Bard is actually not launched to the public at all, they just made a PR announcement and are picking up some extra testers so their PR can have a grain of truth

Bard is actually not launched to the public at all, they just made a PR announcement and are picking up some extra testers so their PR can have a grain of truth to it. They seem to be giving access to an API for a small group of individuals or companies they have chosen. Which seems like nepotism and very unfair to me. Although OpenAI did it initially also. But.. some people may not be aware but some of the key Google researchers started their own company awhile ago called https://character.ai https://character.ai which has an amazing large language model. Not as generally useful as the OpenAI models but still amazingly humanlike and fun. I think basically the character.ai people looked at the tendency of these things to hallucinate and lack of citing sources and decided it was more appropriate for simulating fictional characters.