Bard (chatbot)

Bard (chatbot)
Bard is a conversational generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Google, based initially on the LaMDA family of large language models (LLMs) and later PaLM. It was developed as a direct response to the rise of OpenAI's ChatGPT, and was released in a limited capacity in March 2023 to lukewarm responses, before expanding to other countries in May.
LaMDA had been developed and announced in 2021, but was not released to the public. OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 and its subsequent popularity caught Google executives off-guard and sent them into a panic, prompting a massive and unprecedented level of response in the ensuing months. After mobilizing its workforce, the company scrambled to launch Bard in February 2023, with the chatbot taking center stage during the 2023 Google I/O keynote in May.
Background
In November 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a chatbot based on the GPT-3 family of large language models (LLM). ChatGPT gained worldwide attention following its release, becoming a viral Internet sensation. Alarmed by ChatGPT's potential threat to Google Search, Google executives issued a "code red" alert, reassigning several teams to assist in the company's artificial intelligence (AI) efforts. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet, was widely reported to have issued the alert, but Pichai later denied this to The New York Times. In a rare and unprecedented move, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who had stepped down from their roles as co-CEOs of Alphabet in 2019, were summoned to emergency meetings with company executives to discuss Google's response to ChatGPT.
Earlier in 2021, the company had unveiled LaMDA, a prototype LLM, but did not release it to the public. When asked by employees at an all-hands meeting whether LaMDA was a missed opportunity for Google to compete with ChatGPT, Pichai and Google AI chief Jeff Dean stated that while the company had similar capabilities to ChatGPT, moving too quickly in that arena would represent a major "reputational risk" due to Google being substantially larger than OpenAI. In January 2023, Google sister company DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis hinted at plans for a ChatGPT rival, and Google employees were instructed to accelerate progress on a ChatGPT competitor, intensively testing "Apprentice Bard" and other chatbots. Pichai assured investors during Google's quarterly earnings investor call in February that the company had plans to expand LaMDA's availability and applications.
History
Announcement
On February 6, 2023, Google announced Bard, a conversational generative artificial intelligence chatbot powered by LaMDA. Bard was first rolled out to a select group of 10,000 "trusted testers", before a wide release scheduled at the end of the month. Bard is overseen by product lead Jack Krawczyk, who described the product as a "collaborative AI service" rather than a search engine, while Pichai detailed how Bard would be integrated into Google Search. Reuters calculated that adding ChatGPT-like features to Google Search could cost the company $6 billion in additional expenses by 2024, while research and consulting firm SemiAnalysis calculated that it would cost Google $3 billion. The technology was developed under the codename "Atlas", with the name "Bard" in reference to the Celtic term for a storyteller and chosen to "reflect the creative nature of the algorithm underneath".
Multiple media outlets and financial analysts described Google as "rushing" Bard's announcement to preempt rival Microsoft's planned February 7 event unveiling its partnership with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into its Bing search engine in the form of Bing Chat, as well as playing "catch-up" to Microsoft. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told The Verge: "I want people to know that we made them dance." Tom Warren of The Verge and Davey Alba of Bloomberg News noted that this marked the beginning of another clash between the two Big Tech companies over "the future of search", after their six-year "truce" expired in 2021; Chris Stokel-Walker of The Guardian, Sara Morrison of Recode, and analyst Dan Ives of investment firm Wedbush Securities labeled this an AI arms race between the two.
After an "underwhelming" February 8 livestream in Paris showcasing Bard, Google's stock fell eight percent, equivalent to a $100 billion loss in market value, and the YouTube video of the livestream was made private. Many viewers also pointed out an error during the demo in which Bard gives inaccurate information about the James Webb Space Telescope in response to a query. Google employees criticized Pichai's "rushed" and "botched" announcement of Bard on Memgen, the company's internal forum, while Maggie Harrison of Futurism called the rollout "chaos". Pichai defended his actions by saying that Google had been "deeply working on AI for a long time", rejecting the notion that Bard's launch was a knee-jerk reaction. Alphabet chairman John Hennessy acknowledged that Bard was not fully product-ready, but expressed excitement at the technology's potential.
A week after the James Webb debacle, Pichai asked employees to dedicate two to four hours to dogfood testing Bard, while Google executive Prabhakar Raghavan encouraged employees to correct any errors Bard makes. 80,000 employees responded to Pichai's call to action. In the following weeks, Google employees roundly criticized Bard in internal messages, citing a variety of safety and ethical concerns and calling on company leaders not to launch the service. Seeking to prioritize keeping up with competitors, Google executives decided to proceed with the launch anyway, overruling an unsympathetic risk assessment report conducted by its AI ethics team. After Pichai suddenly laid off 12,000 employees later that month due to slowing revenue growth, remaining workers shared memes and snippets of their humorous exchanges with Bard soliciting its "opinion" on the layoffs. Google employees began testing a more sophisticated version of Bard with larger parameters, dubbed "Big Bard", in mid-March. In 2023, Bard introduced new integrations with Gmail, Docs, and Drive, allowing users to opt-in for Bard to fetch information directly from these platforms, enhancing its utility.
