In the ever-evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, chatbots have emerged as some of the most fascinating and practical applications of the technology. They’ve revolutionized how businesses interact with customers, provided personalized assistance, and even sparked delightful conversations. Two prominent contenders in the AI chatbot arena are ChatGPT and Google Bard. These AI powerhouses are taking the world by storm, and today we’re diving into the exciting battle between them!
Background
Artificial intelligence chatbots are designed to hold conversations with humans through natural language processing and machine learning. Both ChatGPT and Google Bard use large language model (LLM) – a machine learning model for generating and creating conversational text.
OpenAI released a demo of ChatGPT on November 30th 2022, based on its foundational large language model called GPT. The chatbot quickly went viral all over the internet for its different capabilities, from writing stories to coding computer programs and making travel plans. Within just five days, the chatbot managed to garner more than one million users.
Witnessing ChatGPT’s explosive success, Google soon announced Google Bard release date. Bard is a similar chatbot based on its own large language model called LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). Like OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, LaMDA has been trained on hundreds of billions of parameters, including Common Crawl, Wikipedia, books, articles, documents, and content scraped from the open internet.
Many believe that Google rushed the release of Bard under the pressure of ChatGPT’s instant massive success. This is because the AI chatbot gave out a very wrong answer to a query during a live demo by Google and Alphabet. Despite this setback, individuals are still eager to learn how to train a chatbot effectively, seeking ways to improve its performance and reliability.
When asked by a user about the new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope, it answered that the JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system. The answer was factually incorrect because the first image of an exoplanet was taken by an earthbound observatory in 2004. In addition to the dent in its reputation as a leading technology company, Google lost a staggering $100 billion in market value due to this embarrassing mistake.
The initial version of Bard worked with a lighter-model version of LaMDA that requires less computing horsepower to scale to more concurrent users. With the incorporation of the PaLM language model, the current version of Bard can generate more visual responses to user queries.
User Experience
Bard surely gets all the brownie points when it comes to offering a user-friendly interface. Its answers are properly formatted to ensure high readability, making them easier to scan than ChatGPT’s chunky answers.
Another noteworthy feature of Bard is that it offers multiple responses to your questions. With every response, it offers two more drafts of the same answer that you can access by clicking on ‘view other drafts.’ You can click on ‘Regenerate Drafts’ or edit your prompt if you want different answers.
However, Google Bard does not allow you to save chats like ChatGPT; you can export chats, but they get deleted once you close the window. Comparatively, ChatGPT saves and neatly organizes conversations in the side bar. Hence, Bard may prove to be a better option in terms of long-term usability.
Type of Tasks
ChatGPT is better at handling creative tasks because it produces original content through generative AI. For example, it is said to performs better at tasks like brainstorming blog ideas, creating long-form articles or emails, and generating content marketing ideas. On the other hand, Bard is relatively better at summarizing and synthesizing information.
Moreover, ChatGPT tends to stick to the brief while Bard is more likely to add additional information to make the answers more comprehensive and helpful.
Recency of Information
Google Bard AI chatbot freely uses the internet to come up with up-to-date information. Since its directly plugged directly into the internet, you can also ‘google it’ for related searches. It also presents information in a pretty neat way, along with trustworthy links that mark the accuracy of the results and explanations that are easy to understand.
Besides its capability to display search outcomes from the internet, Bard can also offer visuals sourced from Google Search. While it doesn’t presently possess the ability to generate images using AI, it does have the capacity to present pre-existing images relevant to the subject you’ve inquired about.
In comparison, ChatGPT has been trained on data available up until 2021. Only the paid version called ChatGPT allows you to access the internet to search on more recent topics. Even then, you must remember to click on the web browser, which is powered by Microsoft Bing. Plus, ChatGPT is a little slow in generating internet-based information and doesn’t offer visual results to user queries.
Data Accuracy
Bard’s integration with Google’s vast knowledge graph potentially gives it an edge in providing accurate and detailed information. However, its ability to reference current events and modern context doesn’t mean the data it offers is 100% accurate. Google itself admits that Bard is prone to hallucinations. In fact, you cannot completely rely on AI chatbots to provide you with correct information every time. This is because the information these chatbots display largely depends on how you phrase the prompt.
The bottom line: Both tools are undeniably helpful in generating content for business and educational purposes, but they are far from perfect. The answers they provide mostly requires fact-checking!
Conclusion
The battle between ChatGPT and Google Bard is a testament to the rapid progress of AI chatbot technology. Both contenders bring unique strengths to the table, and the ultimate winner depends on their respective capabilities and the specific needs of users.
Whether you’re looking for engaging conversations, accurate information, or creative support, these AI chatbots are at the forefront of transforming the way we interact with technology. As they continue to evolve and improve, the future promises even more exciting developments in the world of AI chatbots! We recommend you test both models with relevant prompts and queries to determine which one better aligns with your needs.
