Bard (Google's AI) Begins To Slowly Rollout - Citations, Limitations & Early Access

Yesterday, Google began to slowly roll out?Google Bard?to some initial reporters and also Google opened up a waitlist to users in the US and UK. I personally gained access to #Bard after writing most of this article but I did gain access to Bard yesterday at 1pm ET. But you can sign up for the waitlist at?bard.google.com?(it does not yet work with Google WorkSpace accounts).

Below you will find out more information on how Bard looks, how it works, how the citations/sources work, limitations, early impressions and more. There is a lot here - and it is super early.

My early impressions is that Google is clearly positioning Bard to be very different from Google Search. In addition, Google is also making sure Bard feels and works differently than Bing Chat. #BingChat, to me, feels way more thought out in terms of the user experience and all the tiny details in how it works with Bing Search. Google is making it super clear right now that Bard is not Search and only putting a "Google It" button in the Bard results so that you are taken out of Bard and into Search.

Bard does not do a lot of what Bing Chat and ChatGPT does but Bard is way faster. Bard has no ads, Bing Chat does have ads. Bard rarely show citations/links, Bing Chat shows citations and links in a much more prominent way. Bard and Bing Chat are just very different, while being similar in purpose.

Bard is Google's experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA, where Google can answer questions that might not have one right answer. Google?said, "Bard is powered by a research large language model (LLM), specifically a lightweight and optimized version of #LaMDA, and will be updated with newer, more capable models over time. It’s grounded in Google's understanding of quality information. You can think of an LLM as a prediction engine. When given a prompt, it generates a response by selecting, one word at a time, from words that are likely to come next. Picking the most probable choice every time wouldn’t lead to very creative responses, so there’s some flexibility factored in. We continue to see that the more people use them, the better LLMs get at predicting what responses might be helpful." In short, it will get better over time, so don't be too harsh on #Google...

As a reminder, Google said?Bard is not Search?we have quotes from Google's Bard lead who said, "It's an experiment that's a collaborative #AI service that we talked about," Krawczyk said. "The magic that we're finding in using the product is really around being this creative companion to helping you be the sparkplug for imagination, explore your curiosity, etc." But he added, "we can't stop users from trying to use it like search."

What Bard Looks Like

Here are some screenshots and videos of Bard from Google: