Google has opened up access to its artificial intelligence chatbot Bard to a limited audience. “It’s an early experiment that allows users to collaborate with productive AI,” Google executives Sissie Hsiao (VP of product) and Eli Collins (VP ​​of research) said in a blog post Tuesday.

Beta testing is initially only available to users in the US and UK. Google, along with Bard, is competing against ChatGPT, a California startup called OpenAI, which is closely linked to software company Microsoft through billions in investment.

ChatGPT has created quite a stir since its launch and has drawn public attention to the topic of artificial intelligence. Although Google has been a leader in artificial intelligence research for years, it has not dared to open systems to external access until now.

Similar to ChatGPT, Bard is based on the Large Research Language Model (LLM). OpenAI works with GPT, which is currently at version 4. Bard uses a weakened and optimized version of the LaMDA language model at Google and will be updated over time with newer, more powerful models.

Interested parties can register immediately at bard.google.com. However, users from Germany can only see the information that the system is not yet available in this country. Hsiao and Collins go on to write that Bard is a direct interface to a large language model.

Bard is designed so you can easily start a search to check answers or explore resources on the Internet. If you click “Google it” you can see suggestions for search queries. The search opens in a new tab so you can find relevant results and dig deeper.

The two Google executives pledged to keep improving Bard and adding new features like coding, more languages, and multimodal experiences. “And one thing’s for sure: We’ll learn with you as we work. With your feedback, Bard will get better.”