(Washington) Google launched its conversational robot Bard, a competitor of ChatGPT, in public access on Tuesday, with the assumed objective of improving the quality of its answers thanks to the increase in exchanges with users.
The subsidiary of the Alphabet group had announced in disaster, at the beginning of February, the creation of Bard, overwhelmed by the arrival in November of ChatGPT, developed by the start-up OpenAI in collaboration with Microsoft.
Its use was initially limited to “confidence testers”, before the opening on Tuesday to the general public. However, the number of connections has been restricted and a waiting list established to manage demand.
Access is only possible, for now, from the United States and the United Kingdom.
The interface is a website, separate from the Google search engine, with a space in which the user can type a question.
“We’ve learned a lot from testing Bard, and the next major step in improving it is to get feedback from more people,” wrote Google vice presidents Sissie Hsiao and Eli Collins in a post on a group site.
“The more people who use it, the better the large language models (LLM, a program capable of generating answers to questions formulated in everyday language) are at predicting the answers likely to be useful”, explained the authors. two managers.
By being fed data and written conversations, the LLM algorithm can more accurately determine the relevant answer to a question.
Bard relies on LaMDA, a language model designed by Google to generate conversation robots (chatbots), of which the group from Mountain View (California) unveiled the first version in 2021.
The two Google executives recognize that LLMs “are not flawless”, and can “provide, in an assured way, inaccurate, misleading or false information”.
Google indicates that it has put in place “safeguards” to contain the possibilities of inaccurate or inappropriate answers, in particular the limitation of the length of the exchanges in a dialogue between Bard and a user.
Since the launch of ChatGPT, several Internet users have sought to push the chatbot to its limits and generated absurd, even worrying responses.
In an interview with The New York Times, Sissie Hsiao and Eli Collins said Google has yet to determine a business model and monetization strategy for Bard.