Google today announced a limited public beta of a new conversational AI service that it calls … Bard.

“We’ve been working on an experimental conversational AI service, powered by Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), that we’re calling Bard,” Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai writes in the announcement post. “And 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.”

Like ChatGPT, Bard draws on information from the web, and like ChatGPT, it requires enormous compute power, so the initial version is a lightweight, smaller solution that can scale to more users more easily.

Brad is the successor to previous AI solutions from Google, Pichai claims. He cites BERT, one of Google’s first Transformer models, which could understand the intricacies of human language; MUM, which is 1,000 times more powerful than BERT and has a next-level and multi-lingual understanding of information that can pick out key moments in videos and provide critical information, including crisis support, in more languages; and more recent advances like LaMDA, PaLM, Imagen, and MusicLM.

“We’re working to bring the latest AI advancements into our products, starting with Search,” he continues. “When people think of Google, they often think of turning to us for quick factual answers. But increasingly, people are turning to Google for deeper insights and understanding. Learning about a topic like this can take a lot of effort to figure out what you really need to know, and people often want to explore a diverse range of opinions or perspectives.”

Pichai also announced that Google would provide its AI prowess to third-party developers, starting with its Generative Language API, initially powered by LaMDA but with more models on the way. Over time, Google will create a “suite of tools and APIs” so that others can build AI-based applications of their own. Google will partner with Cohere, C3.ai, and Anthropic to scale those efforts through Google Cloud.