While the world is witnessing tremendous development of science and technology, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) becoming an important topic, there is question in the minds of the people about the existing chatbots – ChatGPT, Microsoft Bing and Google Bard, and everyone wants to know – which one is most helpful.
When ChatGPT launched late last year, it earned instant and widespread attention for bringing an AI engine to the masses, free of charge. Suddenly, anyone could type in queries and ChatGPT would give novel, humanlike answers in seconds. From writing an essay on the First Crusade to a short poem about Al Gore’s love of Toyota Prii (plural of Prius), ChatGPT would spit out answers in a way Google or Bing never could.
Where traditional search engines populate a list of links to websites that most closely match a person’s query, ChatGPT gives people the answer by looking through large sets of data and using a large language model (LLM) to produce sentences that mimic a human response. It’s been described as autocorrect on steroids.
Given that by January ChatGPT had an estimated 100 million active users, making it the fastest-growing web platform ever, this pushed both Microsoft and Google into high gear. Microsoft’s Bing, which previously had less than 3 percent of search market share, quickly embraced ChatGPT, integrating AI into search. Microsoft actually licenses GPT tech from OpenAI into Bing. It’s seen a nearly 16% bump in traffic since.
Other products have also integrated various forms of generative AI, such as a “copilot” tool in Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, as well as AI features for Google’s Workspace tools like Gmail and Docs. Snapchat, writing assistant Grammarly and WhatsApp have also embraced AI.
While Bard, Bing and ChatGPT all aim to give humanlike answers to questions, each performs differently. Bing starts with the same GPT-4 tech as ChatGPT but goes beyond text and can generate images. Bard uses Google’s own model, called LaMDA, often giving less text-heavy responses. (Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Bard will be switching to PaLM, a more advanced dataset, in the near future.) All these bots can sometimes make factual errors, but of the three, Bard was the least reliable.
Even though both ChatGPT and Bing piggyback off the same tech, entering the same query on both won’t return the same result. That’s partly the nature of generative AI. Unlike a traditional search, which aims to elevate the most relevant links, AI chatbots produce text from scratch, gleaning from its datasets and creating a new answer.
