Google just announced the launch of its ChatGPT competitor Bard. But chances are you won’t be able to access the product right away as the company begins a limited public launch.
For now, Google Bard is only opening up to UK and US users who can go to bard.google.com and sign up for a waitlist. The company calls Bard “an early experiment that lets you collaborate with generative AI.”
Not ready for the Canadian market yet
Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, Bard is a bot model built on top of a large language model. It will be possible to interact with Bard to ask questions and refine the answer with follow-up questions.
According to the Google blog, “You can use Bard to increase your productivity, accelerate your ideas, and spark your curiosity. You can ask Bard for tips on how to reach your goal of reading more books this year that explain quantum physics in layman’s terms, or inspire your creativity by outlining a blog post.
Example with Bard on the Google blog
The AI language model used in Bard is based on Google’s LaMDA (Language Model for Dialog Applications) – this time the company uses a lightweight, optimized version of LaMDA.
Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, Bard enables interaction to ask questions and refine the answer with follow-up questions.
One of the factors that seems to be slowing down the deployment of Bard would be that Google hasn’t yet figured out a way to make its new AI model profitable, as it has with its search engine, which is based on an advertising model.
2023, the AI year!
Closer to home, the 7th edition of Digital Week is dedicated in particular to AI and language models.
The full program is available right here.
Mozilla.ai
On the eve of its 25th anniversary, Mozilla, the nonprofit organization behind the Firefox browser, is launching an AI-focused startup.
The new company, called Mozilla.ai, doesn’t have a mission to build just any AI — its mission is to build “trustworthy” open-source AI, according to Mark Surman, Mozilla’s executive chairman and head of Mozilla.
Mr Surman was referring to the spate of AI models in recent months which, while impressive in their capabilities, have troubling implications for the real world. Once released, OpenAI’s text-generating ChatGPT could be tricked into writing malware, identifying exploits in open source code, and creating phishing websites that look like high-traffic websites. Text-to-image AI like Stable Diffusion has now been co-opted to create pornographic, non-consensual deepfakes and ultragraphic depictions of violence.
Following the current trends in AI research – and not coincidentally the best-funded research areas – over the next few months Mozilla.ai will develop tools that will allow users, for example, to query the sources behind the answers that AI gives them via chatbots. The company will also look to build systems that give users more control over the content recommendation AI (i.e., the algorithms that drive YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok streams).