OpenAI, will not be alone, the platform already has a new rival, developed by Google who started the creation of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots at a slower pace than its rival, but the distances are minimized and soon it will be able to be used.
On May 10, Google launched an improved version of its platform, Bard, in an effort to offer users features that ChatGPT-4 has, and even some better ones.
There are still marked differences between the two systems, however, experts believe the race is evening out.
“At the moment ChatGPT-4 has a clear advantage. Bard is coming in as a challenger, not a leader,” thinks Ricardo Carreon, chief technology officer at Hexabit, an AI firm based in Texas, USA.
“But it’s going to come close and it’s going to be a real competition between the platforms. The issue will be how the user base evolves on both. At the end of the day, what is at stake is who is going to have more users,” Carreón told BBC Mundo.
While it is true that this new platform still has limitations, one of the most obvious is that it only accepts instructions in English, Japanese and Korean. To date, the promised adaptation to more than 40 languages with which the new version was presented has not arrived.
A source close to the tech giant, without specifying dates, told BBC World, “As we continue to develop Bard responsibly, we are gradually expanding access to more countries and regions in English. We will continue to roll it out over time.
However, one advantage it has over ChatGPT-4 is that the latter is a paid version (US$20), while Google’s chatbot is free to use.
Until a few months ago, interaction with Google and OpenAI chatbots was limited to text. In an age where the Internet favors visuals, this apparently didn’t fit. But OpenAI broke the barrier by introducing ChatGPT-4 in March with the integration of images into its chatbot. Bard, for its part, has matched that feature in its new version, something that picks up the pace of the competition.
Receiving instructions based on an image is the most basic function. For example, you can ask it where that artwork is located that someone shared on Instagram without mentioning the source.
On the other hand, there is the offer of answers in pictures. With this, for example, you could ask it to show you photos of the most visited paintings in the Louvre Museum in Paris and you will get the answer with text and photos in seconds.
But the innovative aspect of AI goes beyond that: “It’s not just looking for a photo, it’s reading what’s in the photo and based on that being able to execute a certain action,” says Carreón.
“If I have eggs, tomato and onion on the table and I ask it ‘what can I make,’ it can suggest Mexican-style eggs and show me the recipe with those ingredients. Then it already recognizes what’s in the picture and goes beyond looking for similar images. It’s understanding what’s in them.
This ability is called “multimodal function”: instead of giving instructions to the chatbot only in text, it is able to understand images as well.
Also announced was a feature that is not yet available, Adobe’s AI image generation. When it is known, you could ask it to create the image with the combination of elements that you indicate.
In addition to the above, other services are integrated, as evidenced in the new version of Bard, Google now offers a direct “output” of that information to its cloud services.
You can directly push the content to your Gmail if you ask it to write a vacation request for your boss. Or to the Docs service if you asked him to compose a song for your dad.
OpenAI’s chatbot only offers a button to copy content to the clipboard.
“At the end of the day it’s the Google world fighting the Microsoft world with ChatGPT-4. It has already announced it also as the co-pilot in email, in Office, for programmers on GitHub, it’s going to be your co-pilot even in Windows,” Carreon points out.
“So in certain Windows functions, you will be able to resort to an artificial intelligence assistant to perform certain tasks within the operating system,” he adds.
The real expectation of the AI industry is not only to create chatbots, but also to adapt this enormous information processing and learning capacity to other everyday or specialized applications.
For Carreón, “With a restaurant reservation application, by integrating intelligence you can already tell it in the chat to recommend a place that is vegan, that is open at night until 00:00. It gives you the list and you tell it where you want to book.”
Just like Google as some experts have highlighted the improved mathematical reasoning capabilities or the coding in more than 20 programming languages offered by the new version of Bard. Qualities perceived only by professionals in those areas.
However, an additional feature of Bard that has been highlighted for regular user use is the source enlistment that Google’s chatbot now already does.
The AI has raised concerns about the “hallucinations” that these chatbots can exhibit. This is the name given to the erroneous, inaccurate or flawed information they produce from their huge databanks and their own ability to produce it based on learning.
Bard now displays the multiple sources from which it extracted information, something ChatGPT does not do. This helps build confidence in the results, which can be verifiable.
According to Carreon, this is valuable, but he cautions caution and critical judgment about what the chatbot presents.
“The AI accesses information from its data heap. But it’s also true that it generates information, because as the model learns. There’s going to be some information that doesn’t come from a particular place,” he adds.
“If for a problem it has already learned that there is a good solution, it’s not necessarily going to give you links. But since there is still some error in these programs, it is very important that all the people using the AI verify the final result, because sometimes it has errors.”
For the Hexabit expert, users should be clear that AI is not just an information search engine.
The developers’ goal has been to create a tool with the ability to mimic human learning and reasoning.
“As Bill Gates says, search as we know it today is likely to disappear. And that has gigantic implications, not just for Google, but for all content publishers that use Google as their main traffic platform,” he says.
“I think a lot of people don’t realize yet that this is going to change everything, but in a brutal way. And it’s already happening, there are already a lot of things that are changing,” he concludes.
Published by Emirates Herald, news and information agency.