT. That’s correct. But it’s also true: ChatGPT is the fastest growing web application. After two months, it had already reached 100 million users.
Bard spread fake news during his first presentation in March. Does he still do that?
Accidents like the first Bard demonstration can still happen. During the demonstration, the chatbot was asked to explain the discoveries of the James Webb Space Telescope to a child. Bard then said that the telescope had taken the first picture of a planet outside our solar system. This is not correct (the first photo of an exoplanet was taken by a ground-based telescope as early as 2004).
Such answers, which sound convincing but are substantively incorrect, are an unsolved problem of language models. They often hallucinate, ie make things up when they don’t know what to do. This applies not only to Bard, but to all AI.
Is Bard integrated with the Google search engine?
No. Or at least not yet. This differs from Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which integrates OpenAI’s GPT-4 language model and also accesses the Internet.
Google offers the voting robot as an independent service. Because, according to Krawczyk, Bard is not only responsible for providing factual knowledge, but also for generating new ideas, thus becoming creative.
Unlike the Bing chatbot, Bard does not quote sources. The reason is that there is no method that can reliably indicate where the AI actually got its information from, says Krawczyk. The developers have therefore solved the problem by integrating a “Google it button” into Bard. This allows users to self-check a statement from Bard with a classic Google search.
How will Bard change web search in the future?
This is the big question that not only Google asks itself and that nobody knows the answer to yet. It is already true that you can google a lot of information without having to click on a link. Google shows the answers to questions like “How many kids does Tom Cruise have”? or “How will the weather be tomorrow?” directly to.
If you continue this trend, you can well imagine that for more complex questions we will no longer be referred to “foreign” websites, but receive tailor-made answers from a chatbot. And you only need to switch to primary sources if you do in-depth research. However, this is only possible if the answers are more reliable (see above).
According to Jack Krawczyk, Bard is not intended to replace the classic Google search, but rather to complement it. For example, if you want to learn to play the guitar, search for it on Google or YouTube. If you want a tip for a good pizzeria in the area, use Google or Maps. “There are a number of different ways to get the information you want from Google. Bard is another,” says Krawczyk.
And now you!
Do you use ChatGPT? What do you think of Google Bard? What questions still need to be clarified?
Write to us via the comment function!
(aargauerzeitung.ch)
Source: Watson
I’m Ella Sammie, author specializing in the Technology sector. I have been writing for 24 Instatnt News since 2020, and am passionate about staying up to date with the latest developments in this ever-changing industry.
