Google says its generative AI for ‘Bard’ chat is out of order, launches waiting list

Google Bard seems to be missing. Google says you can now join a waiting list to try out the company’s generative chatbot at the newly launched bard.google.com. The company uses the “Bard”brand, rather than the “Google Assistant”it used to. Apart from the registration link and the FAQ, there isn’t much available right now.

The blog post called Google Bard an “early experiment”and tagged the project with warning labels. The Bard site has a bright blue “Experiment”label right on the logo, and a blog post warns: “Great language models won’t always be right. Feedback from a wide range of experts and users will help Bard improve.” The disclaimer below the demo input field warns: “Bard may display inaccurate or offensive information that does not represent the views of Google.”

Microsoft has been criticized for being very aggressive on AI adoption, even cutting its AI ethics team. Google is trying to portray itself as being more cautious, stating, “Our work on Bard is based on our AI principles, and we continue to focus on quality and safety. We use people’s feedback and ratings to improve our systems, and we’ve also built in barriers, such as limiting the number of dialogue exchanges, to keep the conversation useful and relevant.”

Google says Bard can “boost your productivity, speed up your ideas, and spark your curiosity. You can ask Bard for advice on how to achieve your goal of reading more books this year, explaining quantum physics in simple terms, or sparking your creativity by charting a blog post.” The FAQ warns that Bard is “not yet able to help you with coding”and that “the application’s ability to hold context is currently intentionally limited”.

The waiting list is open to anyone over the age of 18, and Bard only works in American English for now. Unlike the ChatGPT team with Bing, Bard doesn’t seem to be integrated with Google search. Some of the results have a “Google”button that launches the regular Google search site.