Bing and Bard: A New Era of A.I.
2023 is the year starting the new era of A.I. (artificial intelligence). With the launch of ChatGPT in November, the A.I. chatbot is all that every tech geek is talking about.
This revolutionary chatbot has shaken the world of A.I. while giving the public the most human-like answers.
With more than 100 million users, it has gone viral since its launch in November 2022.
The wave of excitement created by ChatGPT upon its launch is being capitalized on by Microsoft and Google. Big companies like Microsoft and Google have joined this race today, raising the stakes even higher.
New Bing: with ChatGpt
For 13 years, Microsoft has done everything in its power to convince you to use Bing, but nobody wants to use a slow inadequate search engine. Therefore, its global market share has remained ever so low.
But the tables have turned, now that on February 7th at a press event in Redmond, Washington, the Microsoft company announced a new version of its search engine Bing powered by upgraded ChatGPT AI.
Confirming the rumors, the company has announced its integration with OpenAI's GPT-4 model into Bing, providing a ChatGPT-like experience within the search engine.
"It's a new day for search", Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said. The new Bing does the same work as the ChatGPT does. But this is more powerful than ChatGPT and customized for search. It takes key learnings and advancements from ChatGPT and GPT-3.5 – & is even faster, accurate.
Microsoft says all the features are powered by an upgraded version of GPT 3.5 that we know of, the AI OpenAI language model that powers ChatGpt. This model is called as "Prometheus Model" by the company.
One essential point to note here is that ChatGPT only deals with the data before 2021, but Bing's version pulls data from very recent data.
AND it can organize that data for you. In Demos, the new Bing was even able to answer about its own launch.
"The race starts today, and we’re going to move and move fast,” Nadella said. “Most importantly, we want to have a lot of fun innovating again in the search realm, because it’s high time.”
The inside look of Bing
The new Bing now features the option to start chatting in its toolbar, which brings you to a ChatGPT-like conversational experience.
In addition to the new Bing, the company has launched two new AI features for its Edge Browser: "chat" and "compose". These will be embedded within Edge's sidebar.
"Chat" allows users to summarise the webpage or document they're looking at and ask questions about its content, while on the other hand "compose" acts as a writing assistant: helping to generate text, from emails to social media posts, based on a few prompts.
It’s also worth noticing that Bing cites its sources and links them in a “learn more” section at the end of its answers. Every result will also include a feedback option.
Bing when used in Edge will summarize lengthy documents and even compare them with other documents. Look up a journal and ask bing to summarize it for you and that’s it.
The new Bing is live today “for desktop limited preview,” but it appears users are only able to “ask” one of a number of preset queries and receive the same results each time. There is also a waitlist to sign up for full access in the future.
The dark side of Bing
It is a bit disappointing to see that Microsoft is back to its old tactics. The company is trying to do the bundling phenomenon again.
When you try to use the new Bing offered by Microsoft, it requires you to open an outlook account at Microsoft. And then suggests you set Microsoft as default.
This phenomenon is known as Herding: When a company pushes you onto a related platform.
Also Enveloping is being done by Microsoft: When service providers close up the doors that lead beyond their own environments.
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Given the way in which OpenAI has scraped the web and now provides regurgitated content as its own, we could argue that this is also part of a larger process.
In addition to the new Bing, the company has launched two new AI features for its Edge Browser: "chat" and "compose". These will be embedded within Edge's sidebar.
"Chat" allows users to summarise the webpage or document they're looking at and ask questions about its content, while on the other hand "compose" acts as a writing assistant: helping to generate text, from emails to social media posts, based on a few prompts.
CEO word’s
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stressed the company's policy of staying true to its AI principles and acknowledged the potential negative consequences that come with every new technology. It’s about being also clear-eyed about the unintended consequences of any new technology,” he said.
Nadella believes that this new technology will reshape "pretty much every software category". He states that every computer interaction in the future will be mediated through an agent and the first st, and the first stage age of this, for Microsoft, is searching.
Bard: Google's response
To not be the one left behind in the race, Google had announced its ChatGPT rival - Bard. It is an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA.
Google, of course, is not going to give up its market share easily and is fighting back with a chatbot of its own — Bard.
Bard, by the way, is not off to a good start.
While Google is probably in the best position to achieve absolutely mind-blowing things with LLMs. This is easier said than done.
Error costing billions
On February 6th, to launch its new AI service, Google put out a promotional tweet and video showing off Bard's capabilities.
In this tweet, Google states "Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models".
With an accompanying gif in the tweet, asking Bard the question "what new discoveries from James Webb space telescope can I tell my 9-year-old about?". The answer by Bard consisted of a few bullet points stating that the telescope took the very first pictures of "exoplanets" or planets outside of earth's solar system.
