Since the launch of ChatGPT, high profile competitors are rapidly entering the AI scene. Most notably, Google’s Bard and Bing Chat. Of course, many smaller companies are creating their own versions, often for more specialized purposes such as blog posts.
CNET did a comparison of the current Top 3. Of course, finding out which is “best” is going to be open to debate and results are likely to change as all of these tools get upgraded constantly. There’s also the issue that one AI chat application may be better for certain purposes or be more accurate on certain topics. For example, as of now, ChatGPT is notorious for making errors and being outdated.
Here are a few highlights from the CNET survey (see video below):
- Overall, ChatGPT is the most powerful system (so far), with the important caveat that the information may be outdated.Bing uses more emojis.
- Bing uses GPT-4 in formulating answers but also has access to Bing search engine data.
- Bing Chat has additional features such as image creation and text-to-voice capability.
ChatGPT has a cap of 25 questions every 3 hours. Bing’s limit is 20 questions, while Bard has no limit. - ChatGPT-4, the latest version, only has information up to 2021. By contrast, Bard and Bing have access to data from the respective companies’ search engines.
While ChatGPT-4 is currently the most robust system, the date limitation can be a serious issue for any topics that require timely data. For example, you couldn’t even ask it simple questions about election results, the price of a stock, Bitcoin, or other assets in the last couple of years, or other info you could easily get from Google. As long as you keep this in mind it’s not such a big issue, but if you carelessly use ChatGPT for serious research and fail to verify your information, your content may contain some serious flaws.
The bottom line is that these AI tools are quickly advancing and you really need to keep up with the latest developments. Google is already confusing the issue by using AI-assisted search in its ordinary search results. This is a clue about what the future likely holds: much more seamless integration between AI chat tools and search engines.