Google Announces Bard, a New AI Service Attempting To Rival ChatGPT

Just a couple of months after BAM gave a live demonstration of ChatGPT on The Walk Thru, Google announced the upcoming launch of its own conversational AI service: Bard. 

Powered by LaMDA (Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications), Bard leverages Google’s vast knowledge base and intelligence to deliver accurate and high-quality answers to users of their industry-leading search engine. 

Bard’s primary purpose is to make Google search results more intuitive and provide more complex answers to human questions without sacrificing clarity or comprehension. 

What it might have more trouble with, according to a recent update on CNN, is accuracy. 

AI tools for real estate agents

If you’ve been keeping up with BAM, you know we’ve asked the question, “Will ChatGPT change the real estate industry forever?”

It’s no secret this conversational AI breakthrough is one of the top AI tools we recommend for real estate agents in our newest ebook. (Get your free copy to learn more!) 

Google has been hard at work learning its potential and the limitations of ChatGPT. 

Now, as the company prepares to launch its own rival to the OpenAI chatbot, we’re keen to explore just how it stacks up. Expect us to keep you up to date on the latest developments—and to provide a live demo of this new tool when it lands. 

After all, research is part of daily life for a well-informed real estate professional. So, if Bard has the potential to make that part easier and more rewarding than ever, you can bet we’re looking forward to putting it to the test. 

In the meantime, if you haven’t yet tried using ChatGPT in your real estate business, check out these eight ideas for using this AI tool to jumpstart your creativity and make better use of your time. 

Google Shares Lose $100 Billion after Bard’s Accuracy Fail 

In a recent demo posted by Google on Twitter, a user asked Bard, “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9 year old about?”

Bard responded with a series of bullet points, one of which read, “JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system.”

Fact check: According to NASA, the first images taken of an exoplanet (i.e., a planet outside our solar system) was taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope almost two decades ago—in 2004. The first published images from the James Web Space Telescope were released on July 12, 2022. 

Bard’s blunder cost Google’s parent company Alphabet $100 billion in market value as shares dropped 7.7% on Wednesday after Reuters published the inaccurate response. 

And while ChatGPT has limitations of its own, this very public accuracy failure—which happened right after Bard’s unveiling and so close to its launch—risks undermining its legitimacy as an AI contender. The reputation of Google’s trusted search engine may also take a hit, as it was the source of Bard’s inaccurate reply. 

Time will tell whether the Trusted Tester program Bard will undergo before its official launch reveals more reasons to tap the brakes before adding it to Google Search.  

When will Bard come to Google Search?

For now, Google has opened Bard to trusted external testers and will use these testers’  feedback, combined with what they learn from their own internal testing, to make sure Bard’s answers meet their high standards before making it more widely available to users.  

So, it may be a few weeks yet—or longer if Google needs more time to improve Bard’s accuracy—before we can try it out and see whether this new addition to the world of AI tools will live up to the excitement (or trepidation) surrounding its launch.

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