ChatGPT is the talk of the town and it seems that Google has felt the pressure, ever since Microsoft acquired the AI chat platform. That’s why they have announced their direct competitor: Google Bard. But the announcement hasn’t gone as well as they would have liked….

A rushed announcement?

At ISID we use and develop AI technologies for our different solutions and, in fact, we are looking at the possibilities of integrating ChatGPT in some of our products, to enhance and diversify the automatic documentation performed by our AI video analytics modules.

So we know how difficult it is to choose the right moment to present the right product in the market. And it seems that Google has stumbled right on that stone just 10 days ago.

On January 23, Microsoft announced a third round of investment in OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT (among others) in which they have been investing for several years. This time, Microsoft is committing to several billion dollars of investment, over the next few years, to advance the development of AI technologies (and to leverage those in their future products).

For Tuesday, February 7, Microsoft had announced an event related to this and Google went ahead, announcing on Monday, February 6, the existence of Google Bard, Google’s AI chat. It was Google CEO Sundar Pichai himself who made the announcement.

However, several mistakes, blunders (an employee forgot the phone needed for the demo) and wrong links to Bard, ended up generating a wave of discontent among Google’s own employees, who wrote to Sundar, telling him to “go back to his long-term strategies” and that “the Bard presentation was rushed and botched”.

It never rains but it pours

Sundar Pichai is not at his best right now at the company, after firing over 12,000 employees (6% of the total) just a month ago because, in his own words, “Google has been hiring for an economy that no longer exists.”. The background to this story is that Google’s stock has fallen more than 10% in just one week, due to concerns of the threat that ChatGPT’s integration into Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, may pose. This, arguably, was the trigger that moved Google to make a hasty announcement of a product that is not yet ready, nor in a position to compete with OpenAI yet.

It is clear that the war of dominance among AI tools started a few months ago. Multiple vendors are trying to be the first to get the biggest share of the AI market pie, which is considerable. According to Grand View Research, in 2022 the market for AI technologies was $136.55 billion, growing a 37.3% through 2030. Google and Microsoft’s CFOs must be rubbing their hands just thinking about the huge profits they could make in the next decade, and they are trying their best to reserve as much of that market for themselves, as possible.

What are the differences between ChatGPT and Google Bard?

However, as of today, there are numerous differences between ChatGPT and Google Bard, which tip the balance (at least for the time being) towards Google Bard. Both use NLP (Natural Language Processing) and Machine Learning models for their chat systems. But that’s where the similarities end.

  • ChatGPT uses data that was collected until 2021, while Google Bard has the ability to integrate current data (probably obtained from the search engine) into its answers.
  • ChatGPT is based on the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) language model while Google has opted for LaMDA, a proprietary model.
  • ChatGPT includes a plagiarism detector to avoid accidentally generating texts that someone else has already written. Google Bard hasn’t one.
  • ChatGPT is available for testing in both free and paid versions. Google Bard is only limited to Beta Testers at the moment and there is no public roadmap so far.
  • OpenAI technologies will not only end up in Microsoft products, while Google Bard is exclusively oriented to improve the Mountain View company’s products.

Who will win the race?

Well, to quote Master Yoda: “Do it, or do not, there is no try...". In other words, anyone who commits to AI technologies has to be consistent and stick it out to the end, even if it is the party that ends up losing, or being left with a niche market. This is not comparable to the Google Glass initiatives or other Microsoft/Google products that have fallen by the wayside. AI is an inescapable future, simply because of the enormous advantages it offers, if applied correctly.

With this market, as with all other high-growth markets in the past, the same thing will happen: at the beginning there will be tens or hundreds of players, some trying to keep more and others less, and after a few years, many will leave or be absorbed by the strongest. In the end there will be half a dozen tools, 2 or 3 of which will be used by the majority and the rest will have their specific uses.

However, I still miss something in this equation: we've talked about Microsoft and Google, but do Amazon and Apple have in store for us? Or, if we go to the other side of the globe...what about Alibaba?