San Francisco, Feb 7 (IANS): Google has unveiled its new artificial intelligence (AI) service 'Bard' to compete against OpenAI's ChatGPT, which is now opened up to "trusted testers" before the company makes it "more widely available to the public in the coming weeks".

Bard is an "experimental conversational AI service" which is powered by Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blogpost on Monday.

The tool aims to combine the depth of the "world's knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models".

It uses data from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses.

"Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity, helping you to explain new discoveries from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old, or learn more about the best strikers in football right now, and then get drills to build your skills," Pichai explained.

The tech giant is initially releasing it using LaMDA's lightweight model version.

This much smaller model requires significantly less computing power, allowing the company to scale to more users, resulting in more feedback.

Google will combine the external feedback with its own internal testing to make sure that Bard's responses "meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information", Pichai mentioned.