There is no doubt that Bard, the chatbot with which Google intends to stand up to ChatGPT and especially the new Bing, it is not having a particularly brilliant early period. As you will remember, the service was announced just one day before the, already announced, presentation of the new Bing took place, in response to the already famous “red code” activated by Sundar Pichai after verifying that his competition threatened to position himself far ahead. in the implementation of artificial intelligence in the context of information seekers on the Internet.
As my colleague Juan said a couple of days ago, rushing is not good, and in this case they have resulted in the launch of a chatbot that still has many edges to polish, to the point that even some Company workers have come to define Bard as “pathetic” and a “convulsive liar.”, with statements as thick as that it can endanger people’s lives. This certainly explains why its deployment is turning out to be much slower than might have been expected, because even with a huge number of Google professionals dedicated exclusively to Bard, a lot of work is necessary to ensure that an intelligence model generative artificial always responds as it should.
Google’s image has suffered from these recent events, and the risk that technology companies like Samsung consider making the leap to Bing as the default search engine on their devices has been like throwing a 100-kilo bag of salt on a wide and already previously painful set of wounds. It is clear, as history has shown us, that a failed launch does not necessarily translate into a total failure, there is still room for improvement, and a quick response can reverse the trend, however negative it may initially be. And if not, tell the developers of No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk 2077, to give just two examples.
Obviously, at Google they are quite aware of this situation, and I do not think I am wrong if I say that we are all expecting important news at Google I / O 2023 that will take place in just a few weeks. However, any significant improvement achieved before arriving at said event should be reviewed, in order to improve the image of the chatbot as much and as soon as possible. This, of course, explains the recent announcement by Google that Bard has already learned to programundoubtedly one of the most anticipated functions by many of the users who already have access to the service.
It is well known that a use that many people are giving to ChatGPT and the new Bing It is precisely that, to obtain the necessary code for a function defined in the prompt. It is also true that an in-depth analysis reveals that sometimes the provided code is not the most correct option, but at least it does substantially reduce the time needed to develop, which is why this feature has been so well received.
The first implementation of Bard’s programming ability seems quite complete, as we can read in said statement:
«Bard can assist with programming and software development tasks, including code generation, debugging, and code explanation. We’re rolling out these capabilities in more than 20 programming languages, including C++, Go, Java, Javascript, Python, and Typescript. And you can easily export your Python code to Google Colab, no copy-paste required. Bard can also help with writing features for Google Sheets.»
In addition to its wide scope, in terms of supported languages, I think the integration with other Google services is particularly clever, something with which Bard can win many integers in terms of those who expected this functionality in the chatbot. It remains to be seen, of course, whether its operation, and therefore the code it generates, is adequate, needs to be polished or is still not up to the standard of what other services offer. However, we will still have to wait until Google decides to extend the scope of its beta to more users and from more geographies since, for now, it is still only available in the United States and the United Kingdom.