But the James Webb Telescope didn't discover exoplanets. The European Southern Observatory's very large telescope took the first pictures of those special celestial bodies in 2004, a fact that NASA confirms.
The public didn't fail to notice this error made by the A.I. chatbot. The ad aired just hours before Google's senior executives touted Bard as the future of the company at a launch event in Paris.
In the middle of all the hype around Bard, this part of Google’s announcement did not get a lot of attention but the consequences were apparent.
By Wednesday, Alphabet, Google's parent company, shares had slid as much as 9% during trading hours, balancing out by the day's close. The Massive fall it has seen in three months, all because of this factual "error".
It shows that the market is convinced that Google has lost its upper hand in the AI and search market it has dominated for decades.
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| yahoo/finance |
The Inside look of Bard
Transformer, a neural network architecture that Google created and released as open-source in 2017, served as the foundation for LaMDA. It's interesting to note that Transformer was also used in the development of GPT-3, the language model on which ChatGPT is based.
According to the official announcement, a lightweight model version of LaMDA will be used in the first iteration of Bard since it uses fewer computer resources and can grow to many people. Bard will use all the data from the internet in addition to LaMDA to deliver replies. Pichai said that using online resources will result in "fresh, high-quality solutions."
CEO word’s
In his blog post, Google CEO Sundar Pichai writes "Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web: whether that’s seeking out additional perspectives, like blogs from people who play both piano and guitar, or going deeper on a related topic, like steps to get started as a beginner. These new AI features will begin rolling out on Google Search soon."
Once again Google is relying on generative AI (or AI which is capable of generating text in this case) to give these results. The information will be sourced based on what is available on the web and its accuracy will be closely watched.
"Today, we’re taking another step forward by opening it up to trusted testers".
This is also only available to certain trusted users right now, but Google will soon open it to public testing. However, the exact date and time have not been specified.
To this Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella responded with "With our innovation, they will definitely wanna come out and show that they can dance, and I want people to know that we made them dance and I think that will be a great day."
The war
Currently, insufficient information about Bard is available to people therefore we are still waiting for more information to come out.
An exciting war has started in the market between these two companies - Microsoft and Google.
People are on the edge of their seats to see who can win this war as both companies have their edge over each other. The Best model will win.
The major differences between the two models introduced are:-
Users count
Appealing to the public often becomes the hardest obstacle to cross for services such as A.I. services. Earning the trust and credibility of the public is no walk in the park. Google has already faced the consequences of just a simple factual error.
ChatGPT reached 100M users in 2 months and is expanding at an increasing speed. Whereas Google Bard, if fully rolled out, will reach the outstanding height of at least 1B users.
It is also essential to consider that Bard has a bigger theoretical distribution whereas, on the other hand, ChatGPT has grown organically to 100 M actual (not theoretical) users.
For Google, a bigger distribution does not guarantee that all 1B users will use it (especially if Bard is inferior to ChatGPT).
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| @DrJimFan |
Data collection
The key difference between ChatGPT and Bard is that Bard will get all of its data via the internet.
We are witnessing the 2 largest deployments of big neural nets in history. A dance of giants. Unfolding in real-time.
While Google has dominated the search engine realm for years. The launch of Bard with a tiny error has shaken the throne of Google.
Also, while Microsoft is going head to head with the new version of Bing integrated with upgraded ChatGPT, Microsoft's history with A.I. isn’t that great.
Microsoft has been trying to compete with Google in the internet search market for years. Without much luck though. But it looks like things are going to change soon.
In the foreseeable future, Microsoft and Google will continue to compete with each other to create the most advanced AI-powered search engine.
Effect on academics
The worst effect of these new inventions in the search market is on academics.
Academics all over the world are in for a shock. They haven’t wrapped their heads around ChatGPT yet and soon they will have to contend with a ChatGPT-powered search engine.
Most Universities’ responses to ChatGPT have been reactionary. They aren’t in favor of students using ChatGPT. Although a misguided policy, it can be enforced.
But how are they going to keep their students from using an AI-powered search engine? This will be impossible. Academics will have to think about artificial intelligence a lot more seriously than they are willing to.
Conclusion
As we have seen in the first week of February 2023, the market is very hot with the new A.I. model inventions.
First, there was ChatGPT. Then, Google announces Bard. Now, the Salesforce CEO just announced EinsteinGPT coming in March.
Also, the scenario for writers and the web is going to drastically change with these new additions. This will completely change the way we search the web.
This marks the end of search engine optimization SEO and the start of Answer Engine Optimization AEO.
This is an interesting time! Every company is racing to catch up and try to take some market share. I'm definitely watching from the sideline!