According to Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, the AI-driven chatbot Bard is set to transition to a more potent PaLM model. This development is occurring at a crucial time, with Google’s chatbot competing against OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has gained immense popularity. In just two months since its launch, ChatGPT acquired 100 million monthly active users in January, making it the quickest growing consumer application ever.
During his appearance on The New York Times’ Hard Fork podcast, Pichai stated, “We have more advanced models available. In the near future, as this goes live, we will be enhancing Bard with some of our more advanced PaLM models, which will offer more capabilities such as improved reasoning, coding, and mathematical question answering. Therefore, you can anticipate seeing progress over the next week.”
Google’s Pathways Language Model (PaLM) is a dense decoder-only Transformer model with 540 billion parameters, developed using the Pathways system, which allows for efficient training of a single model across multiple TPU v4 Pods.
According to Google, the PaLM model has been evaluated on hundreds of language understanding and generation tasks and has shown state-of-the-art few-shot performance across most tasks, outperforming existing models in many cases. Meanwhile, Google has internally developed a language model called LaMDA, which has been trained on 137 billion parameters. According to Engadget, Bard will be able to source high-quality information from LaMDA to provide up-to-date answers.
Pichai was asked in the podcast about how he uses AI generative tools such as Bard, LaMDA, and PaLM in his personal life. He shared an anecdote about playing with his son at home and engaging in conversation with LaMDA.
When asked if OpenAI’s ChatGPT took him by surprise, Pichai responded, “We knew the caliber of the team, some of whom have been at Google before. So I think OpenAI’s progress and surprises – such as ChatGPT – are credit to them for finding something with a product market fit.”
As of March 22, Google has initiated the public launch of Bard, inviting users to provide feedback. In the United States and the United Kingdom, consumers can register on a waiting list to gain access to the AI-powered chatbot.