Launch
Google opened up early access for Bard on March 21, 2023, in a limited capacity, allowing users in the U.S. and UK to join a waitlist. Unlike Microsoft's approach with Bing Chat, Bard was launched as a standalone web application featuring a text box and a disclaimer that the chatbot "may display inaccurate or offensive information that doesn't represent Google's views". Three responses are then provided to each question, with users prompted to submit feedback on the usefulness of each answer. Google vice presidents Sissie Hsiao and Eli Collins framed Bard as a complement to Google Search and stated that the company had not determined how to make the service profitable. Among those granted early access were those enrolled in Google's "Pixel Superfans" loyalty program, users of its Pixel and Nest devices, and Google One subscribers.
Bard is trained by third-party contractors hired by Google, including Appen and Accenture workers, whom Business Insider and Bloomberg News reported were placed under extreme pressure, overworked, and underpaid. Bard is also trained on data from publicly available sources, which Google disclosed by amending its privacy policy. Shortly after Bard's initial launch, Google reorganized the team behind Google Assistant, the company's virtual assistant, to focus on Bard instead. Google researcher Jacob Devlin resigned from the company after claiming that Bard had surreptitiously leveraged data from ChatGPT; Google denied the allegations. Meanwhile, a senior software engineer at the company published an internal memo warning that Google was falling behind in the AI "arms race", not to OpenAI but to independent researchers in open-source communities. Pichai revealed on March 31 that the company intended to "upgrade" Bard by basing it on PaLM, a newer and more powerful LLM from Google, rather than LaMDA. The same day, Krawczyk announced that Google had added "math and logic capabilities" to Bard. Bard gained the ability to assist in coding in April, being compatible with more than 20 programming languages at launch. Microsoft also began running advertisements in the address bar of a developer build of the Edge browser, urging users to try Bing whenever they visit the Bard web app. Google is working to integrate Bard into its ChromeOS operating system and Pixel devices.
Updates
Bard took center stage during the annual Google I/O keynote in May 2023, with Pichai and Hsiao announcing a series of updates to Bard, including the adoption of PaLM 2, integration with other Google products and third-party services, expansion to 180 countries, support for additional languages, and new features. In a stark contrast to previous years, the Google Assistant was barely mentioned during the event. The expanded rollout did not include any nations in the European Union (EU), possibly reflecting concerns about compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation. Those with Google Workspace accounts also gained access to the service. Google attempted to launch Bard in the EU in June, but was blocked by the Irish Data Protection Commission, who requested for a "data protection impact assessment" from the company. In July, Google launched Bard in the EU and Brazil, added support for dozens of new languages, and introduced multiple new personalization and productivity features. An invite-only chatroom ("server") on Discord was created in July, consisting of users who heavily use Bard. Over the next few months, the chatroom was flooded with comments questioning the usefulness of Bard.
Reflecting on Bard's launch in an interview with Wired in September, Pichai acknowledged that Google had been "cautious" to release LaMDA because of "the responsibility that comes with getting it right", complimenting OpenAI for ChatGPT's launch and firing back at Nadella's comment about making Google dance. Google released a major update to the chatbot later that month, integrating it into many of its products through "extensions", adding a button to fact-check AI-generated responses through Google Search, and allowing users to share conversation threads. Google also introduced the "Google-Extended" web crawler as part of its search engine's robots.txt indexing file to allow web publishers to opt-out of allowing Bard to scan them for training. Online users later discovered that Google Search was indexing Bard conversation threads on which users had enabled sharing. Google stated that this was an error and quickly moved to rectify the leaks.
In October, during the company's annual Made by Google event in which it announced the Pixel 8 series and the Pixel Watch 2, Hsiao unveiled "Assistant with Bard", an upgraded version of the Google Assistant which was deeply integrated with Bard, following in the footsteps of Amazon's approach with Alexa.
Reception
Bard received mixed reviews upon its initial release. James Vincent of The Verge found Bard faster than ChatGPT and Bing Chat, but noted that the lack of Bing-esque footnotes was "both a blessing and a curse", encouraging Google to be bolder when experimenting with AI. His colleague David Pierce was unimpressed by its uninteresting and sometimes inaccurate responses, adding that despite Google's insistence that Bard was not a search engine, its user interface resembled that of one, which could cause problems for Google. Cade Metz of The New York Times described Bard as "more cautious" than ChatGPT, while Shirin Ghaffary of Vox called it "dry and uncontroversial" due to the reserved nature of its responses.
The Washington Post columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler found Bard a mixed bag, noting that it acted cautiously but could show Internet-influenced bias. Writing for ZDNet, Sabrina Ortiz believed ChatGPT and Bing Chat were "more capable overall" in comparison to Bard, while Wired journalist Lauren Goode found her conversation with Bard "the most bizarre" of the three. After the introduction of extensions, The New York Times Kevin Roose found the update underwhelming and "a bit of a mess", while Business Insider Lakshmi Varanasi found that Bard often leaned more into flattery than facts.
In a 60 Minutes conversation with Hsiao, Google senior vice president James Manyika, and Pichai, CBS News correspondent Scott Pelley found Bard "unsettling". Associate professor Ethan Mollick of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania was underwhelmed by Bard's artistic ineptitude. The Times later conducted a test with ChatGPT and Bard regarding their ability to handle tasks expected of human assistants, and concluded that ChatGPT's performance was vastly superior to that of Bard. NewsGuard, a tool which rates the credibility of news articles, found that Bard was more skilled at debunking known conspiracy theories than ChatGPT.
See also
Tay (chatbot)
Poe (chatbot)
Ernie Bot
References
External links
White paper
2023 software
Chatbots
Google software
Virtual assistants