Google's Bard, AI search engines to compete with Microsoft's ChatGPT

California: Alphabet Inc., the company that owns Google, announced on Monday that it will introduce a chatbot service and more artificial intelligence for its search engine and developers as a response to Microsoft Corp. in their competition to dominate the next generation of computers.

Microsoft, meanwhile, announced that its own AI announcement would occur on Tuesday.

The torrent of news shows how Silicon Valley is preparing for a major shift brought on by so-called generative AI, a tool that can generate text or other content at will and free up time for white-collar workers.

One of Google's greatest challenges in recent memory has been the rise of ChatGPT, a chatbot from Microsoft-backed OpenAI that might change how consumers search for information, Reuters reported.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai announced in a blog post that his company is launching a conversational AI service called Bard to gather user feedback before going live to the general public.

Additionally, he mentioned Google's plans to incorporate AI components into its search engine that will synthesise information for complicated questions like which instrument is easier to learn, the guitar or the piano. Currently, Google displays content from other websites on the Web for queries with obvious answers.

The company is strengthening its service, while Microsoft is doing the same for Bing by integrating OpenAI's capabilities into it. Google's update for search, the timing of which it did not disclose, shows how the company is doing this.

According to an invitation seen by Reuters, Microsoft has stated that it plans to incorporate AI into all of its products. On Tuesday, Satya Nadella, the company's CEO, will brief media outlets on unspecified developments. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted that he would be at the event.

It's unclear how Google intends to set Bard apart from OpenAI's ChatGPT. Pichai claimed that the new service uses data from the Internet and that ChatGPT's expertise is current as of 2021.

“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our” AI, Pichai said.

LaMDA, Google's artificial intelligence, is the brains behind the new chatbot. LaMDA produced text with such skill that a company engineer last year referred to it as sentient, a claim that the tech giant and scientists widely rejected.

In a demonstration of the service, Bard, just like its rival chatbot, allows users to give it a prompt but warns that its response may be improper or inaccurate. The demo revealed that it then provided three bulleted responses to a question regarding the findings of a space telescope.

In order to serve more people and improve based on their feedback, Google is using a version of LaMDA that uses less processing power, according to Pichai.

Due to its rapid growth, ChatGPT has occasionally had to turn away users. According to UBS analysts, it had 57 million unique visitors in December, possibly outpacing TikTok in terms of adoption.

Beginning the next month, Pichai said, Google also intends to provide creators and businesses with technology tools, initially powered by LaMDA and then by other AI.