Deepmind’s CEO Demis Hassabis has announced that the company’s chatbot Sparrow is likely to enter “private beta” testing later this year. This marks a shift in Deepmind’s focus, as they have primarily been an AI research institute up until now. The technology developed by Deepmind can then be implemented into Google products for consumers. Sparrow is powered by the Chinchilla language model which uses fewer parameters than OpenAI’s biggest models – but has been trained with more data and surpassed GPT-3 in multiple language tests when it was unveiled back in April 2022. It remains to be seen how well Sparrow will perform compared to ChatGPT, which was based on the advanced GPT version 3.5, however there are high hopes that it will exceed expectations due to Google’s access to further powerful language models like PaLM too.