This week, at Google I/O 2023, Google announced they were removing the waitlist for more than 180 countries and released their ChatGPT competitor, Google Bard to the world.
Bard is the product name for their large language model PaLM 2, which is also known as a conversational AI. PaLM2 is a significant upgrade over Google’s first attempt, adding the following benefits:
- Multilinguality: PaLM 2 is more heavily trained on multilingual text, spanning more than 100 languages. This has significantly improved its ability to understand, generate and translate nuanced text — including idioms, poems and riddles — across a wide variety of languages, a hard problem to solve. PaLM 2 also passes advanced language proficiency exams at the “mastery” level.
- Reasoning: PaLM 2’s wide-ranging dataset includes scientific papers and web pages that contain mathematical expressions. As a result, it demonstrates improved capabilities in logic, common sense reasoning, and mathematics.
- Coding: PaLM 2 was pre-trained on a large quantity of publicly available source code datasets. This means that it excels at popular programming languages like Python and JavaScript, but can also generate specialized code in languages like Prolog, Fortran and Verilog.
Trained on a massive dataset, Bard can communicate and generate human-like text in response to a wide range of prompts and questions. For example, Bard can provide summaries of factual topics or create stories.
What’s really impressive is the speed at which Bard provides responses to your prompts, by comparison, this is much faster than ChatGPT, which is often rate limited unless you pay for their Plus tier.
A product response from Google was really important, as the world started to other solutions (like Microsoft’s Bing) that offered this more direct way of getting answers.
What’s fun to play with is the chain of commands you can feed the model and have the answer produced just as you need it. As an example, I asked Bard to:
List the top movies in Australian cinemas right now
To which it provided the number list of the top 10.
I then asked Bard to:
Give me that as a table
Bard happily turned the data into a table in about a second. I wasn’t done, I then asked:
Include their rotten tomato’s rating
That’s a nice set of data, but if I was going to base my movie viewing on that rating, I better sort by that column, so I simply asked Bard to
Sort by that column
Bard happily obliged and I had my table. I then have the opportunity to export that to Google Docs, or Copy to past into Excel. This is really powerful stuff when working with public datasets, each of these tasks would otherwise have taken a number of minutes to create.
The ability to integrate into Google Services, like getting Bard to generate an email, then click 2 buttons and have that as a draft in Gmail is incredibly powerful and I expect many integrations over the coming weeks and months.
According to Bard, the latest browser market share data as of April 2023 shows that Google Chrome is the most popular browser in the world with 62.74% market share. Google is leveraging that success to promote Bard, even offering a link to Bard from the famously slim Google homepage and new tab screen this week.
After using Bard for a few days, I am actually preferring it over ChatGPT for a few reasons.
- Bard is faster
- Bard is up to date (has access to live content on the web without plugins),
- Bard is free
- Bard already supports more than 20+ programming languages
- Bard’s roadmap outlined in the video below suggests Bard is going to continue to get smarter and more capable, quickly.
Despite these, it is important to understand that Bard isn’t perfect. When I asked Bard what it knew about techAU.com.au it did a great job in terms of the content we cover, but did contain a factually incorrect statement which was that techAU is a non-profit organization.. we are not.
Right now, Bard is very text-heavy, but in the near future, will be able to generate images thanks to a partnership with Adobe Firefly which we’ve covered on techAU previously.
It is still early days, but Google is clearly investing heavily in Bard and this is a company that doesn’t like to lose in any field, but their whole business model of search ad revenue is on the line, so they need to get this right.
Sissie Hsiao, Vice President and General Manager, Assistant and Bard, speaks at Google I/O on May 10, 2023.
Have you used both ChatGPT and Google Bard? Which do you prefer?
