Google has recently restructured its Assistant division to reposition its new Bard AI chat technology. This development will reposition Google’s Bard to compete against an emerging rival such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Google announced that Bard is an experimental project but targeted at disrupting the AI chatbox arena in the coming years.
As it stands, here are the recent changes that Google made to its Assistant division with an aim to prioritize Bard’s AI chat:
Amar Subramanya, Google Assistant’s VP of engineering, will lead the engineering team behind developing Bard. Trevor Strohman, former engineering lead for Bard, will continue as the Area Tech Lead for the AI chat. Jianchang Mao, a former executive behind the development of Assistant, has departed Google; and Peeyush Ranjan who was recently Google’s VP of commerce organization will fill the position of Mao.
Meanwhile, AI researcher Jacob Devlin has reportedly left Google after allegedly discovering that Bard’s data was taken from ChatGPT, which also powers Microsoft’s Bing Chat search features. Devlin is said to have joined OpenAI due to the fact that Google takes data from ShareGPT. But Google denied this fact, stating that “Bard is not trained on any data from ShareGPT or ChatGPT.”
With Google’s recent restructuring of Assistant, it is possible that Google is planning to integrate Bard into all Assistant products in the future; and this will definitely redefine how users interact with tech using virtual assistants and online searches. This will surely pitch Google Assistant against Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa as well as other virtual assistant software products that depend on AI.
To underscore this fact, it will be found that Google Assistant already powers most mobile devices, Nest smart speakers and other smart home devices, smartwatches, smart TVs, and even some vehicles equipped with Android Auto software. But how Google plans to monetize Bard AI remains to be demonstrated or revealed to the public.