BREAKING: Google announces creation of ChatGPT competitor Bard

The tech giant has promised that Bard will draw upon all the information available to it to "provide fresh, high-quality responses" to any question users can think of.

"We've been working on an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), that we're calling Bard," Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a Monday blog post. "Today, we're taking another step forward by opening it up to trusted testers ahead of making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks."

"Bard," Pichai continued, "seeks to combine the breadth of the world's knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses."

Pichai went on to explain that the initial release of Bard would utilize Google's lightweight model version of MaMDA, which "requires significantly less computing power," and will thus be easier to scale to a larger user base.

The trial stage will allow Google to collect valuable data both internally and from users "to make sure Bard's responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information."

When ChatGPT first gained prominence, there was speculation that it could someday replace Google search as the main faucet of information on the internet. A number of bugs have since been discovered, including a potential political bias.

Its ability to write poems, papers, and even news articles has also come under fire, with schools such as New York University even going so far as to ban students from using it over fears of plagiarism.

Nonetheless, ChatGPT has continued to gain popularity, and its parent company, OpenAI, has even begun offering a $20 per month service which provides users with faster response rates during peak hours.

This is a breaking story and will be updated.