Google expanded its upgrade of Bard as Gemini Pro now powers the free chatbot in over 40 languages across greater than 230 countries. Users can now generate images with Bard in English in most countries all over the world.
The gap between the highest AI chatbots is closing fast, especially relating to free options. Now that Gemini Pro powers Bard, users of OpenAI’s free ChatGPT platform could also be tempted to migrate.
Gemini Pro gives Bard more advanced understanding, reasoning, summarizing, and coding abilities. Benchmark tests show Gemini Pro doesn’t beat GPT-3.5 Turbo, but it surely comes close.
For most users, Bard’s real-time web access is what makes it more appealing than ChatGPT, which has a knowledge cutoff of September 2019.
Bard’s Double Check feature can also be a terrific strategy to combat hallucinations. When you click on the “G” icon, Bard checks online whether there’s content across the net to substantiate the veracity of the response it generates.
A leaked change log seems to point that Bard will get a reputation change in the subsequent few days as Google leans into the Gemini brand. The leaked change log also makes reference to Gemini Ultra so we may finally see that get released this week.
Leaked Google Gemini change log. Source: X
Bard image generation
Bard now has text-to-image generation functionality for English users in most countries. This free capability is powered by Google’s Imagen 2 model. Google says the model “is designed to balance quality and speed, delivering high-quality, photorealistic outputs.”
The images aren’t nearly as good as Midjourney v6 or DALL-E, but they’re still impressive considering the functionality is free. Considering that the free version of ChatGPT is text-only, it is a big plus for Bard.
Image generated by Bard using the prompt: “generate a picture of a fashion show in steampunk style digital art, zoom in on their face.” Source: Google
Image generated by Bard using prompt: “generate a collage art, with photorealistic images of oceans and plants with muted colours and 3D shading, that’s mied media” Source: Google
Google says it’s made a efforts “to limit violent, offensive or sexually explicit content” and it also won’t generate images of named people.
Bard’s alignment guardrails do seem somewhat overcautious as Bard sometimes refuses to generate a picture that shouldn’t be problematic.
In line with Google’s AI Principles, the pictures generated by Bard could have a digital watermark added to the image using SynthID.
It will likely be interesting to see how OpenAI responds to those recent features and the performance boost that Google has given Bard. ChatGPT is a funnel for channeling users to its paid ChatGPT Plus platform.
The multimodal functionality and integration with other Google products like Gmail and Calendar makes Bard loads more appealing than simply a chatbot. I think more ChatGPT users will start using Bard.
