Google’s Bard Is Finally Here But Can It Beat Its Competitors?

By now you’ve probably heard about Generative AI (Artificial Intelligence) tools such as Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E, or Google’s Bard and a host of others. While most of the AI tools mentioned are available to the public for use, Google’s Bard was only recently announced, with a promotional video shared but not released to the public.

Check out our earlier coverage on Generative AI tools and its impact on humans.

On March 21st, Google opened Bard to users by inviting them to join a waitlist. Reportedly, its rollout will begin with access to US and UK users first and eventually to other countries.

Given recent incidents of disturbing (and downright weird!) behavior from Microsoft’s Bing chatbot (powered by OpenAI’s GPT model), Google inserted a warning within Bard separating the company’s views from any questionable information displayed.

An excerpt read as, “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.”


However, despite having more time to develop and launch its chatbot, Google’s Bard doesn’t offer a clear edge over its competitors.

From Google’s top brass unsure of launching too soon to releasing a promotional video with incorrect answers that led to a $100 billion market devaluation, Google’ Bard has had a rocky start.

Reportedly, in a rudimentary test conducted between Google’s Bard and its competitors, OpenAI’s GPT-4 came out on top. Despite providing factually incorrect answers, unable to write code, offering incomplete/vague answers and making up citations (observed with ChatGPT too), Bard and Claude are believed to be fierce competitors.

One would expect Google to iron out detected problems quickly. A statement on the same read as, “We’ll continue to improve Bard and add capabilities, including coding, more languages and multimodal experiences. With your feedback, Bard will keep getting better and better.”


Although, quite ironically, Bard released nearly exactly two years after the white paper titled “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” was co-authored by former Google researcher, Timnit Gebru (former co-lead of Google’s ethical AI team) before her dismissal.

What do you think of companies releasing AI chatbots that offer incorrect and vague answers? Do you think Google’s Bard will be able to iron out the issues? Let us know in the comments below!