The AI Wars - ChatGPT & New Bing vs Google

Is this the end of Google?

Hey everyone, welcome to another edition of my semi-regular newsletter. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you can’t have missed the news that ChatGPT was launched by OpenAI last November, and it is causing some waves, to say the least. Many educational institutions have gone full-on panic mode, and outright banned access to ChatGPT.

Microsoft who are a large investor in OpenAI initially announced that they have integrated the GPT technology into their Teams product to create Teams Premium (added functionality includes auto-generated meeting notes, live captions, recaps, transcripts, translations, and built-in CHatGPT chatbot), and since then announced that they have added ChatGPT to Bing, their much maligned search engine, in a direct shot across the bows of Google.

This New Bing, as it has been termed is, for now on limited release, but I managed to get access to it, and I have to say, I’m very impressed, but with a huge caveat, which we’ll get to in a sec.

Because I’m a child, one of the first things I asked it to do was to explain Pythagoras’ theorem in the voice of Hagrid explaining it to Harry Potter. It did an excellent job, I have to say.

I then asked it to write a blog post about the fact that I had asked New Bing to explain Pythagoras’ Theorem, and how it got on. I went on to ask it to propose hashtags, and a title for the blog post optimising for engagement. It did this in a matter of seconds and did quite a good job (the wording was a bit cheesy) but you can check it out as I published the entire post unedited here.

Now for the caveat I mentioned earlier. It is far from infallible. I asked it for some context to the current war in Ukraine. It gave me this:

The problem here is it incorrectly says with complete confidence that the crisis started in 2021 with the Euromaidan protests which forced pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych from office. The problem is, the Euromaidan protests were in 2013/14.

When I asked New Bing to check its facts again, it reiterated that the protests took place in 2021.

Finally, when I pointed out that that was simply incorrect, New Bing conceded the error and pointed the finger at another web site as the source of the mistake.

Though, I couldn’t find the error on that site!

So, while ChatGPT, and by extension New Bing have captured people’s attention and are for now the new hotness, they need to be approached with extreme caution. They spout facts with authority which can prove to be entirely false.

At the other end of the scale, out of curiosity, I asked both ChatGPT and New Bing for instructions on how to make scrambled eggs. Here’s how they got on:

As you can see above, ChatGPT did a pretty good job.

I gotta think though, New Bing wins this one - it even adds the “Bon appétit!” at the end for good measure.

Similarly, when I ask the two chatbots for sample code to determine the day of the week given a date - ChatGPT does a good job:

But, New Bing’s effort does a better job with the more comprehensive explanation, the links at the bottom to sources, and offers options to get the same function in other languages:

And where’s Google when all this is going on? Well Google announced their new AI would be called Bard (who came up with that name?), and scheduled a launch announcement for the middle of last week in Paris. It didn’t quite go to plan though, the AI got an advertisement it was displaying wrong, and Google lost $100bn in market capitalisation, when its shares tanked as a consequence (if an AI can mess up Google Ads - that has massive implications for Google’s revenue stream!). Hence we are unlikely to see Bard, or whatever Google end up calling their AI for at least a few months yet. Ad revenue for Microsoft is a small part of their earnings. If Bing messes up like that, its reputation wasn’t great to begin with. If Google’s AI can’t be trusted with ads, that is existential, so expect Google to take a more cautious approach (especially after the Paris debacle!).

So, what’s the verdict? These new generative Chatbots are here to stay. Judiciously used, they can make people far more productive, but they’re extremely fallible, so use with care.

However, as Kent Brockman famously could have said,

What do you think of the New Bing and ChatGPT? Reply to this email, or leave your reply at my online chat about the topic.

Full disclosure - no AI was used in the writing of this newsletter. Ne honest, you could tell, couldn’t you?

Until my next edition of this newsletter, stay well, and thanks for taking the time to read this one.