Google starts rolling out its ChatGPT rival called Bard

Today, Google has started rolling out early bird access to its ChatGPT rival called Bard. Users are also able to join a waitlist at bard.google.com, though the company admits that the roll-out will be slow and is not committing to any date for full public access.

Just like Microsoft’s Bing chatbot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard offers users a blank text box and an invitation to ask questions about any topic they like. However, given the well-documented tendency of these bots to invent information, the search engine maker is stressing that the new AI is not a replacement for its search engine but, rather, a “complement to search” — a bot that users can bounce ideas off of, generate writing drafts, or just chat about life with.

The company’s project’s leads, Sissie Hsiao and Eli Collins describe in a blog post that Bard in cautious terms is “an early experiment … intended to help people boost their productivity, accelerate their ideas, and fuel their curiosity.” They say that it will “collaborate with generative AI” (emphasis ours), language that also seems intended to diffuse Google’s responsibility for future outbursts.

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As with ChatGPT and Bing, there’s also a prominent disclaimer underneath the main text box warning users that “Bard may display inaccurate or offensive information that doesn’t represent Google’s views” — the AI equivalent of “abandon trust, all ye who type here.”

Just as expected, early adopters of the AI report that efforts to extract factual information from Bard are still hit-and-miss. They report that despite the chatbots connection to Google’s search results, it couldn’t fully answer a query on some questions. Sometimes repeating the query did retrieve the correct information, but users would be unable to know which was which without checking an authoritative source like the machine’s manual.

But how does Bard compare to its main rivals, ChatGPT and Bing? Users say that it is certainly faster than either (though this may be simply because it currently has fewer users) and seems to have as potentially broad capabilities as these other systems. It however lacks Bing’s clearly labeled footnotes, which Google says only appear when it directly quotes a source like a news article, and seemed generally more constrained in its answers.

We look forward to having a brief time with the bot and asking a few tricky questions. At the end of the day, the proving of a chatbot is in the chatting, and as Google offers more users access to Bard, this collective stress test will better reveal the system’s capabilities and liabilities.