By Anup Gunaseelan, Director, Delivery Head (Tech Vertical), LatentView Analytics
As humans, we thrive in the battle of duality, especially regarding brands – Apple vs. Microsoft, McDonald’s vs. Burger King, and so on. The AI landscape is no different, as we have two new rivals – ChatGPT and Bard. The advancement of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is one of the most exciting developments in AI in recent years.
GenAI models can generate text, translate languages, and write different kinds of creative content. They can also follow instructions and complete tasks, making them more versatile tools than ever. Two of the most popular GenAI models are ChatGPT and Bard. OpenAI developed ChatGPT, while Google AI developed Bard. Both perform similar tasks and are capable of generating text that is both creative and informative.
If you’re an individual who wants to reduce manual, time-consuming tasks, these bots will perform them efficiently. Conversely, if you’re running a company and looking at streamlining processes and making them cost-effective, these bots are tailor-made for you. But which of these two will emerge as the winner in the long run? Let us find out the advantages and disadvantages of ChatGPT and Bard vis-à-vis their functionalities.
Same, Yet Different
ChatGPT was launched in November 2022 by OpenAI and generated substantial buzz among users worldwide with its ability to generate high-quality responses to various topics. The rise in its popularity can be gauged by the fact that it gained 100+ million users within just a few months of its release. The bot has been pre-trained on a massive text corpus, including many questions and prompts. ChatGPT uses a Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT), a variant of the transformer architecture, to generate text.
Not wanting to be left behind, Google jumped into the fray with its Bard chatbot in March 2023. Like ChatGPT, Bard can perform sentiment analysis, entity recognition, and text classification tasks. Offering a variety of pre-trained models, such as Google Cloud Natural Language API, Bard also includes a language model called BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), which is a pre-trained language model fine-tuned for specific natural language processing (NLP) tasks.
Despite the differentiated technology behind the bots, they share a few similar traits and characteristics. For instance, whenever a user enters a prompt, both these bots understand, respond, and generate human-like text. Depending on the nature of the prompt, the language could be business-like, semi-formal, or casual.
The knowledge repository in ChatGPT and Bard is enormous since both the models have been trained on a large amount of data. The fed data is diverse, allowing the bots to respond exhaustively and interactively. Since both the bots employ a transformer architecture, they consider previous prompts and generate responses accordingly.
While ChatGPT is accessible and user-friendly to non-technical users, Bard is more suited to users with technical knowledge. ChatGPT has limited integration capabilities, while Bard can be integrated with other Google products. One of the significant differences between the bots is their data limitations. While both are loaded with data, ChatGPT’s data is restricted to events covering 2021, while Bard’s information is from the present year.
As a result, ChatGPT cannot answer questions about the present year, while Bard has no such limitations. Where ChatGPT scores over Bard is in its size and versatility. The former is a larger model with 175 billion parameters and is trained on a larger corpus of text data, and requires more computational power to operate. In contrast, Bard is trained on a smaller text corpus and is better suited to specific NLP tasks.
On the costs front, the GPT-3.5-based version of ChatGPT is free, although users must pay a subscription fee for the advanced GPT-4 based version with priority access to new features. Since Bard is part of the TensorFlow library, no access fee is required, and it is accessible to everyone.
The Data Question for Enterprises
How much data do organizations typically have, and what do they do with it? Estimates are hard to come by, but organizations know that such data contains a treasure trove of information that could be mined for valuable information. However, organizations need to figure out how to utilize this data. Their employees spend several hours poring through the information manually. Such exhausting manual work robs them of the critical bandwidth they require for analytical tasks, which deliver a more significant business impact.
For organizations looking to enhance the productivity of their data, GenAI has emerged as a one-stop solution. The two GenAI models, ChatGPT and Bard, can generate text, videos, images, etc., by responding to prompts. They use NLP to transform raw characters into sentences, parts of speech, entities, and actions.
By applying machine learning algorithms, GenAI models learn the patterns and structure of their input training data and generate new data with similar characteristics. These models perform various NLP tasks, including text classification, named entity recognition, and text generation. The use cases for both these models are enormous for organizations.
Choosing Between ChatGPT and Bard
ChatGPT and Bard provide certain advantages and disadvantages in terms of their functionalities. However, organizations implementing either of the bots need to consider several frameworks. As a first step, they need to look at data availability, security, and integration with the current tech stack. They also need to factor in the accuracy and responsiveness of these bots for end users. The final framework for selecting a bot is the number, complexity, and type of use cases organizations have lined up.
While ChatGPT helps generate social media posts and business articles, Bard’s expertise is in answering complex technical queries. For instance, an e-commerce business might prefer ChatGPT for its ability to generate content that is relevant to that business. A healthcare organization, though, would look at Bard for retrieving relevant documents using complex queries. ChatGPT is useful in customer-facing applications, such as customer support and chatbots.
However, organizations need to be careful when choosing either of the bots in their processes as GenAI is still at a nascent stage, and both bots have had their share of issues concerning accuracy and misinformation. ChatGPT has often been found to have delivered wrong or inaccurate answers to even simple questions. Organizations cannot entirely rely on the bot for accurate answers, as mentioned by ChatGPT founder Sam Altman. Bard too had its fair share of problems, as a study revealed that it can easily churn out fake news. In an era where information is available at the fingertips, such misinformation can have grave consequences.
ChatGPT and Bard offer several advantages depending on their use cases. AI has existed for several years, but GenAI models, especially ChatGPT and Bard, have opened up exciting possibilities for organizations looking at reducing manual tasks and prioritizing value-added tasks. While there is little to choose between both bots, the key for organizations is to identify use cases that can be handled by either bots. The winner of the AI battle royale has yet to be determined, but the organization that can better manage these bots’ implementations will trump its competitors.
In addition to ChatGPT and Bard, several other GenAI models are being developed. These models are rapidly evolving, and we will likely see even more powerful and versatile ones. The advancement of GenAI has the potential to revolutionize a wide range of industries. The future of GenAI is bright, and it is an exciting time to be involved in AI.
