Google CEO Sundar Pichai promises more capable Bard AI chatbot soon

Bard was released for the public on March 21 but failed to garner the attention won by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot.

“We clearly have more capable models. Pretty soon, we will be upgrading Bard to some of our more capable Pathways Language Model (PaLM) models, which will bring more capabilities; be it in reasoning, coding, it can answer maths questions better,” Pichai said during The New York Times’ Hard Fork podcast.

“So you will see progress over the course of next week,” Pichai added.

Pichai said that part of the reason for Bard’s limited capabilities was a sense of caution within Google.

“To me, it was important to not put out a more capable model before we can fully make sure we can handle it well,” he was quoted as saying in the report.

Pichai confirmed he was talking with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin about the work.He also raised concerns that development of AI is currently moving too fast and “perhaps poses a threat to society”.

“This is going to need a lot of debate, no-one knows all the answers,” said Pichai.

Google has denied reports that it is copying Microsoft-owned OpenAI’s ChatGPT to train its AI chatbot called Bard.

A report in The Information claimed that OpenAI’s success “has forced the two AI research teams within Google’s parent, Alphabet, to overcome years of intense rivalry to work together”.

According to the report, citing sources, software engineers at Google’s Brain AI group are working with employees at DeepMind, which is a sibling company within Alphabet to develop software to compete with OpenAI.

However, a Google spokesperson told The Verge that “Bard is not trained on any data from ShareGPT or ChatGPT”.

Bard, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, is based on a large language model (LLM), specifically a lightweight and optimised version of LaMDA, which the tech giant said will be updated with newer, more capable models in the future.