The lukewarm response to the offering did not surprise Pichai. Credit: gguy via Shutterstock.

Google is planning to soon launch upgrade to its experimental AI chabot Bard, the tech giant’s CEO Sundar Pichai said in an interview with The New York Times.

The comment comes after the AI chatbot, launched last month, fell short of winning the same praise or notice as Microsoft’s Bing chatbot or OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

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But the lukewarm response to the offering did not surprise Pichai, who in the interview said: “In some ways, I feel like we took a souped-up Civic, [and] kind of put it in a race with more powerful cars”.

“But we are going to be training fast. We clearly have more capable models. Pretty soon, maybe as this goes live, we will be upgrading Bard to some of our more capable PaLM models, so which will bring more capabilities, be it in reasoning, coding,” said Pichai.

The upgrades in Bard are expected to start appearing soon.

Google’s CEO also said the company wants to make sure that it can handle the more powerful model before it goes live.

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Currently, Bard runs on a ‘lightweight and efficient version of LaMDA’ an AI focused on conversational dialogue.

According to Pichai, the rationale behind limiting Bard’s capabilities was a sense of caution within the company.

Pichai said, “to me, it was important to not put [out] a more capable model before we can fully make sure we can handle it well. We are all in very, very early stages. We will have even more capable models to plug in over time. But I don’t want it to be just who’s there first, but getting it right is very important to us.”

These statements come amid a temporary ban on ChatGPT in Italy over breach of privacy laws.

In a statement, the Italian regulator said, OpenAI has “no legal basis” to collect and process “personal data in order to ‘train’ the algorithms.”