“We’ll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to make sure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality,safety,and groundedness in real-world information,” Alphabet chief executive officer Sundar Pichaisaid in a blog post announcing the news. “We’re excited for this phase of testing to help us continue to learn and improve Bard’s quality and speed.”
Bard will be powered by LaMDA,a large language model developed by Google that stirred controversy in May when a Google software engineer publicly asserted that the AI was “sentient” — a claim that has since come under scrutiny.
The testers Google selected for early access are a geographically diverse group of people outside of the company who will help it improve and understand how regular users will encounter the AI service in real life,a Google spokesperson said.
Loading
Pichai has sought to emphasise the company’s progress in artificial intelligence amid heightened competitive pressure from companies like OpenAI,maker of the wildly popular chatbot ChatGPT.
In addition to the release of Bard,Google will allow developers to tap into its language models to create their own applications. The company will begin opening up its Generative Language API to companies,developers and creators next month,Pichai said.
“Beyond our own products,we think it’s important to make it easy,safe,and scalable for others to benefit from these advances by building on top of our best models,” Pichai wrote in the blog post.