Google Bard is about to get supercharged

Google’s recently released chatbot, Bard, lacks pizzazz, to say the least. The company’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, addressed these concerns on the New York TimesHard Fork Podcast(Opens in a new tab) Thursday. While acknowledging that Bard has its weaknesses, Pichai claimed an injection of brute force was imminent.

Indeed, in Mashable’s own testing of Bard, the chatbot’s answers could be a letdown – bland and concise when we specifically asked for something spicy and creative. In some areas, though, we appreciated the no-nonsense explanations, even noticing the potential for something big in the direct but counterintuitive answers to tricky questions.

Pichai explained on Hard Fork, “We knew when we put Bard out we wanted to be careful. It’s the start of a journey for us. […] Since this was our first time going out, we wanted to see what kind of questions we would get. We positioned it carefully, of course.”

And frankly, the word “Bard” in the logo on the Bard homepage(Opens in a new tab) is immediately followed by the word “experiment”. The blog post(Opens in a new tab) Bard’s announcement called it “an early experiment that lets you collaborate with generative AI.” Still, the public didn’t set their expectations exactly to the level Pichai intended, he explained.

“We’ve tried to prepare users for the creative collaboration questions,” he said, “but people do different things. I think it’s kind of been lost. […] So in some ways we released one of our smaller models, which is what drives Bard. And we were careful.”

Pichai likened Bard to a “suppressed Civic” in a race against hotter sports cars. That’s a curious appeal to Google’s humility that may not win your sympathy when you consider that Google has been accused of monopolistic business practices by the Justice Department and that parent company Alphabet is one of the Fortune magazine‘s top 10 most powerful companies(Opens in a new tab) in the world.

Anyway, here’s the good news for all Bard fans: Pichai says the chatbot will be upgraded to a new model soon. Real soon. “Obviously we have more capable models. Soon, maybe when this goes live, we’ll upgrade Bard to some of our more capable PaLM models, so those will have more capabilities, whether it’s reasoning, coding. It can ask math answer better. So you’ll see progress over the course of next week.”

Of course, Pichai backed in a bit, explaining that security and user experience are paramount. “We’re all in a very, very early stage. We’re going to have even more capable models to plug into over time. But I don’t want it to be just who gets there first, but it’s very important for us to get it right.” Translation: Don’t expect the upgrade to rush into metaphorical court and submerge the current metaphorical Lebron James of major language models: GPT-4.

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Google’s attempts to keep expectations low in this area are probably wise given recent allegations that the company trains its models on ChatGPT output – which Google denies(Opens in a new tab). Training a large language model based on the output of someone else’s large language model is a bit like photocopying a map and calling yourself a cartographer – not a good impression.

Pichai also hinted at a not-too-distant future where powerful, personalized models exist for every user. “In some respects, [a personalized model] is what we envisioned when we were building the Google Assistant. But we have the technology to actually do those things now.” So bearing in mind that Bard is owned by the company that owns or develops the products, billions of people(Opens in a new tab) use to organize their lives, it’s probably not wise to count Google as an eventual heavy-hitter in the chatbot world.