Google Bard was released to public testing in early March, but it’s not quite as impressive as its rivals Bing Chat and ChatGPT (which were already far from perfect). Google is promising that upgrades are on the way.
The latest episode of The New York Times‘ podcast Hard Fork had Google CEO Sundar Pichai on as a guest, who said upgrades are in development for Bard. He said, “We will be upgrading Bard to some of our more capable PaLM models, which will bring more capabilities; be it in reasoning, coding, it can answer maths questions better. So you will see progress over the course of next week.”
Google Bard was initially based on LaMDA, the AI language model that Google has been developing for several years. That sets it apart from most other chatbots — Bing Chat, ChatGPT, and others are using technology derived from OpenAI’s GPT models. Google’s PaLM is a larger-scale model, which might make Bard a bit more useful. Sundar went on to say, “To me, it was important to not put [out] a more capable model before we can fully make sure we can handle it well.”
We’ll likely hear more about Bard’s upgrades over the coming weeks, as Google has been eager to share progress on Bard as its competitors ramp up development.
