AI search engine race is here: Google announces Bard, its ChatGPT rival

After classifying ChatGPT a “code red” for its search business, Google is now making its own AI-powered moves. On Monday, the company announced its own “experimental conversational AI service” called Bard.

Google-parent Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said the company is opening up Bard to “trusted testers” before making it available to the public in the weeks ahead.

Bard is powered by Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA). The company said users will soon see AI-powered features in the search function “that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats.”

“AI is the most profound technology we are working on today,” Pichai wrote.

Bard’s not all

The Bard news comes just a few days after Google and OpenAI-rival Anthropic announced a cloud partnership, but declined to comment on Google’s investment in the tech, which media reports suggest is valued between $300 million and $400 million.

Little-known Anthropic was founded by siblings Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, both former vice presidents at OpenAI, the creator behind ChatGPT. While Microsoft is all over OpenAI’s business with a $10 billion investment, Google is solidifying the AI arms race with Anthropic, Bard and more.

Anthropic said it will use Google’s cloud system to scale up its AI, while Google Cloud said there are plans to make Anthropic’s language-model assistant, Claude, more available in the coming months.

Pichai said last week Google plans to release chatbots in the coming weeks and months so people can use it “as a companion to search.”

The new Bing

Meanwhile, Microsoft apparently let slip its AI-powered Bing search engine, at least for a few minutes. Bing users reported stumbling across the chat search Friday and were able to play around with it a bit before it disappeared.

Bing's ChatGPT integration just appeared for me. Replaces the search bar with a composer for natural-language questions pic.twitter.com/NxZ0k9O92C

— Owen Yin (@Owen_Yin) February 3, 2023

Self-proclaimed student and designer Owen Yin said in a Medium post that he could toggle between the conventional search and the chatbot. He also said chatbot cited its sources, which is pretty critical considering ChatGPT is known to make things up.

AI on jobs

The power of AI is still in its infancy but its potential has people taking a hard look at jobs it will replace. Respondents of a Bloomberg survey said AI could replace some people in the financial, media, legal and tech sectors.

However, more than two-thirds of respondents didn’t feel their own jobs were at risk in the next three years. Eighty percent of economists said AI wouldn’t replace them, but more than half of salespeople said it would.