At present, Google’s chatbot is in a fierce competition with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has gained enormous popularity. The Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, announced that their AI-powered chatbot, Bard, will soon transition to a more advanced PaLM model. This move is in response to the tough competition posed by ChatGPT, which reached an impressive milestone of 100 million monthly active users just two months after its launch in January. ChatGPT is now considered the fastest-growing consumer application ever.
During an appearance on The New York Times’ Hard Fork podcast, Pichai stated that they have more advanced models available. He mentioned that they plan to upgrade Bard to some of their more capable PaLM models, which will bring additional capabilities in reasoning, coding, and even better performance in answering math questions. Pichai also stated that these upgrades will be implemented soon, possibly coinciding with the podcast’s release, and users can expect to see progress over the course of the next week.
Google’s PaLM, a dense decoder-only Transformer language model, has been trained using the Pathways system and boasts 540 billion parameters. The Pathways system allows for efficient training of a single model across multiple TPU v4 Pods. After evaluating the model on hundreds of language understanding and generation tasks, Google found that PaLM achieves state-of-the-art few-shot performance across most tasks, surpassing existing models by significant margins in many cases.
Additionally, Google has developed an internal language model called LaMDA, which has been trained on 137 billion parameters. According to Google, LaMDA has the ability to draw responses from high quality information sources and provide up-to-date answers. Bard, a representative from the tech giant, has expressed confidence in LaMDA’s potential.
Pichai was queried about his use of AI generative tools such as Bard, LaMDA, and PaLM in his personal life during the podcast. He recounted how he had interacted with LaMDA while playing with his son at home. When asked about his thoughts on OpenAI’s ChatGPT catching him by surprise, he acknowledged the exceptional talent at OpenAI and credited ChatGPT’s success to finding a product market fit.
As of March 22, Google has started to publicly release Bard, and is inviting users to try it out and provide feedback. Consumers in the United States and UK can join a waiting list to gain access to the AI-powered chatbot.