Google launches early access to its AI chatbot Bard

San Francisco, March 22

Google has announced that it is opening up access to its ChatGPT competitor "Bard" as an early experiment for users to collaborate with generative AI.

The early access to Bard has rolled out in the US and UK, and the company said it will expand the access over time to more countries and languages.

"You can use Bard to boost your productivity, accelerate your ideas and fuel your curiosity. You might ask Bard to give you tips to reach your goal of reading more books this year, explain quantum physics in simple terms or spark your creativity by outlining a blogpost," Google said in a blogpost.

Bard, like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Bing chatbot, is based on a large language model (LLM), specifically a lightweight and optimised version of LaMDA, which the tech giant said will be updated with newer, more capable models in the future.

Users can think of an LLM as a prediction engine. When given a prompt, it generates a response by selecting, one word at a time, from words that are likely to come next, according to Google.

Users can interact with Bard by asking questions and refining their responses with follow-up questions.

Further, the company said that it will continue to improve Bard and add capabilities, including coding, more languages and multimodal experiences over time.