Google AI Bard vs ChatGPT: Artificial Intelligence (AI), is the new technological trend that recently overtakes the previous trend of the unfortunately now declining non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and the world of metaverse.
Just around the end of 2022, the trend of both NFTs and metaverse started to take a downturn which led to plentiful of big companies who first heavily invested in this technology, deciding to either drop the project entirely or try to scale it down due to them have already invested too much on the project (see Meta, Microsoft, and Disney Backpedalling to AI as Metaverse Fail to Flourish).
Starting around a similar time of the year, another next-gen technology, AI, has started to make buzz on the internet. OpenAI, through its AI-powered chatbot, the ChatGPT really helps popularise the AI technology into the public domain and this results in several other big companies also wanting part of that slice of cake.
The current dominant contender to OpenAI’s ChatGPT in the AI chatbot space is Google’s “homebrew” AI chatbot, Bard. Well, there is also Microsoft with its Bing AI, however, the under-the-hood of Microsoft uses the same “engine” as ChatGPT, the GPT-4, under its hood to which in short, it is basically the heavily modified version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
And therefore, in this article, we will try to see a comparison between Google AI Bard vs ChatGPT vs Bing.
What they have in common
Between Google Bard vs ChatGPT Reddit, all three serve similar if not basically the same function, which is, quoted directly from Bard when being asked what differs them from conventional search engines, it said Bard (and other chatbots) are “able to have conversations with you. I (Bard) can understand your questions and provide answers that are tailored to your specific needs. I (bard) can also generate different creative text formats of text content, like poems, code, scripts, musical pieces, email, letters, etc.”
Three sites are also operating in a similar fashion, which is by asking questions or giving prompts in their text box and the AI will process whatever the users put in the text box using their natural language processing ability, and come up with answers that hopefully satisfy users’ expectations.
Then, what differentiates them?
Well, for starters, the three products are developed by different companies. This means that, despite sharing similar if not the key features, they operate using different sources of dataset. Therefore, the result could vary between them.
As a fun little experiment, we take this opportunity to let the AIs fill up with the answer themselves. We first attempted to ask similar questions about the source of the data pool or dataset that they use and the three of them came up with these answers:
As we can see, in Bard vs Bing, both share an advantage of being tailored to be integrated into their search engine siblings compared to OpenAI’s ChatGPT which when asked, said that OpenAI themselves doesn’t openly disclose where they sourced the data to train their AI. Bard, on the other hand, openly told us that they mainly learn from Google and the same goes for Bing, where they fetch their data from Bing’s algorithm.
This doesn’t mean that ChatGPT provides inaccurate information however, it’s just that it could mean that they are being trained with probably both sources but only limited to those that are open to the publicー while both Bard and Bing have the advantage of having the information in house.
How capable are they?
Now that we know we technically can converse with them, we also tried to experiment to see how capable they are of doing specific tasks. In this case, we tried to ask them to perform one mathematical problem and to write something for us.
First, we attempted to give them a maths question “Sally is 54 years old and her mother is 80, how many years ago was Sally’s mother times her age?” where the answer should be “41 years ago” and both Google Bard and Bing provide the correct answer however Bing did a bit of extra step on writing the formula.
However, the same thing cannot be said for ChatGPT where it seems it went a bit too extra mile in providing the answer which in the end doesn’t really give the supposed end answer. Therefore, it seems that despite Bing sharing the same under-the-hood engine with ChatGPT, Microsoft did make them better. Google AI’s Bard is also correct and does a bit of explaining to get to the conclusion however it approaches differently from Bing.
For the second test, we ask three of them to write a poem using Shakespearean language and here are the results from them:
Here, we can find something interesting. In between ChatGPT vs Google AI (Bard), we see that they are both trying to provide the answer right away whilst Bing actually mimics a conversation-like situation where it asks us back what kind of poem we want, which is quite a welcoming surprise, to be honest.
Now, between ChatGPT and Bard, it seems that in this case, ChatGPT wins over Bard as while Bard indeed wrote us a poem, it is written using a modern spelling compared to ChatGPT which attempts to mimic them better. It also creates a bit of a disclaimer at the end which gives a human-like impression that even if they are an AI, they could still be wrong.
How to try them yourselves
All three of the AIs are now available for the public to test out with ChatGPT being limited to outdated data for the free users. It can be accessed through chat.openai.com and if you want to, you can upgrade to its “plus” version which uses the updated engine, the same as what Bing currently uses, and an up-to-date data pool for $20/month.
As for how to use Bard and Bing AI, Bard can be accessed through bard.google.com using all types of browsers while Bing AI can be accessed through bing.com and clicking or tapping the “chat” icon. Both Bard and Bing AI require you to be logged in to their respective service, however, the Bing AI can only be fully accessed if you are using Edge browser.
Bottom line
In the AI chatbot field, there are three main contenders which are ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and Microsoft’s Bing AI. The three of them share a similar basic function and goalー to understand users’ questions and provide answers that are tailored to those specific needs.
From the small test that we did earlier, it seems that we can assume that currently between ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, they are pretty much equal, however, it seems that ChatGPT did better in trying to mimic a conversation but on the other hand, it fell short on its outdated database, at least on the free version.
Bing AI, however, comes with quite a surprise as it is pretty much able to satisfy both spectrums, especially with its ability to ask back to us earlier when we asked it to write a poem.
Though, we encourage you, readers, to try it on your own and give them your own verdict! An opinion is subjective, after all.
Oh and a bit of extra, Google’s Bard API is already available however it is currently only granted to a few selected developers.
