(Paris) Engaged in the race for artificial intelligence, Google could not do without the European Union, despite regulatory constraints: several months late, the group finally launched Bard, its answer to ChatGPT, in a fifty new countries.
“Bard is now available in most countries around the world and in the most widely spoken languages,” Google said in a blog post Thursday, which introduced the tool in February to compete with OpenAI’s flagship software, funded primarily by Microsoft.
“We have proactively engaged with experts, policymakers and regulators to drive this expansion,” the US giant said.
He had to delay the launch of Bard in the EU after questions from the Irish personal data regulator (the DPC). A worrying signal, because its competitor ChatGPT, also accused of not respecting European regulations, had for its part been blocked at the end of March for a month in Italy.
“Google made a number of changes prior to launch, including improving transparency and changing some control mechanisms for users,” DPC spokesperson Graham Doyle told Politico.
“Google has agreed to conduct a review and provide a report to the DPC three months after Bard becomes operational in the EU,” he continued.
Artificial intelligence algorithms raise many fears in terms of privacy, disinformation or respect for intellectual property. Brussels wants to regulate the sector via a text currently under discussion.
But pro-AI companies and experts say such precautions risk slowing innovation on the continent.
Google also launched its product in Brazil on Thursday, despite a plan to regulate content on the internet that it denounced.
Trilingual so far (English, Japanese and Korean), Bard can now express himself in about forty languages ​​including Arabic, German, Chinese, Spanish, French and Hindi, according to Google.
They will also be able to state their answers orally, adapt the style of their answers in professional or informal language, or extract information from an image.
Finally, it will be possible to continue old conversations with artificial intelligence, a feature already available on ChatGPT.
Conversational robots, presented as an alternative to traditional online research, have experienced dazzling success since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022. It is even integrated into certain tools from the American giant Microsoft, including the Bing search engine.
To stay in the race, Google has had to accelerate its own announcements in AI and notably presented in May its new language model dubbed PaLM 2. It also plans to add these functionalities to its search engine and its suite of online services. online (Maps, Gmail, Docs).
The two competitors, followed by a slew of start-ups, compete with announcements with a stated goal: that their platforms equipped with generative AI become the preferred personal assistants of the general public, but also of companies.
The global generative AI market (including text and image generation) could thus generate $67 billion in revenue in 2023, and be multiplied by more than ten before the end of the decade, according to Bloomberg Intelligence and the research firm IDC.
These robots, which operate statistically from a gigantic corpus of learning, however, tend to make mistakes regularly, due to a lack of reasoning skills.
Bard is thus presented as a “creative tool”, “experimental”, which “may display inaccurate or offensive information”. A warning also present in its competitor.