It's official. Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, has released a news announcement saying that Google is launching its AI Search Assistant called Bard.
How Bard looks and works is still unknown: Google is currently limiting access to Bard to a select few "trusted testers".
We can get an idea of what Bard is going to look like by examining the screenshot that Google provided in the official announcement:
The interface looks a lot like the Featured Snippets feature that Google provides, except that you can also "upvote and downvote" answers, regenerate an answer, and "Check it". It's safe to say that the Check it button is likely the ability to check the source of the information.
Bard: Behind the scenes
According to Google, the experimental bot Bard "combines the vast knowledge available to the whole world with the intelligence and creativity of Google's language models. It can be used to make sense of complex topics and scientific discoveries, find sources of inspiration or quickly get answers to factual information".
Bard is based on a "lightweight" version of LaMDA's neural network. The lightweight version is designed to require less processing power, making it more accessible to all Google users. This is largely due to the fact that the computing costs for chatbots such as ChatGPT are extremely high.
The search giant also said that it will create a set of tools and APIs that will make it easier for third-party developers to create more innovative applications with artificial intelligence.
Will Bard attribute its source of information?
This is arguably one of the most asked questions when it comes to any chatbot, but more so Google's Bard, since Google has a long-standing history of slowly but surely making information available directly from the search pages rather than making users click on links.
It should be safe to assume that Google will provide attribution since it will have to deal with things like misinformation or attributing wrong information.
How that will happen is still unclear. One thing is for sure, there are going to be many developments in this space since it's extremely unlikely that creators (writers) will be happy about the fact that Google will blatantly start to use their content without providing anything in return.
