Google Releases Bard, Apple and Chatbots, DPReview to Shut Down (Daily Update)

Hello everyone.

We will kick off today's update with some chatbot discussion. Neil’s stance continues to be to approach chatbots with caution. We will talk more about that today. The discussion concludes with some additional comments about Amazon shutting down DPReview. There is more to that story than what we briefly alluded to yesterday.

Let's jump right in.


Google Releases Bard

Here's TechCrunch:

“Google just announced that the company is releasing its ChatGPT competitor Bard. But chances are you won’t be able to access the product right away as the company is starting with a limited public rollout.

Users in the U.K. and the U.S. can head over to bard. google .com and join a waitlist. The company calls Bard an ‘early experiment that lets you collaborate with generative AI.’

Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, Bard is a chatbot based on a large language model. You can interact with Bard to ask questions and refine the answer with follow-up queries.

‘You can use Bard to boost your productivity, accelerate your ideas and fuel your curiosity. You might ask Bard to give you tips to reach your goal of reading more books this year, explain quantum physics in simple terms or spark your creativity by outlining a blog post,’ Google VP of Product Sissie Hsiao and Google VP of Research Eli Collins wrote in a blog post.

When Google first unveiled Bard last month, there wasn’t much to see other than a lengthy blog post written by Google CEO Sundar Pichai. The model used in Bard is based on Google’s own LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) — the company is using a lightweight and optimized version of LaMDA.”

Google went with a “lightweight and optimized version of LaMDA” in order to get it out in the wild without facing a financial strain in terms of computing power needs. One benefit in doing so is being able to build buzz on social media.

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