AI race gets more intense – The Financial Express
The Financial Express
Artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI, in particular, has remained the hottest tech this year. It was out of the blue that humankind woke up to the reality that a machine could write, code, create art, plan holidays, and do a slew of other activities, as well as humans could. The big move was spearheaded by Microsoft-backed OpenAI.
Tech giants, such as Google and Baidu, swiftly followed suit, while OpenAI’s ChatGPT remained the most popular one. However, as interest in the technology appeared to fade with ChatGPT witnessing a decline in active users by 10% in June and July, and 3% in August, the company rolled out a host of features and brought AI chatbots back in the news.Taking to X, OpenAI announced on September 27 that the ChatGPT users were able to surf the internet, thus overcoming the biggest limitation of the platform, which was that its data was restricted to 2021. While the browsing is currently available for Plus and Enterprise users, it will be expanded to all users, the company said. “To enable, choose Browse with Bing in the selector under GPT-4,” it said in the post on X. Notably, the company had earlier tested the feature through the Bing search engine as a part of its ChatGPT Plus offering. However, it disabled it later over concerns that it let users bypass the paywall. Another big announcement preceded that, in which OpenAI said that ChatGPT could “see, hear, and speak”. It meant that the AI chatbot could have voice interactions and also interact with the users using images. However, this feature, too, is limited to paid users. Another major AI chatbot that allows users access to the latest information is Google’s Bard. With OpenAI launching the feature, it warrants a comparison between the two, and what is in store for the users.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT
First and foremost, ChatGPT remains extremely easy to use with a sleek and simple user interface. While GPT 3.5, which is a large language model (LLM) developed by OpenAI, is available to all users; GPT 4 is available to paid users, which allows users access to additional features, including the internet access, “see, hear, and speak” feature, apart from faster response, plugins and advanced data analysis. The subscription costs $20 per month.However, given the features, the fee seems worth it with the fact that apart from the access to latest information, it also offers features making ChatGPT probably the foremost AI chatbot. Take the case of its LLM, which is trained on a large amount of data, which makes it likelier to come up with accurate responses. Reports suggest that GPT-4, which is trained using more data compared to its predecessor GPT 3.5, has decent reasoning capability too.The internet access just adds more guns to its already strong arsenal. However, the catch remains that it is only available to subscribers, which costs $20 a month. And until you are ready to shell out that amount of money, you’ll not get access to any of the features, which play a crucial role in making ChatGPT the foremost product in the AI chatbots space.
Google’s Bard
Now coming to Bard, the AI chatbot developed by search engine giant Google. Contrary to its contemporary ChatGPT, Bard already allowed its users access to the latest information, as its data wasn’t restricted. One also needn’t pay $20 a month, and the feature has remained available for free. Not only it is open to all but also generates fast responses, which makes for a good experience, as well as the similarity with Google also enhances the use of Bard.The chatbot is powered by PaLM 2, which is the latest version of the LLM developed by Google. Notably, PaLM 2 is heavily trained on multilingual text, which includes over 100 languages. It also possesses better coding and reasoning capability. It was a major improvement over its predecessor PaLM, and a major take over its rival GPT-4.While ChatGPT has remained the top chatbot for multiple reasons, the internet access only enhances the overall features. However, with AI racing having just begun recently, it will be interesting to see what new features the companies will roll out to stay ahead of the curve.
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