The launch of Bard, already in its first phase of public beta, It is turning out to be somewhat disappointing in several ways.. As we told you a few days ago, Google finally opened a waiting list for users interested in trying out its chatbot but, unlike Microsoft and the global reach of the new Bing beta, those from the search engine have preferred to limit access, in this first phase, to users from the United States and the United Kingdom, and only in English.
On the other hand, and as we already told you when Google first spoke about Bard, its first implementation is based on LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), an AI language model that focuses on providing dialogue and in which the company has been working for several years. However, the company also anticipated that it was going to use a light version of it, giving preference to the efficiency of the chatbot over the fact that it was capable of offering more complex and elaborate responses, in addition to having a broader scope in terms of its functions.
This limitation has had a consequence that was deducible a priori, the first evaluations of Bard agree, for the most part, that the Google chatbot is, in its current state, markedly less useful than those with which it currently rivals, mainly Bing and ChatGPT. And what is even worse in the face to face with the Microsoft service, many users point out that the sources used by Bard are not reliable, which means that any response generated by the model has to be quarantined.
This is a fairly serious problem, to the point that it has had to be the company’s own CEO, Sundar Pichai, who has responded to the criticism and given explanations, as well as advancing plans for the future. The manager was interviewed on the Hard Fork podcast of The New York Times, where among other things promised that Google will update Bard soon. “Very soon, perhaps around the time this podcast goes live, we will be upgrading the Bard to some of our more capable PaLM models, bringing more capabilities; Whether in reasoning, coding, you can better answer math questions. So you’ll see the progress over the course of the next week.”.
Pichai also admitted that they have not competed, so far, in the best conditions, “In a way, I feel like we took an upgraded Civic and put it in a race with more powerful cars.”. This is something that we have already talked about on occasion, that Google’s fear and conservative position was, at the same time, putting sticks in its own wheels.
