Bing and Bard : The A.I. and Search Race
Bing and Bard : The A.I. and Search Race
Micrsoft backed OpenAI vs Google backed Bard. Impression of first few days in this "race"
Hello reader.
In the world of artificial intelligence, the race to provide the best AI-powered search capabilities is getting ever more intense. After Microsoft's recent integration of the OpenAI ChatGPT-like chatbot into Bing, Google has responded with its own AI-powered feature – Bard.
Though the media buzz created by the launch of Bard has taken a blow due to Google's reported inaccurate responses, the competition between the two tech giants continues to heat up.
This week was filled with Bing vs Google articles on the internet. All the major publications, even on my Twitter feed (of course) were filled with debates and discussions regarding Bard vs Bing.
The internet seems to be split into two parts. One who believes Microsoft with OpenAI can bring back Bing to the market. And others believe that Google after the release of Bard would only continue to dominate the search market.
Source - miklagard.dk
This week was fast-paced on the events that happened in the AI industry. And the public seemed interested and hyped more than ever.
Let's see the key events that happened.
Bing finally started the integration of ChatGPT
So after much anticipation, Microsoft has finally unveiled its new updated Bing. As everyone expected, Bing now started the integration of a ChatGPT-like chatbot in the bing. The last few days showed a lot of drama.
Google lost over $100 billion m-cap after AI chatbot Bard gives the wrong answer to one of their ads on the company’s official Twitter account. OpenAI’s CEO commenting on the monopoly of Google in Search. And so on.
However, clearing all this media hype and drama, I want to discuss Bing and Bard in this post.
A lot of the users, especially those who didn’t use Bing before, may realise that this is not the first time Bing actually using a chatbot in its search engine. Earlier, Microsoft tried to release its own chatbot to Bing, and if failed terribly. The earlier chatbot looked something like this -
Microsoft then removed the chatbot then and now, with the partnership with OpenAI, it has again tried to enter into the AI and ChatBot domain. But this time, the news of the integration of a ChatGPT-like chatbot (developed by OpenAI obviously) has a different story.
With ChatGPT gaining thunderous success in just 2 months, and after a huge investment of 10 Billion USD (which is much more compared to Google’s investment of 300 million USD in Anthropic), Microsoft’s Bing is now a major player in the race. “It's a new paradigm for search. Rapid innovation is going to come. The race starts today." Satya Nadella told the reporters. Bing now will go full-in in terms of competing with Google with its integration of OpenAi’s GPT-4 model.
After I covered the purported leak of chatgpt on the internet a few days back, the hype for this has only skyrocketed. And when Microsoft and OpenAI came together and hosted the event on 7th of Jan, half of the public had already anticipated its release. In my opinion, it was the perfect start of valentine's week for tech lovers (or search and AI lovers, any way you want to interpret it).
But now, since “the race has started”, Google is not fully quiet. Google has announced its own integration of AI-Powered features in the Search. And the AI competition between these two tech companies would only get more intense.
Introducing Bard.
Bard: Google’s response.
I intentionally waited for a few days after the launch of the AI-powered Bing, just to see how Google responds. And oh boy it was not something that I have expected!
Just the day after the official announcement of Microsoft, Google released an ad Bard on its Twitter page. And it cost them quite a lot of money, to say the least. Shares of Google's parent company lost more than $100 billion in market value on Wednesday after its Bard chatbot ad showed inaccurate information. Shares of the Alphabet fell 8% or $8.59 a share to $99.05.
In the ad, Bard is given the prompt: "What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year-old about?"
Bard responds with a number of answers. The blunder? One of the answers said that JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system or exoplanets. This is wrong. Actually, the first pictures of exoplanets were taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT)
Hoping that Google would finetune Bard before it is formally introduced to the public, let’s learn more about Bard.
The fact, in the end, however, remains the same.OpenAI with just 375 employees (at the time I’m writing this) is getting itself in a heated competition with Google. Even though it is backed by another giant company - Microsoft, in terms of AI advancements Google has always been on lead. Especially creating AI for commercial purposes
Rise of Heavy Competition. What does Google Have in store?
Google has been using AI to improve search for billions of people for many years now. From the revolutionary BERT to the powerful MUM, Google is now pushing the boundaries of AI and language understanding. And now, with the introduction of Bard, Google is taking it to the next level.
Google is preparing to introduce at least 20 artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools and a search chatbot during its annual developer conference in May. LaMDA is the machine learning model developed by google. Just like the GPT-3 model of ChatGPT, Google LaMDA focuses on having human-like conversations by utilizing artificial intelligence. This includes forecasting what users need (in the traditional AI and ML sense), assisting them in clarifying their inquiries and allowing users to have an open-ended conversation with Google Assistant.
The initial release of BARD will be based on a lightweight model of LaMDA. So this makes LaMDA the back-end of this chatbot which supplies the intelligence of the BARD.
Under the sea of technicality, and growing competition, could google maintain its alleged monopoly in the search market? Only time would tell.
If everything goes “error-free”, this could be a turning point in the Internet Information and Search industry. And the fact that AI is backing this revolution is exciting and scary at the same time.
Let’s hope for the best.
Solid article, congrats !