Bard could have debuted before ChatGPT, says former Google employee

ChatGPT rival Bard, Google’s AI-powered chatbot which debuted in February, could have arrived months before its eventual launch, possibly around the same time as ChatGPT, or before it, an engineer sacked by the tech giant in July last year has revealed.

In fact, the product that eventually became Bard began development in mid-2021, said Blake Lemoine.

“It was not called Bard then, but they were working on it, and they were trying to figure out whether it would be safe to release it. They were on the verge of releasing something in the fall of 2022…so it would have come out right around the same time as ChatGPT, or right before it,” Lemoine told Futurism.

A former member of Google’s artificial intelligence team, he added that the chatbot’s initial launch was halted in part due to some of the safety concerns raised by him.

Lemoine continued: “Bard could have come 2 years ago, but the company was making sure it doesn’t make up things too often, making sure it does not have racial or gender biases, or political biases…things like that.”

Google, he said, has ‘far more advanced technology’ that it hasn’t released yet.

ChatGPT, meanwhile, was introduced in November 2022.

Why did Google fire Lemoine?

Internally, Lemoine had raised alarms regarding LaMDA, Google’s powerful large language model (LLM). The company, however, did not agree with his claims. He then went to the press, and the organsiation responded by sacking him.

Lemoine joined Google in February 2015 as a software engineer, his LinkedIn profile shows.