The big picture: AI has been a topic of interest within the tech industry for several years, but the general population didn't get its first real taste of the technology until deep learning models like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney launched with the ability to generate strikingly lifelike images from text inputs. However, people truly grasped the power of AI last November when OpenAI launched ChatGPT to the public. While Google has been late to the AI game, many believe that Bard could be the only real competitor to ChatGPT in the near future. Google has opened public access to its conversational AI chatbot, Bard . The move comes a month and a half after the company unveiled the service and rolled it out to a handful of beta testers. With this week's wider rollout, users in the US and the UK will now be able to join a waitlist to check out its features and assess its abilities. Google said Bard can not only be used to boost productivity, but should also help users … [Read more...] about Google’s ChatGPT rival ‘Bard’ is now in early access