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Introducing Bard, Google’s Response To ChatGPT

The search giant’s new chatbot is still being tested, but is set to launch in the coming weeks with an API available for developers to build into their own creations.

Published

3 years ago

February 8, 2023

Nour Nasir

introducing bard google's response to chatgpt

As the hype builds around startup OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, Google is keen to stay ahead of the Microsoft-funded competition. To that end, the search giant will roll out its own version of the technology named Bard over the coming weeks.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, has announced that Bard is already available to “trusted testers” and is designed to harness the “breadth of the world’s knowledge” behind a conversational-looking interface. Pichai did not announce concrete plans to integrate Bard into the company’s main search box, instead pointing to a novel and more cautious use of the technology to enhance conventional searches.

The news of Google’s foray into chatbot-style AI comes after Microsoft’s recent investment of $10 billion into ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI. ChatGPT has grown into an internet sensation over the last few months, however, some experts advise caution after noticing that the bot is prone to making up answers or copying its responses from other online sources.

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Interestingly, the ChatGPT engine is built on top of an AI model known as Transformer, which Google itself first invented. After Google researchers listed severe limitations in the concept in a 2020 paper, two prominent ethical AI researchers, Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, were fired from the search giant, while others are said to remain frustrated at Google’s hesitancy to harness the technology thoroughly.

So what differences can we expect from Google’s new Bard software when it releases? In Sundar Pichai’s blog post on Monday, the CEO offered the example of asking Bard “to explain discoveries made by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in a way that a 9-year-old might find interesting”. Bard responds in a conversational bullet-point style, with the first one reading, “In 2023, The JWST spotted several galaxies nicknamed green peas. They were given this name because they are small, round, and green, like peas”.

News

At I/O 2026, Sundar Pichai Concedes AI Must Deliver Real Value

Gemini 3.5, a personal agent called Spark, agentic shopping, and Android XR eyewear are all aimed at making AI feel useful, not just impressive.

Published

7 days ago

May 20, 2026

Nour Nasir

at io 2026 sundar pichai concedes ai must deliver real value

Google

Google’s annual I/O developer conference (I/O 2026) has recently become a status update on the same question: can the company turn its AI spending into products people use every day? This year, chief executive Sundar Pichai described Google as being in a phase of hyper progress, while conceding this is the part of the cycle where people want to see real value in the products they use on a day-to-day basis.

The strategy on display was to push agents — AI systems that act on a user’s behalf — into nearly every Google product at once. Search now has an “intelligent search box” that returns generated explainer videos alongside links. Gmail, Docs, YouTube and Maps are gaining their own agent layers, including a Docs Live feature that turns spoken instructions into drafted text with citations.

Two new models, Gemini 3.5 and a cheaper Gemini 3.5 Flash, arrived the same day. Google says 900 million people now use Gemini, and that more than 50 billion images have been generated with it. The pricing tier names are likely to confuse buyers: a new AI Ultra plan launches at $100 a month, while the older Gemini AI Ultra drops from $250 to $200.

The flashier announcements were Gemini Omni, a video generator pitched as a more realistic answer to OpenAI’s discontinued Sora 2, and Gemini Spark, a personal agent that handles recurring tasks across a user’s Google account. A new universal shopping cart lets agents complete purchases across multiple retailers from inside Google itself, placing the company between the merchant and the buyer, and also owning the checkout.

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Google also confirmed its Android XR eyewear, built with Samsung and frames from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. Audio-only glasses ship this autumn; a display-equipped version, which would superimpose live translations into the wearer’s field of view, is still in development. Both sets translate, however only the display version shows you the result.

What Pichai did not resolve is the bargain underneath all this. An agent is only useful to the degree it knows your calendar, your inbox, your shopping history and your physical surroundings. Google has now confirmed that, in time, the same context may carry advertising.