Google Bard is now live – here are our first impressions of the ChatGPT rival

So how exactly was Google Bard trained? Google has already explained that it's based on a lightweight version of its large language model called LaMDA, but we wanted to get Bard to explain its own origin story.

There were no bites from radioactive spiders involved, sadly – just the usual tale of being locked in a room with an unimaginable number of “books, articles, websites and code”. 

Supervised learning was involved and Bard says it took the “long time” of “several months” for it to learn how to communicate like a human. Wait till it hears how long it takes us humans.

As our hands-on Google Bard review points out, the Bard interface is really nice – and a step up from ChatGPT's functional but uninspiring layout.

Like the new Bing, Bard is a conversational sidekick rather than a traditional search engine. You can restart conversations at any point and also edit questions – and Bard will also give you a button below its responses if there's extra info available.

Starting off with simply questions like ‘I want to write a novel, how do I get started?' (above), Bard serves up a solid list of tips (albeit without any citations for where it got the information from).

Before we get stuck into our fascinating conversations with Google Bard, here's a reminder of how to get access.

If you have a personal Gmail account (work accounts aren't currently compatible), you can now sign up for Google Bard waitlist (opens in new tab). It isn't yet clear how long that waitlist is, but even those who signed up 30 minutes after the opening of the public beta haven't yet gained access, so there may be a slight wait.

While you do get a short poem from Bard to keep you amused, our early conversations are a bit more revealing about how Google's chatbot compares to ChatGPT. Let's get stuck into those…