Google Bard has now landed, but is it better than ChatGPT? These are the main differences between the AI chatbots.
The battle of the AI chatbots has now exploded with the public launch of Google Bard, the search giant’s answer to ChatGPT. So how do these two disarmingly human internet companions compare? We’ve spent hours chatting to both to find out.
Google Bard and ChatGPT look functionally similar, offering you a simple white text box to enter your question. They’re also both built on powerful natural language processing engines. But as we’ve discovered in our hands-on Google Bard review, they’re also pretty different AI beasts under the hood.
Google’s Bard is based on a lightweight version of LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), which was trained on a data set called Infiniset. This data includes a mix of articles and books, but also social media comments on the likes of Reddit and Twitter – which means it’s particularly adept at personable dialogue.
Bard is also plugged into the internet, whereas its OpenAI rival isn’t (at least, in the same way). ChatGPT’s real strength is text generation, which makes it a great creative companion. But while ChatGPT has limited knowledge of the world after 2021, a new Plugins feature lets it connect to third-party apps to tap into up-to-date information (like live prices for flights or hotels).
Both Google Bard and ChatGPT are, then, complementary tools that both have their place. But there’s no doubt that ChatGPT is a little further down the road in its evolution – so here are the ways it holds an edge over its Google rival (and a few ways it doesn’t).5 ways that ChatGPT is better than Google Bard1. ChatGPT is better at coding
One of the ChatGPT’s most impressive skills is generating code from your natural language prompts. For example, we’ve already seen someone use it to create a Wordle rival called Sumplete, and the creative possibilities are endless.
On the other hand, ChatGPT is also far from the perfect programming companion, as we discovered when trying to create a game called Tic-Tac-Go. Whether you’re coding in HTML, CSS or JavaScript, the chatbot can end up going down rabbit holes that you’ll need to rescue it from.
But despite ChatGPT’s limitations, it’s well ahead of Google Bard in this department. Google says that “Bard is still learning to code, and responses about code aren’t officially supported for now”. Yet that doesn’t stop it trying – when we asked it to help us make the same Tic-Tac-Go game above, it had a good shot.
While Bard spat out some code in different languages, it was incomplete – and the chatbot then essentially opted out of helping us further. So while programming skills are coming to Bard, this one’s definitely a win for ChatGPT – particularly since the arrival of its more powerful GPT-4 model as part of ChatGPT Plus.2. ChatGPT is a creative muse
Looking for an AI sidekick who can help spark creative ideas or analyze your own work? This is another big strength of ChatGPT, particularly compared to the more limited Google Bard.
We have a few authors on the TechRadar team and they’ve all found ChatGPT to be an excellent partner for generating new ideas based on short passages of writing, or even critiquing their work.
This is partly down to its ChatGPT’s comparatively generous input limits. For example, the ChatGPT’s free version can process around 2,000 tokens at a time (about 1,500 words), while the paid Plus tier can handle around double that.
