Former Google engineers launch startup Merlin, a larger version of Bard

A startup co-founded by Google engineers and engineers who built Bard moved out of beta this week with an AI chatbot that can essentially do everything Bard and other generative AI can do — but offers more features on both larger and smaller ends of the spectrum.?<br><br>Merlin, which was started in January with backing from Founders Fund, brings together a team of about 25 engineers and researchers to try to build on the AI that Google built, including the company’s Gemini 3 model that was released just last month.?<br><br>Merlin doesn’t have the same brand recognition as ChatGPT, which was released last year by OpenAI, or Meta AI’s Llama, which was released a few weeks ago, but it is putting a larger version of AI into the hands of more users faster than its competitors.?<br><br>While OpenAI is charging businesses $36 per month to use the 175 billion parameter version of ChatGPT, Merlin is giving that same size model to all users for $4.99 per month, while charging businesses whose accounts can range upward of 10,000 employees $4.99 per employee. Merlin is also releasing a version that is twice as large as that, which will be aimed at businesses that want to use it for more complex data processing jobs.?<br><br>While OpenAI and Meta AI are placing limitations on how many requests users can send to them, Merlin is giving users up to 100 requests per minute, with no request limits.?<br><br>While ChatGPT and Llama have limitations on how long or how short AI responses can be, Merlin has no upper or lower limits for users.<br><br>Former Google engineers launch startup Merlin, a larger version of Bard (msn.com)