Google's Bard starts creating images, and I like them.

Bard's got some cool updates. It now offers Gemini Pro in more countries and can check its answers better, but the biggest of all is image generation. Yup, you can now create images in Bard.

What's going on here?

Bard's now global with Gemini Pro and can whip up images.

What does this mean?

So, Gemini Pro, Google’s language model equivalent to GPT 3.5 is now in Bard for over 40 languages and 230+ countries. Similarly, Bard has a double-check feature that checks generated answers against web content to flag incorrect responses. It also works better and in more countries & languages now.

And if that's not enough, Bard's now your personal artist, creating images from your prompts, thanks to the Imagen 2 model. And, Google’s all about embedding digital watermarks in these images, using their tool called Synth ID. (how reliable is that is a topic for another time)

Why should I care?

Recently Bard with Gemini Pro climbed the charts in a community-driven leaderboard, getting to number 2 just behind GPT-4 Turbo by OpenAI. So users are getting that performance in more languages.

Also, this isn’t Bard Advanced, the version powered by Google’s Gemini Ultra, which it claims beats GPT-4, so we’ll have to see what kind of fight that one brings.

Images are definitely not the best of what’s out there, but it’s free, and in some quick checks I found it more visually appealing than some stuff I got from DallE. So, worth keeping an eye on.