Google’s Bard may get upgrades soon, CEO Sundar Pichai says

Google’s Bard was introduced last month. The conversational chatbot is aimed at countering the popularity of the ChatGPT tool backed by Microsoft. However, the announcement was termed as ‘rushed’ and botched’ by Google employees themselves.

Responding to criticisms of the product, Pichai said “We clearly have more capable models. We will be upgrading Bard to some of our more capable PaLM models, which will bring more capabilities.” He stated that the process will start next week.

During the interview, Pichai also confirmed that Google will not launch a more capable model before ensuring how it can handle it. To recall, Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. lost $100 billion in market value shortly after Bard inadvertently disclosed false information in a promotional video.

The CEO also said that the company’s AI tool is currently running on a ‘lightweight and efficient version of LaMDA’ language model. He stated that the reason for limiting Bard’s capabilities was a sense of caution within Google. He also added that he has discussed the AI bot with co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and has not issued ‘code-red’ to scrape the developments.

In a related news, Google has denied the allegations that its recently launched generative AI-based chatbot, Bard is trained on data from OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Reportedly, Google used data from a website called ShareGPT which keeps a record of users’ conversations with ChatGPT. 

As per a report published in The Information, Google engineer Jacob Devlin informed Google CEO Sundar Pichai along with other top executives that Bard’s machine learning models were being trained using ChatGPT. He also warned the company that this move would violate OpenAI’s terms of service while also making Bard’s answers sound similar to that of ChatGPT.