Bard is Out and Being Tested in Changed World of High Expectations

 Google has announced their model, has been getting some criticism.  But as they say it is still just a  test.  There are lots of models jumping out there.    Google seems to have moved early without enough testing.    Expectations are high.  Also,  it competes directly with very profitable Google Search. Use directly with caution.

Try Bard and share your feedback

Mar 21, 2023  in the Google Blog.

We’re starting to open access to Bard, an early experiment that lets you collaborate with generative AI. We're beginning with the U.S. and the U.K., and will expand to more countries and languages over time.

SissieHsiao.png, Sissie Hsiao, VP, Product

Eli Collins, VP, Research

Animation of text: “Meet Bard, an early experiment by Google.” Followed by sentences explaining what Bard can do, like draft a packing list for a fishing and camping trip.

Today we’re starting to open access to Bard, an early experiment that lets you collaborate with generative AI. This follows our announcements from last week as we continue to bring helpful AI experiences to people, businesses and communities.

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. We’ve learned a lot so far by testing Bard, and the next critical step in improving it is to get feedback from more people.

Bard can help you brainstorm some ways to read more books this year.

About Bard

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.

While LLMs are an exciting technology, they’re 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. For example, when asked to share a couple suggestions for easy indoor plants, Bard convincingly presented ideas…but it got some things wrong, like the scientific name for the ZZ plant.  .... ' 

Google's Bard Is Here (Waitlist)

Yet another chatty AI,   examining.  From the Lamda Language model.

-  You can sign up to try Bard at bard.google.com. We'll begin rolling out access in the U.S. and U.K. today and expanding over time to more countries and languages. Until next time, Bard out! -

I am now on the waitlist, more will follow here.

Bard: Google's rival to ChatGPT launches for over-18s

The Bard chatbot answering questions

By Zoe Kleinman, Technology editor

Google will begin rolling out its AI chatbot Bard today, but it will only be available to certain users and they will have to be over the age of 18.

Unlike its viral rival ChatGPT, it can access up-to-date information from the internet and has a "Google it" button which accesses search.

It also namechecks its sources for facts, such as Wikipedia.

But Google warned Bard would have "limitations" and said it might share misinformation and display bias.

This is because it "learns" from real-world information, in which those biases currently exist - meaning it is possible for stereotypes and false information to show up in its responses.

How do chatbots work?

AI chatbots are programmed to answer questions online using natural, human-like language.

They can write anything from speeches and marketing copy to computer code and student essays.

When ChatGPT launched in November 2022, it had more than one million users within a week, said OpenAI, the firm behind it.

Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in it, incorporating the product into its search engine Bing last month.

It has also unveiled plans to bring a version of the tech to its office apps including Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

Google has been a slower and more cautious runner in the generative AI race with its version, Bard, which launches in the US and UK to begin with. Users will have to register to try it out.

Bard is a descendant of an earlier language model of Google's called Lamda, which was never fully released to the public. It did, however, attract a lot of attention when one of the engineers who worked on it claimed its answers were so compelling that he believed it was sentient. Google denied the claims and he was fired.

What AI Still Can't Do

Thoughtful Piece

What AI Still Doesn't Know How to Do, By The Wall Street Journal, July 18, 2022

A few weeks ago a Google engineer got a lot of attention for a dramatic claim: He said that the company's LaMDA system, an example of what's known in artificial intelligence as a large language model, had become a sentient, intelligent being.

Large language models like LaMDA or San Francisco-based Open AI's rival GPT-3 are remarkably good at generating coherent, convincing writing and conversations—convincing enough to fool the engineer. But they use a relatively simple technique to do it: The models see the first part of a text that someone has written and then try to predict which words are likely to come next. If a powerful computer does this billions of times with billions of texts generated by millions of people, the system can eventually produce a grammatical and plausible continuation to a new prompt or a question.

It's natural to ask whether large language models like LaMDA (short for Language Model Dialogue Application) or GPT-3 are really smart—or just double-talk artists in the tradition of the great old comedian Prof. Irwin Corey, "The World's Greatest Authority." (Look up Corey's routines of mock erudition to get the idea.) But I think that's the wrong question. These models are neither truly intelligent agents nor deceptively dumb. Intelligence and agency are the wrong categories for understanding them.

