As AI continues to advance quickly, one of the most popular applications recently is chatbots, programs that are designed to simulate human conversation. As a result of this, large tech companies are scrambling to develop and launch the most innovative chatbots and implement them into new applications like search engines. The two biggest powerhouses headed in this direction are Google and Microsoft. In January 2023, Microsoft invested $10 billion into OpenAI, and a month later they announced that they would be partnering with OpenAI to introduce Bing Chat, an AI chatbot, to the Bing search engine. Shortly after, Google announced Bard, a direct competition to Bing Chat.
In this blog post, I will review Bing Chat and Bard and provide my thoughts on whether or not Bing Chat has the ability to introduce a serious competitive threat to Google in the global search market for the first time in over 20 years.
Before my review, it’s important to have a little context for each tool. Bing Chat runs on OpenAI’s GPT-4, an advanced version of ChatGPT that has outstanding performance improvements. Bard, on the other hand, is based on LaMDA, Google’s family of large language models which has been around for a much longer time than ChatGPT and GPT-4. There was some controversy concerning LaMDA in 2022 when a Google engineer claimed that it was sentient and could have emotions and be truly conscious, sparking debate about the ethics of developing such AI.
Now, onto the review.
While both interfaces had a clean and straightforward UI, the first difference between the two that I noticed was that while Bard had no restrictions on how long a conversation could last, Bing Chat had a limit of 20 messages per thread. This is because the chatbot tends to spiral out of control for longer conversations, producing creepy responses that concerned users before this limitation was put in place. While preventing this from happening is certainly important, this is inconvenient because if you reach the max you’ll have to start a new thread and give Bing Chat all the context of the previous thread in order to ask a follow-up question. Another difference was that Bing Chat cited its sources in every single response, allowing me to dive deeper into the topic as well as see if the response came from a reputable source so I could fact-check it. Unfortunately, Bard doesn’t have this feature, making it feel much less reliable than Bing Chat.
As I used both chatbots more, I noticed that I had to be more specific with Bard and often found myself needing to reword my question to get a relevant response or any response at all since Bard often refused my questions. Bard also sometimes gave incorrect information and tended to not always get all the facts right. Bing Chat also had its flaws, often contradicting itself in a single response.
Overall, I preferred using Bing Chat to Bard and I think Google should be concerned about Bing Chat potentially being a threat to its dominant position over other search engines. Currently, Google seems to be behind Microsoft when it comes to this new aspect of search engines, and they may need to modernize quicker to adapt to the new competitive environment. Bing Chat provides quick answers to questions, making it much more convenient as a source of information than scrolling through Google search results. Considering that Google generates most of its revenue through advertisers’ links showing up on search results, Bing Chat could be a threat to Google’s economics.
While I’d place Bing Chat above Bard right now, it’s important to note that both of these tools are still in experimental/preview versions and they continue to evolve day by day. Proof of this evolution lies in the fact that 3 months ago I completely dismissed the idea that Microsoft would be able to compete with Google even with an AI chatbot.
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