Google's AI Chatbot Bard Now Open to Public; CEO Warns of Possible Surprises, Errors

Google's much-anticipated AI chatbot, Bard, has begun rolling out to the general public.

The popular search engine announced a waitlist on March 21 for users in the United States and the United Kingdom, gradually adding new members. Google's new artificial intelligence system, Bard, was created to respond to OpenAI's hit AI system ChatGPT.

In response to these developments, Insider reports that CEO Sundar Pichai issued warnings to employees, advising them to expect things to go wrong as the AI product enters the market.

In an email to staff, Pichai cautioned that, as more people use Bard and put it through its paces, "things will go wrong," and the chatbot would "surprise us."

Google's Bard Failed Test in February

The AI chatbot was initially made available to a select group of "trusted testers" in February, and it was only Tuesday when Google began rolling out gradual public access.

However, the chatbot has already encountered some early complications. In a February promotion event for Bard, the bot provided a wrong response to a demo question about the James Webb Space Telescope.

During a live-streamed event, Bard was asked about James Webb Space Telescope discoveries that a 9-year-old might understand.

The chatbot claimed that JWST had captured the very first images of exoplanets. The correct answer was the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in 2004.

Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, reportedly lost $100 billion in market value due to the chatbot error.

Recently, in a conversation with a technology blogger about the Justice Department's antitrust case against the company, Bard asserted that Google has a monopoly on digital advertising technologies.

These types of AI response error, agreed by many to be called "AI hallucinations," occurs when an artificial intelligence system provides results inconsistent with what a human observer would expect.

Since AI systems like Bard rely on large datasets that can be incomplete or biased, there is always the possibility that the chatbot would provide an incorrect answer.

A Google spokesperson told Insider that Bard could sometimes deliver inaccurate or inappropriate information that does not reflect Google's views. They also stated that the chatbot should "not respond in a way that endorses a particular viewpoint on subjective topics."

Google Braces for Bard's Public Launch Performance

Pichai's email to staff also stated that the business was aware of the need to improve Bard's performance and that public feedback would be critical in making such advancements.

He congratulated the 80,000 Googlers who had helped test the chatbot and acknowledged that the corporation was "in the early stages of a long AI journey."

Google's entry into the chatbot market comes on the heels of the success of OpenAI's ChatGPT, which debuted in November 2022. Because of the high prominence of the OpenAI product and Microsoft's significant investment in the company behind it, Google and Microsoft are competing to bring new AI technologies to the market.

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