In the realm of conversational AI, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has garnered global acclaim, rapidly becoming one of the most swiftly adopted consumer products. In contrast, Google’s Bard has often lingered in the shadows, despite ongoing feature enhancements, including expanded access to user data across various Google products. However, a compelling shift has occurred — Bard, now available to English-speaking users in 170 countries, is powered by Google’s latest Gemini model, touted to match or even surpass OpenAI’s technology.
Bard has embraced the Gemini Pro tier, strategically positioned as a balanced solution — swift and efficient while retaining significant capabilities. Google asserts that Gemini represents a substantial upgrade for Bard, enhancing its performance across tasks like summarization, brainstorming, and writing. Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, notes a comprehensive improvement in understanding user intent, delivering higher-quality and more factual responses, making it particularly advantageous for coding tasks.
While Bard currently functions as a conventional chatbot, responding to text inputs, an upcoming iteration, “Bard Advanced,” fueled by Gemini Ultra, promises a transformative experience. Gemini Ultra, the most powerful version of Google’s new language model, introduces multimodal capabilities, enabling interactions beyond text — including images, audio, and video. Demis Hassabis, head of Google DeepMind, emphasizes Gemini’s inherent multimodality, highlighting its seamless integration and reasoning across various formats.
Google’s demos showcase practical applications, such as YouTuber Mark Rober using Bard for perfecting paper airplanes with AI-assisted feedback based on photos. Additionally, parents can leverage Bard by uploading images of their children’s homework for assistance in identifying errors in math problems.
While Pichai views this launch as a pivotal moment for Bard and the commencement of the Gemini era, early benchmarking suggests that the new model could position Bard on par with, or even surpass, ChatGPT in chatbot capabilities. This achievement marks a noteworthy milestone for Google’s conversational AI endeavors.
