Chatbots are making waves in the world with ChatGPT setting a standard of generative AI, unlike anything that came before it. 

Post its release on 30th November 2022, ChatGPT has broken through with its next-gen natural language processing, forcing a worldwide discussion about its implementation and how it will change the current society. 

However, it is important to note that OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, weren’t the only ones working on such a model. Google had been working on something similar and the emergence of ChatGPT saw them launch their chatbot, Bard.

Brothers in Arms

At the core, both Google Bard and ChatGPT are chatbots, which means they give natural ‘human-like’ outputs to the inputs given by users. You can ask them anything, from which books you can read this year to ideas on what to gift your best friend on their birthday! Both of them take the prompt, run it through their system and use their natural language processing to answer the prompt in a fully-formed paragraph rather than just a collection of words. 

Are Google Bard & ChatGPT the same? 

We discussed how both are chatbots, taking in queries and furnishing a response, however, that’s pretty much where the similarities end. A deeper look inside these chatbots reveals how they differ.

• Thinking Different

The major difference between the two is the data sources and models they are trained on. Think of it as the values and thought process one receives from their parents. The surrounding people, especially your parents shape your way of thinking.

Likewise, ChatGPT uses a generative pre-training transformer (GPT) and Bard uses Google’s language model for dialogue applications (LaMDA). While they built the former for text functions, the latter focuses on dialogue. 

• The Latest vs The Limited

Chatbots needed to know how to understand any prompt and to shape their response specifically to make it more ‘human-like’. That’s why they were trained on data sources like Wikipedia, Common Crawl, articles, books and other documents.

However, ChatGPT’s data is limited to 2021. This means that all its sources are up to that year. This is also noted in its responses as asking a prompt to review a book released this year results in it revealing this flaw. Bard doesn’t have this limitation and can pull data from the latest search results. 

• Responses

Contrary to popular belief, these chatbots were made with different goals in mind. ChatGPT is meant to be an expert in taking overwhelming amounts of information and processing it into bite-sized pieces whereas Bard was designed to have conversations with humans. 

GPT uses a twin-phase process to generate a response. It collects data across its approximately 175 billion set parameters and then fine-tunes the information to create the perfect answer. LaMDA on the other hand uses infinite sources of Google search data which helps it provide accurate responses. 

• User Experience

In general, you will have quite a pleasant user experience using either of these chatbots for their intended use. Both of them offer a well-structured response to prompts, with the option to further elaborate on any of the points. 

ChatGPT is adept in writing complex code but Bard cannot code as of yet. Bard provides multiple answers to a prompt named ‘drafts’ each different from the other, giving you the option to choose which suits them the best. They can also choose to mix all drafts to create the best response. ChatGPT is limited to a single response but retains conversation longer by remembering up to 3000 words from the existing conversation. 

Final Verdict 

Both chatbots have garnered amazing responses from people around the globe. While displaying flashes of brilliance, they still have room to grow. For instance, ChatGPT and Bard are prone to ‘hallucinate’ information, i.e. their responses aren’t 100% reliable. 

Understanding the difference between the two helps you know which one to turn to when you need help with specific things. Bard has a better UI, provides up-to-date responses with a few drafts to choose from and focuses on making conversations. On the other hand, ChatGPT masters summarizing any text to form quick responses with more language support and uses. 

We hope this helped you get a clearer picture of the battle between ChatGPT vs Google Bard.