Bard

Bard was a conversational chatbot developed by Google that was rebranded as Gemini in February 2024. Following the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google announced its own conversational chatbot. In a blog post published on February 6, 2023, Google CEO Sundar Pichai introduced Bard, an experimental conversational artificial intelligence (AI) service powered by LaMDA. Bard was a large language model that could combine and summarize information from the internet to produce responses to user queries. The first version of Bard utilized a lightweight LaMDA model that reduced the computing power required, enabling it to scale to more users. Google performed internal testing to check for quality and safety issues. The service was only made available to trusted testers initially, to gather external feedback before plans for a wider release.

The announcement of Bard included a number of examples of the service answering queries. However, in one example, Bard answered a question on new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope incorrectly, stating the telescope took the first pictures of a planet outside of the solar system. The first pictures of an exoplanet were actually taken in 2004 by the Very Large Telescope (VLT). After the mistake was discovered, shares of Alphabet (Google's parent company) dropped by as much as 9 percent on February 8th—a $100 billion drop in market value.