Instead, these AI systems are what we might call cultural technologies, like writing, print, libraries, internet search engines or even language itself. They are new techniques for passing on information from one group of people to another. Asking whether GPT-3 or LaMDA is intelligent or knows about the world is like asking whether the University of California's library is intelligent or whether a Google search "knows" the answer to your questions. But cultural technologies can be extremely powerful—for good or ill.

From The Wall Street Journal

View Full Article     

Google Coversational AI System and AI Test Kitchen

Test Kitchen is interesting. 

Google Debuts LaMDA 2 Conversational AI System and AI Test Kitchen   By Jaime Hampton in Datanami

At its annual developer conference last week, Google announced the second release of its conversational AI system, LaMDA, which stands for Language Models for Dialogue Applications. Google says LaMDa 2 is a more finely tuned version of their original release that uses open domain dialogue technology for conversation.

LaMDA is built on Google’s own Transformer neural network, an open source architecture that the company debuted in 2017. LaMDA was trained with dialogue (a dataset of 1.56 trillion words from public web data and documents, to be exact) to allow it to have what the company calls “natural, sensible and specific conversations.” It was then fine-tuned to generate natural language responses to given contexts and then classify its own responses according to whether they are safe and high quality. (More specific training information can be found in this developer blog post.)

Google CEO Sundar Pichai demonstrates LaMDA. With its “Imagine It” capability, users can input ideas and the AI will generate descriptive responses and even follow-up questions, as seen here.

During his keynote, Google CEO Sundar Pichai queued up pre-made demonstrations of LaMDA 2 that he said were not specific products but “quick sketches” to illustrate LaMDA’s capabilities. There is a creative function called “Imagine It,” where users can input their own ideas and the AI will generate imaginative and relevant descriptions of the idea. He shows LaMDA answering the prompt “Imagine I’m at the deepest part of the ocean” with “You’re in the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean! The waves are crashing against the walls of your submarine. You are surrounded by total darkness.” This description is followed by a list of follow-up questions generated by LaMDA, such as “What kind of creatures live here?” Ideas can be related to a straightforward topic (like the given example of the Mariana Trench), or a more abstract idea (such as how being on a planet made of ice cream might feel). Another function shown is called “Talk About It,” and this allows users to ask LaMDA 2 questions about a specific subject matter, after which it will stay on-topic, no matter which follow-up questions are asked.

Perhaps the most interesting capability, “List It,” was demonstrated live, this time by Senior Director of Product Management Josh Woodward, who said: “List It explores whether LaMDA can take a complex goal or topic and break it down into relevant subtasks. It can help me figure out what I’m trying to do and generate useful ideas I might not have thought of.”

Woodward tells LaMDA he wants to plant a vegetable garden, and it instantly provides him with a detailed list of subtasks, including “Make a list of what to grow” and “Research what grows best in your area.” Each suggested subtask can be broken down into a list of more suggestions specific to the task. LaMDA can also generate tips, such as trying container growing if yard space is a concern. .... ' 

LaMDA: Next Generation Chatbots

Short intro to Google's LaMDA.   Looking for smarter conversations.  Hope to use this in  upcoming applications.

Google’s LaMDA: The Next Generation of Chatbots

First, we had GPT-3. Now we have LaMDA.,    By Alberto Romero

In mid-2020 OpenAI presented the all-powerful language system GPT-3. It revolutionized the world and landed headlines in very important media outlet magazines. This incredible technology can create fiction, poetry, music, code, and many other amazing things (I wrote a complete overview of GPT-3 for Towards Data Science if you want to check it out).

It was expected that other big tech companies wouldn’t fall behind. Indeed, some days ago at Google I/O annual conference, Google executives presented the last research and technologies of the big firm. One of them stole the show: LaMDA, a conversational AI capable of having human-like conversations.

In this article, I’m going to review the little we know today about this tech and how it works.

LaMDA — A conversational AI

LaMDA stands for “Language Model for Dialogue Applications.” Following from previous models such as BERT and GPT-3, LaMDA is also based on the transformer architecture, open-sourced by Google in 2017. This architecture allows the model to predict text focusing only on how previous words relate to each other (attention mechanism).  ... '