Google's BARD and Other Feb 6 Happenings
Google today announced Bard, a potential ChatGPT's potential competitor with a potentially large impact on website publisher.
Created on February 7|Last edited on February 8
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Bard 🤔
While Microsoft seeks to integrate OpenAI into all of its products, Google plans to soon release a few AI features of their own, one of which is called BARD which is a chatbot similar to ChatGPT. Google also plans to improve its search engine with a few new powerful query synthesizing features powered by Google's LaMDA.
What differentiates LaMDA? ❓
Released in 2021, Google's LaMDA model is a chatbot! Well, we've witnessed dozens of chatbots and powerful LLMs over the years what makes this one stand out? Does it rival ChatGPT? Sparrow? Claude?
LaMDA is built on the Transformer architecture, much like all the other modern-day chatbots, and was released back in 2017. This blog post by Google states that, unlike other large language models, they trained on dialogue, giving this AI a sense of context for what might make a conversation relevant. Additionally, it seems that LamDA was created with the intent to hold a conversation while being safe and factually grounded, meaning the AI was trained to minimize a spew hurtful nonsense and false information.
Lots and lots of Startups and Funding 💸
This blog post wouldn't be complete without listing out a few recent startups that received a healthy amount of funding:
- Recycleye, an AI startup leveraging computer vision to improve the cost of sorting objects in recycling plants, raises $17 million in their Series A funding.
- UK's Latent Technology raises $2.1 million in aims to develop generative AI technology to mitigate the arduous task of animating video game characters and objects
- Magic.dev, a startup backed by Google's growth fund CapitalG, receives $28 million to fund their mission of creating an AI software engineer/colleague
- This reminds me of GitHub Copilot! I wonder what differentiates their method from ChatGPT or from just simply finetuning a ChatGPT model to behave like a copilot. Maybe an upgraded version of GitHub copilot?
- Cohere.ai , another contender in the chatbot sector, is a startup run by Google researchers who aim to make NLP accessible to anyone and is said to be discussing a potentially enormous funding round of hundreds of millions of dollars
- From an initial glance to me, Cohere seems reminiscent of HuggingFace: they provide NLP models for you to use in just 2-3 lines of code
- Cohere provides 3 products: Classify (text classification for content moderation), Generate (a versatile chatbot), and Embed (as the name suggests, generate embeddings and find insight)
References
Dastin, Jeffrey. “Google Unveils CHATGPT Rival Bard, Ai Search Plans in Battle with Microsoft.” Reuters, Thomson Reuters, 6 Feb. 2023
Megan, Smalley. “Recycleye Raises $17M in Series A Funding.” Recycling Today, https://www.recyclingtoday.com/news/recycleye-raises-17-million-series-a-funding/
Hu, Krystal. “Ai Startup Cohere in Talks to Raise Funding at $6 BLN plus Valuation -Sources.” Reuters, Thomson Reuters, 6 Feb. 2023
Collins, Eli, and Zoubin Ghahramani. “LAMDA: Our Breakthrough Conversation Technology.” Google, Google, 18 May 2021
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Tags: ML News
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