Oh my Bard

Starting February 13, basic access to Twitter’s API and Ads API will cost developers $100/month. Twitter this morning announced a small concession, namely a new form of limited free access. How exactly this will affect makers using the platform’s API remains unclear. Let us know how you’re impacted here.

On Monday this week, Google announced their long-awaited integration of conversational AI into search: Bard. We mentioned this in Tuesday’s newsletter, but let’s take a closer look at what it is.

How it works: Much like ChatGPT, Bard is designed to provide synthesized answers to complex questions from multiple sources on the web in response to conversational prompts.

“Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture,” said Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, in an announcement on February 6.

Right now, Bard is only available to a small group of “trusted testers”, but Pichai says it will be released to the public “in the coming weeks.”

Bard is powered by Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) — the same LaMDA ex-Google engineer Blake Lemoine last year publicly claimed was sentient, leading the company to refute these claims and fire him.

Sentient ≠ accurate: A big conversation around Bard’s release is how slow Google has been to respond to ChatGPT, with many on Twitter teasing the tech giant for reacting to OpenAI instead of leading the way. AI makers from FAANG companies, including Google and Meta, have gone on the defense, remarking that they’ve been resistant to put out new technology without working out all the kinks (to put it lightly).

And maybe they have a point. Yesterday, astrophysicists on Twitter found a factual error in Bard’s public product demo (above), where Bard falsely claimed the James Webb Space Telescope took the first photos of an exoplanet outside our solar system. The mistake seemingly cost Alphabet Inc. (Google’s parent company) $100 billion in market value on Wednesday.

OpenAI has taken the opposite approach: shipping fast and seeing what makers do with the technology while actively working to solve issues of accuracy, bias, and plagiarism.

When it comes to AI, are you all for playing it safe, or are you on team “ship fast and break things?”

Leave your thoughts. 👇

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