Google said it will update Bard its AI chatbot to assist people in writing code to develop software, as the tech giant plays catch-up in a fast-moving race on AI technology.
Lagging behind competition
In a blog post the company announced new capabilities for its generative AI tool including code generation, debugging, and explanations of code for beginners.
Amidst fierce competition from OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing Chat, it launched the public release to get an edge on both.
The new features align with similar programming capabilities offered by its rivals.
The release of ChatGPT, a chatbot from the Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI began the race in the tech sector to put AI into more users’ hands.
An “experiment”, may provide unreliable results
Google describes Bard as an experiment allowing collaboration with generative AI, technology that relies on past data to create rather than identify content.
The experimental nature means that it may confidently give false or misleading information.
“Always double-check Bard’s responses and carefully test and review code for errors, bugs and vulnerabilities before relying on it,” said Paige Bailey, group product manager for Google Research.
Helpful for new programmers
The bot will be able to code in 20 programming languages including Java, C++ and Python, and can also help debug and explain code to users.
For new programmers, you can share code snippets and Bard will give you a breakdown of the coding language and what that block of code does.
Optimizing capability
The company said Bard can also optimize code to make it faster or more efficient with simple prompts such as “Could you make that code faster?”
By sharing the error message, Bard will help troubleshoot the problem.
Currently, Bard can be accessed by a small set of users who can chat with the bot and ask questions instead of running Google’s traditional search tool.
Internal criticism and concern
However, Google’s own employees have criticized the launch to be too premature, calling Bard a “pathological liar” and “worse than useless.”
During one company-wide session, an employee mentioned how frequently Bard would give users potentially dangerous advice, whether it was about how to land an airliner or how to go scuba diving.
In late 2022 and early 2021, the company fired two researchers, Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, when they published a research paper revealing flaws in comparable AI language systems that enable chatbots like Bard.
The researchers identified the problems while working for the corporation, and the report was published as a result.
“Hallucination”
Back in February a major issue with AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard was found, that it presents false information with confidence, pretending that it’s reality.
Because they basically are autocomplete systems, the systems frequently “hallucinate” — that is, makeup information.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently revealed that the internet giant will integrate conversational AI tech into its search engine.
These capabilities would enable people to converse with computers in a natural, human-like manner.
He stated that the company is making tremendous progress in AI research and development.
