Google opened early access to Bard, letting users in the US and UK join a waitlist at bard.google.com, with more countries and languages to follow. It was the first time Google had released a large language model chat service to the general public. The launch came about four months after ChatGPT and a week after GPT-4, and the initial Bard ran on a lightweight version of LaMDA rather than PaLM — widely judged to fall short of ChatGPT. For Google it was a release that prioritized shipping something, and the generations turned over quickly afterward with PaLM 2 and then Gemini.