• Google has officially revealed its ChatGPT rival, with the company choosing to call it Bard.
• The platform is the next step in the company’s AI plans, with it set to made available to the public in the coming weeks.
• Google beat Microsoft to a similar announcement, which is scheduled to take place later today.

The AI arms race is on, with a number of big tech companies trying to match the the capabilities of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Google in particular has outlined its intent, having planned a live streamed event for Wednesday afternoon, but before that takes place, we already have an idea of what is to come, and it’s called Bard.

This as Alphabet (which owns Google) CEO, Sundar Pichai, shared some of the details of the company’s consumer-facing AI platform earlier this week.

“Two years ago we unveiled next-generation language and conversation capabilities powered by our Language Model for Dialogue Applications (or LaMDA for short). We’ve been working on an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA, that we’re calling Bard. 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,” noted Pichai in a blog post.

“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses. Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity, helping you to explain new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old, or learn more about the best strikers in football right now, and then get drills to build your skills,” he added.

Much like Google assistant then, Bard is an AI tool that will soon be embedded into Google’s most popular platform – Search. To that end Google is looking to use Bard as a means of contextualising complex information, where it can be leveraged to assist with learning, outside of helping with other labour intensive tasks.

“One of the most exciting opportunities is how AI can deepen our understanding of information and turn it into useful knowledge more efficiently — making it easier for people to get to the heart of what they’re looking for and get things done,” continued Pichai.

We should have a better idea of how Google plans to implement Bard, as well as when we can experience it, after the company hosts its aforementioned event tomorrow afternoon. The same goes for Microsoft, which too has announced an event at short notice for later today.

You can tune into that event by watching the embedded video below once 15:30 rolls around on 8th February.