The war to lead advances in artificial intelligence has begun. In the wake of ChatGPT's success, Google CEO Sundar Pichai unveiled Bard, its new "experimental AI-based conversation tool." Shortly thereafter, Microsoft announced a surprise press conference to be given by Satya Nadella, CEO of the technology company, in which he "will share some progress on interesting projects." According to experts, it will announce an exclusive partnership with OpenAI and the use of ChatGPT for Bing searches.
2/ Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world's knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses. Today we're opening Bard up to trusted external testers. pic.twitter.com/QPy5BcERd6
— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) February 6, 2023
Integrating AI into applications and search engines
In a post on the company's blog, Pichai said that after monitoring the advances in AI "we re-oriented the company around AI about six years ago," and we see it as the most important way we can deliver on our mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
It’s a really exciting time to be working on these technologies as we translate deep research and breakthroughs into products that truly help people. That’s the journey we’ve been on with large language models. Two years ago we unveiled next-generation language and conversation capabilities powered by our Language Model for Dialogue Applications (or LaMDA for short).
The result is Bard, "an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA, which we call Bard," the post said. Last Monday Google gave access to "trusted testers ahead of making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks."
Fulgurant counterattack by Microsoft
A few minutes later, Microsoft surprisingly called a press conference for the following day. The company's CEO, Satya Nadella, will be in charge of presenting to the media, so the expectation generated is now at an all time high. Experts expect them to announce the integration of ChatGPT into Bing and give more details on the extension of its partnership with OpenAI.
A few days ago, Microsoft signed a $10 billion deal making it OpenAI's exclusive cloud partner. Microsoft cloud services will power all OpenAI workloads in products, API services and research.
