ChatGPT, Google Bard, Claude 2, or Bing Chat? Decoding the best AI chatbot for you – The Indian Express
One of the biggest developments in July so far has been AI start-up Anthropic unveiling the latest iteration of its AI chatbot Claude – Claude 2 in the US and the UK. The chatbot is the latest to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Bard. Incidentally, Google also introduced a slew of features to its Bard chatbot, some of which are unique and gives it an edge over ChatGPT.
In an era where work, irrespective of the industry, entails meeting tight deadlines, last-minute presentations, numerous tedious tasks, integrating various technologies, and aligning with multiple goals at once, an AI chatbot emerges as an attractive solution.
If you are not sure which chatbot can be your saviour in terms of work, here we attempt to offer a precise comparison of the four chatbots that are currently assisting millions of people around the world.
This is the most potent chatbot yet with its capability to digest up to 1,00,000 tokens which is equivalent to 75,000 words in a prompt. This means a user can upload J D Salinger’s acclaimed novel ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ entirely as a prompt. The previous version of Claude only had 9,000 tokens. However, Anthropic now claims that Claude 2 provides responses in a more contextual and improved manner.
Claude 2 is an AI chatbot just like ChatGPT and it has been created by San Francisco-based AI start-up Anthropic. Most importantly, Claude is free to use and the biggest advantage of the chatbot is, as mentioned above, its ability to summarise nearly any document. Users can upload more than one document to Claude and ask it to analyse shared findings and find commonalities between the two documents.
When it comes to coding, based on the recent reports, Claude 2 scored 71.2 per cent on a Python coding test, while ChatGPT trailed at 67 per cent. Also, it is more updated than ChatGPT, as its information cutoff date is early 2023, whereas the latter has a September 2021 cutoff. For now, Claude 2 is only available in the UK and the US. However, login is simple as users only require a valid email address and follow a few prompts to set up.
Privacy and limitations: As of now, Claude 2 lets users delete their conversations and reportedly supports VPN browsing. However, when it comes to limitations, the chatbot is only available in the UK and the US. It lacks internet access and is likely to offer incorrect information if prompted with requests for real-world data. There is a likelihood that Claude 2 can make mistakes in some complex tasks and appear confident doing so.
Search giant Google introduced its AI chatbot Bard in March of this year. Over the last few months, Google has made some significant improvements to its chatbot which was initially based on Google’s LaMDA family of Large Language Models (LLM). The chatbot was later moved to PaLM, a 540-billion-parameter transformer-based LLM.
There is good news for all those who have been waiting for an update on Bard, as Google recently introduced a slew of features to the AI chatbot. Now, users can listen to Google Bard’s responses in over 40 languages (text-to-voice). Google has also integrated Google Lens allowing users to upload images along with prompts, thus making Bard multi-modal.
Besides, the chatbot has been expanded to more territories across the EU and Brazil. Another fascinating feature is its ability to adjust the tonality of responses. Users can now customise Bard’s responses in five ways – simple, long, short, professional, or casual tones. Bard now allows users to share the responses via links. The latest addition of languages to Bard includes Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Arabic, Chinese, German, Spanish, etc. Most importantly, just like Claude, Google Bard is free to use for anyone.
To use Google Bard, users simply need to log in to bard.google.com.
Privacy and limitations: Google’s chatbot reportedly comes with an option to auto-delete interactions in around 18 months. It does not allow users to retrieve past interactions. Besides, Bard supports VPN access making it available across the world, bypassing local restrictions. When it comes to limitations, it is learned that Bard’s API access is limited and context handling capabilities are significantly lesser compared to Claude 2. Several users have reported that Bard’s responses occasionally tend to be generic.
Last week both Claude and Bard came up with some interesting upgrades that could potentially threaten the dominance of ChatGPT.
Introduced in November 2022 by OpenAI, ChatGPT continues to make waves across the world. The machine learning model has been winning over users with its impressive human-like responses. Over the last several months, ChatGPT has become the go-to resource for all kinds of information, so much so that it threatened the dominance of Google’s search engine.
ChatGPT was built on GPT-3.5, which has been trained on a diverse range of data sources, including articles, books, and websites, to enable itself to comprehend human languages. OpenAI introduced its more potent large language model GPT-4 in March this year. GPT-4 has a token limit of 8,912. However, users need to subscribe to ChatGPT Plus to use GPT-4. Besides, the company has also introduced a wide variety of plugins that can come in handy for summarising documents, YouTube videos, developing code, interpreting data, browsing the Internet, etc.
Despite so many chatbots being introduced in the last six months, ChatGPT remains a powerful tool that has found wider acceptance among millions of professionals worldwide. It offers quick and accessible information on a wide range of topics. This makes it an excellent resource for education, research, and seeking general knowledge. Its personalised conversations also make it a great tool to improve one’s communication skills.
To use ChatGPT, one will need to log in on OpenAI.com with a valid email address. And, if one is not planning to subscribe to the ChatGPT Plus, the regular version powered by GPT-3.5 can be more than enough for a variety of tasks including writing/editing/proofreading emails, generating ideas for presentations, running grammar checks, or generating essays, breaking down concepts, etc.
Privacy and limitations: ChatGPT allows users to delete their interactions and it does not support VPN access. When it comes to its limitations, ChatGPT has fewer context-handling abilities than Claude 2. The free version does not offer any additional features and OpenAI has temporarily disabled ChatGPT’s Internet browsing feature. It has been reported that while doing complex tasks, ChatGPT can throw up inappropriate results.
Today, there are many AI chatbots that can help you with an assortment of tasks. However, one should always remember that the primary function of these AI tools is to act as a copilot for enhancing human productivity and creativity. They are in no way a substitute for the extraordinary human ability of critical thinking, creative problem-solving, and driving innovation.
Bing Chat is a great resource if you are scouring the internet for information. It is built into Microsoft Edge offers a tailored way of browsing information on the internet. Bing Chat is based on the GPT-4 language model. It can perform web searches and offer recommendations along with links. It not only generates content, but it can also create images with the help of DALL-E. At present, users get 20 chats per session and 200 chats per day. Unlike ChatGPT Plus, which offers GPT-4, Bing Chat is free.
Bing is placed in the sidebar of the Microsoft Edge browser and is called Discover. Its features include chat, composition, and insights. One of the most interesting features is that when a user is on a web page, Bing can answer questions from that page with context.
To use Bing Chat, open Bing.com on Microsoft Edge, tap on Chat and ask a question in the input box at the bottom.
Privacy and limitations: Bing Chat does not access private information. Moreover, it uses page context information to provide detailed responses. Since both Bing and ChatGPT use OpenAI’s language models, responses generated by both chatbots could often be similar. Users have also reported that Bing Chat often produces responses that may not be as creative as ChatGPT. Its responses are usually short.
Bijin JoseBijin Jose is an Assistant Editor with Indian Express Online, New Delh… read more
