Last week, OpenAI expanded its partnership with Microsoft, which made a multi-year, multimillion dollar investment in the company "around a shared ambition to responsibly advance cutting-edge AI research and democratize AI as a new technology platform."

Not to be outdone, Google - which declared a "Code Red" over ChatGPT, is rolling out a rival.

The new system, Bard, is powered by LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) - the large language model that stirred controversy in May when a Google software engineer publicly asserted that the AI was "sentient."

More via Axios:

Between the lines: Google has long been working on such systems but faces pressure to show it is making progress amid all the attention on OpenAI's popular ChatGPT and similar projects.

Details: Google is laying out three AI-related projects as part of a blog post from CEO Sundar Pichai.

Bard, the conversational assistant based on Google's LaMDA large language model, is starting limited external testing.

The company is offering a preview of how it soon plans to integrate LaMDA into search results, including using the system to help offer a narrative response to queries that don't have one clear answer.

Google says it is developing APIs that will let others plug into its large language models, starting with LaMDA itself.

"It's a really exciting time to be working on these technologies as we translate deep research and breakthroughs into products that truly help people," wrote CEO Sundar Pichai in a blog post announcing the new AI Chatbot.