After an odd, last-minute announcement in Paris last month, Google finally released Bard as an early preview this week. It marks the company’s entry into the AI wars, which has dominated the tech news cycle throughout 2023, but so far, it’s off to a bumpy start. Not only is Bard seemingly unready to compete head-to-head with ChatGPT, but Microsoft’s own Bing previews are pretty impressive, right down to its integrations with apps like Word and Excel.
It’s still early days, of course, but the earliest viral examples of Bard content ranged from funny to concerning, without much in between. The app was unaware of the existence of five pounds of feathers, thought every month ended with “uary” — as in, “Apruary” or “Auguary” — and completely botched an elementary school math-level word problem. It’s not a great start for the leader in search, but things got even messier when Bard seemed to leak random, unfounded, and almost certainly untrue rumors about the Pixel 7a alongside plagiarizing content without a proper source.
That’s some surprisingly bad press for Bard ahead of a more thorough presentation at Google I/O in May, but what’s worse is just how impressive the competition seems to be. Bing might not be your first choice for a search engine, but every time Microsoft shows off its new AI-powered tools, the internet seems captivated by what this means for productivity. I know I’m never going to learn Excel beyond surface-level tools, and with Bing’s help, it seems like I won’t need to anytime soon.
Then, of course, there’s ChatGPT. On top of the recent release of GPT-4, ChatGPT started supporting plugins this week, which should make the most popular chatbot on the web even more powerful. Despite the limitations of ChatGPT over Bard and Bing — namely, its dated training data, which cuts off in September of 2021.
While I have no doubt our audience has rapidly adopted some or all of these tools, I’m curious which bot has quickly become a favorite. Rather than asking which AI service you’re using — after all, Bard remains behind invite-only access — I’d like to know which you’re most excited about? Has Bard won you over, despite a few embarrassing first steps? Is Microsoft convincing you to dump Google as your search engine of choice? Are you sticking with Chat-GPT instead of these other, larger names? Or have you got your eyes on something else entirely?
