• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 6, 2023

Alphabet Chief Executive Sundar Pichai in a blog post on Monday explained how the company will launch a conversational artificial intelligence (AI) service called Bard. The test will let users provide feedback. A public release will follow in the coming weeks.

"We’ve been working on an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA, that we’re calling Bard," Pichai wrote in a post. "And today, we’re taking another step forward by opening it up to trusted testers ahead of making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks."
Google two years ago unveiled the next-generation language and conversation capabilities powered by its Language Model for Dialogue Applications, known as LaMDA."

Bard combines the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of Google’s large language models by drawing on information from the web to provide quality responses, Pichai wrote.

On Wednesday in Paris, Google will preview Bard at an event titled Search, Maps and Beyond.

Google initially plans to release Bard supported by a “lightweight model version of LaMDA,” a smaller model that requires significantly less computing power, he wrote. It will enable Google to scale to more users and allow more feedback.

The feedback, combined with Google’s internal tests, will ensure Bard’s responses meet a “high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information.”

Next month, Google will begin onboarding individual developers, creators and enterprises so they can try the Generative Language API, initially powered by LaMDA with a range of models to follow.

In time, Google intends to create a suite of tools and APIs that will make it easy for others to build more innovative applications with AI.

It will require advanced computing power to build reliable and trustworthy AI systems. The anticipation is that Google Cloud and its partnerships with Cohere, C3.ai and Anthropic will help Google achieve these advancements.

Google on Friday announced a partnership with Anthropic that puts the Alphabet company as a preferred cloud provider for the AI company.