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...Google's parent company, Alphabet, had its earnings call yesterday, and Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai promised that "very soon people will be able to interact directly with our newest, most powerful language models as a companion to Search in experimental and innovative ways." Earlier this year, the company declared a "code red" over the meteoric rise of ChatGPT and even dragged co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin out of retirement to help.

Google has plenty of AI technology, but it is mostly not open to the public. It has a chatbot language model called "LaMDA" (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) and an image-generation AI called "Imagen." While OpenAI turns similar technologies into public products like DALL-E and ChatGPT that wow the world and earn the company a ton of attention, Google keeps everything internal and only ever talks about these projects in blog posts and research papers.

One result of Google's productization efforts, according to a CNBC report, is called "Apprentice Bard," a chatbot that uses LaMDA technology enabling people to "ask questions and receive detailed answers similar to ChatGPT." ...