Google just revealed its long-awaited ChatGPT rival: Bard

Less than a month after the artificial-intelligence chatbot ChatGPT was introduced to the world, Google's management issued a "code red" over the technology.

Amid the threat that the buzzy new tool posed to Google's search business, CEO Sundar Pichai redirected several teams at the company toward developing and launching the company's own AI products. The company also said it plansned to unveil 20 new AI products this year and also demo a version of Google Search that included AI chatbot features.

On Monday in a blog post on Google's website, Pichai unveiled Google's Bard AI service, which he described as "an experimental conversational AI service." In other words, it's Google's new competitor to ChatGPT. Pichai said Bard would be opened up to "trusted testers" starting Monday and would be made widely available to the public in the coming weeks.

Chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard are trained on enormous amounts of textual data.

ChatGPT, for example, is driven by significant amounts of data and computing techniques to help it make predictions to put words together in a meaningful way.

Bard is powered by LaMDA, a language model trained on dialogue that Google announced in May 2021.

In a video embedded into the post demonstrating how Bard works, a user wrote the question "what new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9 year old about." In turn, Bard responded with colorful facts including, "In 2023, the JWST spotted a number of galaxies nicknamed 'green peas.'"

Pichai said Bard would draw on information from the web to provide what he called "fresh, high-quality responses."

Pichai added, however, that Google was releasing Bard with a "lightweight model version of LaMDA." It's a smaller model that he said required "significantly less computing power."

The Verge noted that Google might be cautious with Bard's debut out of awareness of the issues that come with "untested AI." Research has shown that unregulated large language models have been known to churn out hate speech.

Google didn't immediately respond to a request for a comment.