- Google recognizes that its AI Bard is less efficient than those of its competitors OpenAI and Microsoft.
- Google CEO Sundar Pichai announces an upcoming Bard upgrade to more advanced PaLM models.
- Bing rejoices in the success of its chatbot and the relative failure of Google.
The last will be the first, and vice versa. Undisputed leader of the search engine market, Google is struggling to establish itself in the field of conversational artificial intelligence.
Launched four months ago, its AI Bard has failed to convince users or compete with the two other major players in the sector: OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing Chat.
These two AIs, unveiled before Bard, impressed with their ability to dialogue, generate creative content, solve problems or debug code. Bard, on the other hand, has proven to be far more limited and less successful in these tasks (to put it mildly).
“A tuned Civic” against Ferraris
In an interview given to New York TimesGoogle CEO Sundar Pichai admitted defeat in that first battle. “I feel like we took a tuned Civic and put it in competition with more powerful cars” he told the American media.
This automotive comparison perfectly illustrates the feeling of users who tested Bard and who were disappointed by his often imprecise, incomplete or off-topic answers.
But Google has not said its last word and intends to improve its AI in the coming days. Pichai revealed that Bard was going to get an upgrade towards PaLM (Pre-training with Auxiliary Language Modeling) models, which are more advanced than the LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) model currently used.
According to Pichai, the PaLM models will bring more abilities to Bard, whether in reasoning, coding, or answering mathematical questions. He hopes in this way to make up for the accumulated delay compared to ChatGPT and Bing Chat, which both use LLM (Large Language Model) models based on the GPT series created by OpenAI.
Microsoft tâcle Google
Bing, Google’s historic search engine challenger, is relishing the success of its AI and the relative failure of its main competitor.
“Oceans rise, empires crumble” tweeted Michael Schechter, vice president of growth and delivery at Microsoft, in response to Pichai’s interview. Fair play, but be careful not to declare victory too quickly. The AI market is still in its infancy and is evolving at a phenomenal speed. Google therefore still has a chance to recover. A battle is lost, but not the war.
