Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to trend. It is arguably one of the, if not the most, topical trend right now. You must catch up if you are unfamiliar with the current AI revolution. You will benefit so much from knowing what is happening in AI. There is a lot to talk about, especially regarding technology rivalries worldwide. Microsoft has positioned itself at the apex regarding the latest trend of large language models (LLMs). Google was mostly reactionary as they hurriedly unveiled Bard in response to ChatGPT.
What Is Bard And Why The Name Bard?
Bard is Google’s experimental conversational AI service (or chatbot) powered by LaMDA. However, for Bard, the version of LaMDA used is a lightweight and optimized one. LaMDA is a large language model (LLM) built on Transformer. Transformer is a neural network architecture Google launched in 2017. It also made it open source the same year. LaMDA was particularly trained on dialogue tasks.
LaMDA stands for Language Model for Dialogue Applications. There have been debates regarding whether or not LaMDA is sentient; that is how good it is. Bard is Google’s AI and is unsurprisingly considered a competitor to ChatGPT. How they fare against each other is a whole subject on its own. Bard denotes a poet, a reference to the linguistic ability of Bard. Bard is a term from the first century that refers to national poets.
Bard Has Some Interesting Attributes
Derives Responses From The Internet In Real-Time
Bard formulates its responses from the internet in real time. Unlike ChatGPT, which uses data sources up to September 2021. ChatGPT-4’s data set ends in September 2021. This makes ChatGPT-4 limited in the realm of being current. That is a huge uniqueness that Bard has. The other cool thing about Bard is that it uses natural language when querying rather than just keywords.
Readily Available In Many Countries
The other uniqueness of Bard is that it is readily available in many countries – over 180 countries. Plus, it is available in three languages, namely, English, Japanese, and Korean. You can check the full list here. One of those countries is Zimbabwe. As we speak, Bard is already available in Zimbabwe.
Returns Different Drafts When Prompted
When you type in a prompt in Bard, you may notice that it can show you different drafts as responses. You can check the drafts to see which response best satisfies your prompt. There is room to ask follow-up questions. Plus, you can always re-prompt Bard if the responses are not satisfactory.
Bard Is Not Yet Perfect (Just Like Other AIs)
This is something I felt I should elaborate on here. I have noticed many people tend to think that AIs such as LLMs or chatbots are perfect. They are not; even the mighty ChatGPT is not an exception. Google had this to say about Bard’s imperfections:
LLMs are an exciting technology, but they are not without their faults. For instance, because they learn from a wide range of information that reflects real-world biases and stereotypes, those sometimes show up in their outputs. And they can provide inaccurate, misleading or false information while presenting it confidently.
Google Bard Now Available In Zimbabwe
Yes, Google Bard is available in Zimbabwe. It is quite simple to get started. You must go to the Bard homepage and sign into your Google Account. This means it is that simple for those who already have Google Accounts. Those who do not must sign up for a Google Account first. Of course, doing that is also quite straightforward.
I encourage you to go check out Google Bard here. I have been playing around with it for some time now. It is not yet as perfect as many tend to expect from AI chatbots. In introducing itself, it even says, ‘…I have limitations and will not always get it right, but your feedback will help me improve’. Regardless, it is much better to have an AI chatbot from a global tech titan such as Google available in Zimbabwe. Maybe we have ChatGPT to thank for that. Bard somehow had to come in with better value propositions. One of them was not to restrict access. Have you accessed Google Bard yet, and if so, what can you say about your user experience? Kindly share your thoughts in the comments below.
