ChatGPT vs Bard — The AI Chatbot Race: Who Will Win?

What are AI-powered Chatbots?

AI-powered chatbots?are computer programs that use?Artificial Intelligence (AI)?technology to simulate conversations with users via text or voice. They are designed to understand natural language and respond to user queries or requests in a conversational manner. AI-powered chatbots can be used in a variety of applications, including customer service, sales, marketing, and personal assistance. They are becoming increasingly popular due to their ability to provide efficient, personalized, and 24/7 service, as well as their potential to reduce costs for businesses.

How are these chatbots built?

AI chatbots work by using?Natural Language Processing (NLP)?and?machine learning algorithms?to understand user input and generate appropriate responses. When a user interacts with an AI chatbot, the chatbot first analyzes the user’s input and identifies the intent behind it. It then uses ML algorithms to search for the best response from its knowledge base or to generate a new response on the fly. The chatbot can also use contextual information, such as the user’s previous queries or preferences, to personalize its responses.

The start of the war

‘Bard’?is a sophisticated language model developed by?Google AI?that can perform various functions, including text summarization. It has the capability to summarize diverse content types, such as text files, HTML pages, and code snippets. Bard stands out as a suitable option for summarizing complex documents that other algorithms may struggle with, thanks to its capacity to comprehend the context of the text and produce more precise summaries. Nonetheless, there are instances where Bard may generate lengthy or repetitive summaries. The official date for the release of Google Bard to the public was?March 21st, but currently, only certain Google account holders have been given access.

On the other hand,?OpenAI’s?AI chatbot,?‘ChatGPT’?launched as a prototype on?November 30th?and has garnered attention in the two months since its public launch. Users have found that it is capable of completing a variety of tasks, including writing songs, essays, and program code. However, concerns have been raised about the potential threat to various jobs and the education system if students rely on technology to complete their coursework and university applications. Despite its capabilities, ChatGPT still has limitations, including being text-only, restricted to content from the internet as it was in 2021, and not being updated. Additionally, it presents its answers as facts, although the internet is known to contain misinformation, which can be dangerous.

Both, Bard and ChatGPT possess incredible capabilities. Companies are increasingly trying to embed technologies as such in their daily operations to reap the benefits of AI. However, both chatbots are trying to take each other down by introducing new features and being able to gather more data to improve it with time. OpenAI’s launch of?GPT4?has left the world stunned by its abilities. Google, on the other hand, is also trying its best to come up with better and more accurate results.

This article goes into further depth exploring?Google’s and OpenAI’s strategies for success.

How are chatbots trained?

AI chatbots are trained using large amounts of data, such as conversation logs, customer reviews, or product specifications. This data is used to teach the chatbot how to recognize and respond to different types of user input. Some advanced chatbots can even learn from the feedback provided by users, improving their accuracy and performance over time.

In addition to NLP and ML, AI chatbots may also incorporate other technologies such as speech recognition, sentiment analysis, and image recognition, depending on their intended use case. Overall, AI chatbots use advanced algorithms and machine intelligence to understand and respond to user input naturally and conversationally.

Deep dive into the training of BARD and ChatGPT

BARD and ChatGPT are two advanced chatbots developed using massive amounts of text data. Let’s dig deeper to see what types of datasets have been used to train them.

The Infiniset Dataset:

Shortly after its launch, Bard became embroiled in controversy when it responded to a question about the source of its dataset by mentioning Gmail. However, Google has clarified that Bard is built on the LaMDA language model, which was trained on a dataset called Infiniset that is composed of internet content. Little information is available regarding the origin of this dataset.?The LaMDA research paper?from 2022 provides information about the percentages of various types of data used to train the model, with only 12.5% coming from publicly available web crawls and another 12.5% from Wikipedia.

To sum up, Bard’s dataset is derived from multiple sources, including publicly available datasets of text and code from the web such as Wikipedia, GitHub, and Stack Overflow. Google’s internal data from products like Search and Gmail is also used, as well as data from third-party companies that have collaborated with Google to contribute to Bard’s training.

