While OpenAI’s ChatGPT was the first artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot to captivate the world after its public release in November 2022, a variety of competitors have entered the marketplace since then.
Tech giants Google and Microsoft have launched their AI chatbots, with Google’s Bard removing its waitlist, and opening up to over 180 countries and territories on May 10, after Microsoft beat it to the punch and fully released its AI-powered Bing search engine on May 4.
With several chatbots to choose from, Cointelegraph decided to put some of the most well-known through their paces to see which held up best during field testing, as well as comparing some of their features.
To test the chatbots, they were each asked a series of questions, riddles and more complex prompts to determine their accuracy and speed of responses.
Many AI chatbots available today are powered by OpenAI’s GPT models. While these AI chatbots may give similar results to ChatGPT, the app developers can also add additional commands, which may change the results.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3.5
While OpenAI has already released ChatGPT-4, which is available to Plus plan users for $20 per month, ChatGPT-3.5 is free to use and is tested here.
ChatGPT-4 significantly outperforms its predecessor with faster response speeds, more accurate responses and less server downtime.
The first AI chatbot to take the world by storm can help with tasks like essay writing, code debugging and even personal finances after only a second or so of processing time.
However, one area where ChatGPT underperforms is its lack of ability to search the internet.
This means the model is only as good as the training data fed into it, which goes up until September 2021. OpenAI is rolling out plugins that allow it to source online information using Bing’s search API, but this will be limited to users on the Plus plan.
ChatGPT has a brand new plugin that uses the Bing API to access the current, up-to-date internet.
This changes everything. pic.twitter.com/Izknqp1UgC
— Rowan Cheung (@rowancheung) March 23, 2023
Despite this shortcoming in the free version, the chatbot is still usually able to suggest resources to help the user with their query, as highlighted in the interaction below.
ChatGPT-3.5 correctly answered most of the riddles it was given and all the simple math problems, but the answers were less consistently correct when it was asked more complex problems.
For example, when asked to solve the quadratic equation 2t^2 + 0.3t – 0.4 = 0, ChatGPT-3.5 returned the correct answer in one out of three attempts and had similar issues multiplying larger numbers.
ChatGPT-3.5 can also be inaccurate when answering other questions. According to OpenAI’s testing, it was only able to correctly answer 213 of 400 questions in the Uniform Bar Exam, which graduated law students in the United States are required to pass before they can become practicing lawyers.
Outside of factual inaccuracies, ChatGPT-3.5 also struggled with questions to test its logical ability, such as the one below.
Microsoft’s Bing
Bing’s ChatGPT is based on the GPT-4 language model created by OpenAI, but the two chatbots have several key differences.
The first noticeable difference is that it takes Bing’s chatbot much longer to respond to questions, with an average response time of approximately five seconds compared with OpenAI’s ChatGPT taking only one second.
It also requires users to use the Microsoft Edge web browser, which is nowhere near as popular as Google Chrome.
On the positive side, Bing’s chatbot utilizes the Bing search engine in its responses, allowing it to answer questions about current events, unlike any other chatbot using GPT-4. It’s also currently available for free.
Additionally, it provides sources for its answers, letting users more easily verify claims made by the chatbot.
Using the same quadratic equation 2t^2 + 0.3t – 0.4 = 0, Bing linked to Microsoft Math Solver but often gave an incorrect answer and had similar issues correctly answering larger multiplications.
In the same logical question about the bookmark posed to ChatGPT-3.5, Bing correctly answered that you would expect to see the bookmark on page 120.
Google’s Bard
Google’s recently released AI chatbot called Bard, which runs on its PaLM 2 language model.
2/ Bard now also gets plugins
Get instant access to these apps amongst others:
・Spotify (Music)
・Walmart (retail)
・Indeed (job hunting)
・Uber Eats (meal delivery)
・Adobe Firefly (image creation)
・And all Google Apps pic.twitter.com/WyRBBYbYbR— Moritz Kremb (@moritzkremb) May 11, 2023
As pointed out in a Twitter thread by AI enthusiast Moritz Kremb, it can both respond and be prompted with images, supports numerous programming…
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