Google’s Bard AI Launches in Early Access Today

Google is making its new Bard AI available for early enthusiasts today. If you’re in the US and the UK, you can sign up to try Bard today and Google says it will expand access to it to more countries and languages over time.

Google announced Bard last month in what appeared to be a pretty rushed announcement. This was just a day before Microsoft announced its new Bing Chatbot powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but a factual error in a promotional video for Bard made Google’s parent company Alphabet lose $100 billion in market value.

Bard is powered by an optimized version of LaMDA, a large language model (LLM) that Google announced back in 2021. As of today, Google says that Bard remains an “early experiment” and that it has “learned a lot so far by testing Bard.” The company hopes to improve its Bard AI even more by opening access to it more broadly.

“Bard is a direct interface to an LLM, and we think of it as a complementary experience to Google Search. Bard is designed so that you can easily visit Search to check its responses or explore sources across the web,” the company explained. Google is also said that it’s already planning integrate LLMs into Google Search “in a deeper way.”

Currently, Bard can be used to answer complex questions in simple terms and create content. Sometimes, Bard will also offer different drafts of its responses to a question, allowing users to choose the best starting point for a conversation with the chatbot.

Just like Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, Google has limited the number of Bard responses in a conversation to limit the risk of the AI going off the rails. At the bottom of every Bard response, there’s also “Google it” button allowing users to see relevant results about a query in a new tab.

“We’ll continue to improve Bard and add capabilities, including coding, more languages and multimodal experiences. And one thing is certain: We’ll learn alongside you as we go,” Google said today.