Google just launched Bard, its answer to ChatGPT—and it wants you to make it better

Google has a lot riding on this launch. Microsoft partnered with OpenAI to make an aggressive play for Google’s top spot in search. Meanwhile, Google blundered straight out of the gate when it first tried to respond. In a teaser clip for Bard that the company put out in February, the chatbot was shown making a factual error. Google’s value fell But Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at AI startup Hugging Face and former co-lead of Google’s AI ethics team, is skeptical of this framing. Google has been working on LaMDA for years, she says, and she thinks pitching Bard as an experiment “is a PR trick that larger companies use to reach millions of customers while also removing themselves from accountability if anything goes wrong.” 

Google wants users to think of Bard as a sidekick to Google Search, not a replacement. A button that sits below Bard’s chat widget says “Google It.” The idea is to nudge users to head to Google Search to check Bard’s answers or find out more. “It’s one of the things that help us offset limitations of the technology,” says Krawczyk.

“We really want to encourage people to actually explore other places, sort of confirm things if they’re not sure,” says Ghahramani.

This acknowledgement of Bard’s flaws has shaped the chatbot’s design in other ways, too. Users can interact with Bard only a handful of times in any given session. This is because the longer large language models engage in a single conversation, the more likely they are to go off the rails. Many of the weirder responses from Bing Chat that people have shared online emerged at the end of drawn-out exchanges, for example.   

Google won’t confirm what the conversation limit will be for launch, but it will be set quite low for the initial release and adjusted depending on user feedback.

Google is also playing it safe in terms of content. Users will not be able to ask for sexually explicit, illegal, or harmful material (as judged Perhaps the biggest difference between Bard and ChatGPT is that Bard produces three versions of every response, which Google calls “drafts.” Users can click between them and pick the response they prefer, or mix and match between them. The aim is to remind people that Bard cannot generate perfect answers. “There’s the sense of authoritativeness when you only see one example,” says Krawczyk. “And we know there are limitations around factuality.”