Google is getting ready to make its Bard AI better suited to compete with ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot. Speaking on The New York Times podcast “Hard Fork (via Engadget), Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that Bard will soon replace its current LaMDA model with “more capable” Pathways Language Models (PaLM).

Google first introduced Pathways, a new AI architecture that can handle several tasks simultaneously back in 2021. At the time, the company explained that Pathways would allow Google to train one model to do “thousands or millions of things” instead of just one.

“We clearly have more capable models. Pretty soon, maybe as this goes live, we will be upgrading Bard to some of our more capable PaLM models, so which will bring more capabilities, be it in reasoning, coding,” Pichai explained. However, the Google CEO emphasized that the company won’t release a “more capable model before we can fully make sure we can handle it well.”

“We are all in very, very early stages. We will have even more capable models to plug in over time. But I don’t want it to be just who’s there first, but getting it right is very important to us,” the exec said.

So far, Bard didn’t receive as much attention as ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, which are both available more broadly. According to a recent report from The Information, Google may have actually trained its Bard AI using public data from its competitor ChatGPT. Google quickly denied the report.

As of today, Google Bard is available in limited preview in the US. Just like Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, enthusiasts have to join a waitlist before they can get access to it. However, Google slowly iterating on Bard may be the right approach as public opinion about “generative AI” technology appears to be changing.

Earlier this week, Elon Musk and other tech leaders signed an open letter asking all AI labs around the world to immediately pause the training of AI systems more powerful than OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4 “for at least six months.” Today, we also learned that Italy’s national data protection agency has banned ChatGPT over data privacy concerns.