Bard to switch up to powerful language model, confirms Google’s Sundar Pichai

In The New York Times podcast Hard Fork, Google CEO Sundar Pichai mentioned that Bard will switch over to a larger PaLM model from the present LaMDA model in order to amp up its productivity. 

“We clearly have more capable models,” said Pichai. “Pretty soon, maybe as this goes live, we will be upgrading Bard to some of our more capable PaLM models, so which will bring more capabilities, be it in reasoning, coding.”

According to Engadget, LaMDA, has been trained on 137 billion parameters. In comparison, PaLM is said to have been trained on 540 billion parameters, making it more efficient when it comes to analysing prompts.

From what is evident, both Microsoft and OpenAI has been basking in the extreme success of their AI ChatGPT. 

Google has been quick enough to follow suit and and create its own AI to take over tasks, making it easier to flow through the day. Fro introducing Bard, to implementing AI in Gmail and Google Docs, Google is keeping up with the competition among tech giants. 

Reaction to Google’s chatbot has been mixed so far, with people saying the answers weren’t as detailed or context-sensitive like those of its rivals.

In the podcast, Pichai admitted that launching Bard with LaMDA limited its scope but added that the lower computing power required to keep it online meant more people got to try it out and give feedback.

He said that the company won’t release a “more capable model before we can fully make sure we can handle it well. We are all in very, very early stages. We will have even more capable models to plug in over time. But I don’t want it to be just who’s there first, but getting it right is very important to us”.