Google Bard & Bing ChatGPT: The new way to search

The year 2022 was perhaps the most important ever in the development of AI. But just a few months into 2023, it’s clear where we’re headed. The year promises to be an even more dramatic shift in humanity’s approach to this technology.

OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT on Nov. 30, 2022, and shortly thereafter it became apparent that it will radically change the way we get information – even though conversational AI, based on 2020’s GPT-3, keeps making compelling claims but is factually off the mark.

What is Bing ChatGPT?

Actually, it was to be expected that this would happen: Microsoft and ChatGPT developer OpenAI have had a partnership for quite some time. Microsoft has seized the opportunity to make its weakening search engine Bing more attractive with the help of AI.

ChatGPT’s big problem: the information is outdated, because the AI’s memory ends in September 2021, when the last training data was added.

ChatGPT in Bing, on the other hand, can access the Internet and thus incorporate up-to-date information into its responses. This holds tremendous potential, but also dangers, as initial testers have already demonstrated.

Bing with ChatGPT is not yet freely available, but only for certain people on a waiting list. Currently (February 2023), there are reportedly more than one million users from 169 countries.

What is Google Bard?

As the presentation of Bing with ChatGPT loomed, Google went all out to overtake Microsoft. Surprisingly, CEO Sundar Pichai unveiled Google’s new engine for its search engine: Google Bard.

That’s important because: Google is, after all, the undefeated king of search engines and holds more than 90 percent market share.

Even though AI and search are currently getting a lot of attention and seem like a hot topic – it actually has a somewhat longer history. The idea of conversational AI did not come from OpenAI either, even though they currently offer the most prominent example of it with ChatGPT.

In 2021, Google announced its Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA). This is now serving as the basis for Google Bard in a “lightweight” version in order to keep computing power as low as possible and to gather as much feedback as possible.

Like Bing with ChatGPT, Google Bard is currently still in a closed test phase, but you cannot simply sign up for this. In the next few weeks, Google Bard should be available for more people.

What are the differences between Google Bard and Bing ChatGPT?

Since both services are not yet freely available, it is difficult to draw a comparison between Google Bard and Bing with ChatGPT.

Because Google is also even stricter with the rollout, reports from testers have not really leaked out to the public yet.

Both will probably be able to output up-to-date information by connecting to the Internet. How accurate they will be in doing so remains to be seen.

While ChatGPT will be integrated into Microsoft 365 in the future and thus into the globally distributed products of the Office suite, among others, the entire Google universe of Gmail, Android and Google Assistant is open to Google Bard. In any case, it remains exciting to see how they will integrate the powerful AI into their software.

Is ChatGPT Plus worth it at all, if Bing ChatGPT is going to be free?

Because ChatGPT was available for free from the beginning and thus burned millions of dollars of investors’ money every day, access was severely limited: Time and again, users received an indication that the browser-based service was currently busy and therefore could not be used.

Soon after, OpenAI had therefore introduced ChatGPT Plus. At a price of $20 per month, users could secure first class access, which would allow them to always use ChatGPT even during peak hours. Moreover, OpenAI promises the availability of new features (like the access to a faster model with lower quality) as opposed to the free plan. The up-to-dateness of the data is also unchanged.

Whether and how Microsoft will monetize Bing with ChatGPT is unclear. In the course of the year, the AI Help is to be integrated into Bing and Microsoft 365. It is therefore conceivable that a Microsoft 365 subscription will become a prerequisite after the test phase in order to

Even though Bing with ChatGPT is currently still plagued with bugs: it has the potential to deliver much better results if Microsoft fixes them. ChatGPT and Bing with ChatGPT use different models.

“We’re excited to announce the new Bing is running on a new, next-generation OpenAI large language model that is more powerful than ChatGPT and customized specifically for search. It takes key learnings and advancements from ChatGPT and GPT-3.5 – and it is even faster, more accurate and more capable,” they said in the announcement.

Because the monetization of Bing with ChatGPT has not yet been finally clarified and it is unclear what advantages ChatGPT Plus will offer apart from better availability, it is indeed impossible to answer at present whether the investment in ChatGPT Plus is worthwhile at all.