Google Search Will ‘Soon’ Receive AI Upgrade As Company Scrambles To Release ChatGPT Competitor

 Google will release a public competitor to artificial intelligence language processing tool ChatGPT in the coming weeks as the Microsoft-backed system garners millions of users, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Monday.

ChatGPT has earned worldwide recognition as knowledge workers use the system to complete tasks such as writing emails and computer code in a matter of seconds. Pichai revealed in a blog post that Bard, an experimental conversational artificial intelligence service based on the company’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications, will be opened to “trusted testers ahead of making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks.”

“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,” Pichai wrote. “We’re releasing it initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA. This much smaller model requires significantly less computing power, enabling us to scale to more users, allowing for more feedback. We’ll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to make sure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information.”

The present version of ChatGPT has “limited knowledge” of world events after 2021 and is “not connected to the internet,” according to an article from OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed firm which created the system. ChatGPT has nevertheless reached 100 million active users within two months of becoming publicly available, surpassing growth trends for social media platforms such as TikTok to possibly become the fastest-growing internet product in history, according to a UBS investor note seen by Business Insider.

Some 27% of employees at prominent consulting, technology, and financial services companies have already used ChatGPT in various capacities, according to a survey from Fishbowl. Venture capital firms have been seeking to acquire shares at a rate that would ascribe a valuation of nearly $30 billion to OpenAI even though the company has generated little revenue, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

Pichai added that his company would implement artificial intelligence systems such as LaMDA, PaLM, Imagen, and MusicLM into Google Search. The systems could take complex and analytical questions submitted by users and summarize information from multiple sources.

“Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats,” Pichai continued, “so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web: whether that’s seeking out additional perspectives, like blogs from people who play both piano and guitar, or going deeper on a related topic, like steps to get started as a beginner. These new AI features will begin rolling out on Google Search soon.”

Google previously vowed that the company would not pursue artificial intelligence solutions that cause harm, assist with weapons or other harm-inducing technologies, gather information for the purpose of surveillance, or otherwise contravene “widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.” The company has also promised that its artificial intelligence products would be socially beneficial and avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias.

Many conservatives have expressed concern that ChatGPT appears to possess political and social views that skew leftward. National Review writer Nate Hochman asked ChatGPT about several ideas considered to be misinformation by fact-checkers and found that the system often echoed the establishment-sanctioned narrative, while Reason contributor David Rozado found that ChatGPT scored toward the center-Left on four different political compass quizzes. Another recent analysis from The Daily Wire found that ChatGPT sometimes endorses principles espoused by supporters of radical gender theory.