Google on Wednesday opened its generative artificial intelligence chatbot Bard in English in 180 countries, announcing the forthcoming integration of this technology (which can create plain-language content on demand) with many other platforms, including online search.
“We’ve been primarily an artificial intelligence company for seven years and we’re at a tipping point,” Sundar Pichai, CEO of the California-based company, told thousands of people gathered at his Mountain View amphitheater.
“For some time now, we’ve been making our products radically more useful through generative AI, taking a bold and responsible approach,” he added.
The November release of the ChatGPT interface — designed by Californian startup OpenAI, funded primarily by Microsoft — sparked a frantic race for generative AI, between ebullient enthusiasm and apocalyptic worries.
Google responded with its own Bard interface, which was released to the public at the end of March.
On Wednesday, the company announced that the chatbot is now available in English in 180 countries worldwide.
The chatbot will soon be able to converse in 40 languages and must be multimedia, i.e. it must be able to integrate images into Internet users’ questions and their answers.
The world number one in digital advertising also showed how online research will gradually change, with written answers to questions from Internet users via the traditional links and the opportunity to exchange information and ask for details via the interface.
The new Google is due to arrive in the next few weeks, the company has opened a waiting list where you have To to be able to use it in a few weeks.
The Californian company is also developing Bard extensions so that users can interact with the robot directly from the Maps mapping application, the Gmail mailbox or the online word processor Docs.
Cloud business customers are not forgotten, with tools for companies that want to design their own generative AI tools (search, chatbots, etc.) for their applications using their own data.
Microsoft recently made similar announcements. The IT company had already integrated ChatGPT into its Bing search engine last week and opened it up completely to the general public, thus relaunching the previously insignificant portal compared to Google.
The two competitors compete with ads for a stated goal: their AI-supported platforms should become users’ preferred personal assistants.
Google introduced PaLM 2 on Wednesday, the new, advanced version of its language model. These algorithms, trained on mountains of data, enable the creation of conversational robots such as ChatGPT or Bard.
“It has enabled many improvements in Bard over the last two months, in terms of math, logic, reasoning ability or even the ability to program and debug code,” Product Director Jack Krawczyk pointed out during a press conference.
“We are in a fascinating time where the gap between human imagination and the capabilities of technology is rapidly closing,” he added.
But Silicon Valley’s performance is worrying, especially since OpenAI launched GPT-4 in March, a “magnificent multimedia model (…) as efficient as humans in many professional and academic contexts”.
The head of the start-up, Sam Altman, explained that he is working on a so-called “general” artificial intelligence, i.e. programs with human cognitive abilities.
Many experts have since voiced fears ranging from misinformation to job replacements, even calling for a six-month research hiatus.
Geoffrey Hinton, considered one of the founding fathers of AI, said May 3 during a round table organized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that the “existential threat” that AI poses to humanity is “serious and imminent.” may be.
The computer scientist has just left Google, where he worked for ten years, “to be able to speak freely about the dangers of AI,” he explained.