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Google has fallen behind ChatGPT in the AI chatbot race with Bard but Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google admitted that the AI chatbot is running on a lighter version of LaMDA and soon it will be upgraded to more capable PaLM models.

Pichai was quoted saying this in a podcast by New York Times, where he also assured that the new version of Bard will get more capabilities, and help with answers for Math’s problems better. Pichai mentioned the changes will become visible in the coming week.

He gave a cheeky example where he compared Bard as a souped-up Civic that was going up against a more powerful car. Google claims PaLM is based on a recent language model and will deal with tasks like coding problems and reasoning a lot better. So why did Google roll out Bard with a less-powerful model? Pichai claims Google wanted to make sure that it did not release a powerful model from day one, and wanted to see if they can handle these applications well.

He also admitted that Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have been actively involved in this project, and also working with the engineers at Google. But he was quick to mention that the supposed code red was more of an internal appeal and he didn’t issue it as a company-wide call. Various experts have come forward to seek a slowdown in the advancement of AI and Pichai chimes with their concerns. He feels the development is moving too fast and it could pose a threat to society.

Google has been overshadowed by OpenAI and Microsoft in the AI arena in the past few weeks. ChatGPT has moved to v4.0 and now with the introduction of plugin support, the AI chatbot can actually access the internet to give more granular data.

Microsoft has used its partnership with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT to Bing, Edge browser and Office suite among others. Google has not disclosed the version numbers of Bard but the update shared by Pichai clearly suggests Google is nowhere close to its potential in AI and soon we might see things pick up.

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