The WebText Dataset:

ChatGPT has been trained on a massive amount of text data from various sources, including web pages, books, and articles. Specifically, OpenAI used a dataset called the WebText, which consists of over 45 terabytes of text scraped from various websites. The WebText includes a diverse range of text genres, such as fiction, news, science, and more, making it an ideal training dataset for a general-purpose language model like ChatGPT. In addition to the WebText dataset, OpenAI also used other large-scale text corpora to train ChatGPT, such as the BooksCorpus, which contains over 11,000 books across a variety of genres, and the Common Crawl, which is a dataset of web pages collected over a period of several years.

By training on these massive datasets, ChatGPT has been able to learn a wide range of patterns and relationships between words and phrases, enabling it to generate coherent and contextually appropriate responses to a wide variety of conversational prompts.

Differences between ChatGPT and Bard

Several differences that have been observed in both AI chatbots are listed below:

Purpose of use:

Although ChatGPT and Google Bard are both natural language AI chatbots that share some similarities, they are designed to be used in slightly different ways.

• ChatGPT is primarily used to?answer direct questions?with direct answers and has been quite successful in this regard. However, its ability to write creatively has caused some concern among white-collar workers, such as writers, SEO advisors, and copy editors, due to occasional inaccuracies and issues with plagiarism.
• Google Bard was initially designed to?enhance Google’s search tool, but it is also set to serve as an automated support tool for businesses lacking the resources to maintain human support teams. The AI responder will interact with customers and offer assistance.

Integration with browsers:

• ChatGPT has been integrated into?Microsoft’s Bing search engine, allowing users to ask direct questions and receive relevant results without the need to search for specific keywords. Additionally, ChatGPT has been integrated into Microsoft’s Teams communication tool and will soon be available in a limited form on the Edge browser. The Opera browser has also announced plans to integrate ChatGPT in the future.
• Google Bard is expected to be integrated into the?Chrome browser?and its related Chromium derivatives soon. Additionally, Google plans to make Bard available to third-party developers in the future.

Language model:

• Google Bard employs Google’s?LaMDA?language model.
• ChatGPT uses its own?GPT3?model.

Data:

• ChatGPT relies on slightly older data and is limited to data collected prior to 2022 in its current GPT3 model.
• Google Bard uses more recent data. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that Google Bard is more accurate, as it has encountered issues with providing incorrect answers during its initial unveiling.

Creating Complex Code:

• ChatGPT gained recognition for its capability to generate intricate code, including debugging it. Researchers from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and University College London pitted the chatbot against industry-standard automated program repair methods and two typical deep-learning approaches. They discovered that ChatGPT was “competitive” with the deep learning approaches and delivered “significantly better” outcomes than the typical program repair techniques, as stated in their arXiv article.
• Google confirmed that Bard is still in the learning phase for code and hasn’t yet provided this feature.

Retaining past conversations and responses:

• OpenAI reported that ChatGPT can recall previous conversations. However, there are two limitations: the bot can only retain up to 3,000 words, and it does not utilize past conversations to generate responses.
• Google indicated that Bard’s capacity to remember context is intentionally restricted at present, but the company asserts that it will improve with time.

One major distinction between the two chatbots is that Bard’s LaMDA can retrieve responses from the internet, ensuring it always has the most up-to-date information. Additionally, it is integrated into Google’s search engine and can provide direct links to websites upon request. In contrast, ChatGPT relies on Generative Pre-training Transformer-4 (GPT-4), and all of its responses are derived from its knowledge base, which is limited to data before September 2021, restricting it to older information and research.

Conclusion

Once Google Bard is more widely accessible, it is anticipated that it will be a strong competitor to ChatGPT. Both chatbots rely on natural language models, with Google Bard utilizing Google’s internal LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) and ChatGPT using an older GPT-3 language model. Google Bard’s responses to inquiries are based on more recent data, while ChatGPT is predominantly trained on data available before 2021. This is similar to how Microsoft’s Bing Chat operates. At present, it is difficult to determine which chatbot is more capable, but with more exposure to Google Bard, a close competition is expected.