ChatGPT rival made by Google to be made available for public soon: Sundar Pichai

HIGHLIGHTS

• ChatGPT will soon be rivalled by a similar AI engine from Google
• A report by CNBC had previously stated it to be in the works
• Pichai now said users will soon get to “directly engage with them”

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has made numerous headlines and amassed over 100 million users since it was opened for public access, is soon set to get a new rival from the house of Google. Word on the same was announced on Thursday by Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google and its parent holding company, Alphabet. During the call, Pichai detailed the key role that artificial intelligence (AI) and tools powered by AI will play at Google going forward, and the work that the company is doing in this regard.

How Google plans to take on ChatGPT

In an earnings call with analysts, Pichai said, “More than six years ago, I first spoke about Google being an AI-first company. Since then, we have been a leader in developing AI.” He cited projects such as Transformer in 2017, as well as diffusion models a form of neural AI engine as being fundamental to “many of the generative AI applications” that are found across the industry.

“We have been preparing for this moment since early last year, and you’re going to see a lot from us in the coming few months across three big areas of opportunity: first, large models. We published extensively about LaMDA and PaLM, the industry’s largest, most sophisticated model plus extensive work at DeepMind. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll make these language models available, starting with LaMDA so that people can engage directly with them,” Pichai said in the opening remarks during Alphabet’s earnings call in which a weak online advertising market saw Google report weak sales, leading to a 12.2 percent decline in earnings per share.

Explaining how the technology will work, Pichai added, “Very soon, people will be able to interact directly with our newest, most powerful language models as a companion to Search in experimental and innovative ways. We’ll (also) provide new tools and APIs for developers, creators, and partners. This will empower them to innovate and build their own applications and discover new possibilities with AI on top of our language, multimodal, and other AI models.”

Pichai’s explanation comes as CNBC reported regarding Google’s work on a ChatGPT rival, named Apprentice Bard, last week. In the same time frame, OpenAI also rolled out a subscription model for ChatGPT, which now costs $20 per month.