Google Bard did not arrive before OpenAI’s ChatGPT due to THIS reason

OpenAI introduced ChatGPT in November 2022. The launch led to an artificial intelligence (AI) race with major tech giants taking part and announcing their own AI bots/tools. Google debuted its AI chatbot named Bard in February this year, almost three months after the launch of ChatGPT.

Now, an ex-Google engineer is claiming that Google Bard may have arrived at the same time as ChatGPT. In an interview with Futurism, Blake Lemoine, who was also a former member of Google's artificial intelligence team, said Google started working on the product in mid 2021.

“It was not called Bard then, but they were working on it, and they were trying to figure out whether it would be safe to release it. They were on the verge of releasing something in the fall of 2022…so it would have come out right around the same time as ChatGPT, or right before it,” Lemoine said.

He stated that the chatbot's initial launch was delayed in part due to safety concerns raised by him. “Bard could have come 2 years ago, but the company was making sure it doesn’t make up things too often, making sure it does not have racial or gender biases, or political biases…things like that,” he added. 

During the interview, Lemoine also stated that Google has ‘far more advanced technology' that it hasn’t released yet. He also added that ‘there are plenty of other systems that give Google's AI more capabilities, more features, make it smarter’. 

“The most sophisticated system I ever got to play with was heavily multimodal — not just incorporating images, but incorporating sounds, giving it access to the Google Books API, giving it access to essentially every API backend that Google had, and allowing it to just gain an understanding of all of it,” he said.