What to know about ChatGPT’s rivals

Google’s Bard, an artificial intelligence chatbot that rivals OpenAI’s ChatGPT, launched in Europe Thursday, after Google rectified user security concerns that had led to the European Union blocking its debut.

We’ve curated insights and reporting on how ChatGPT’s competitors size up and the existential fear facing one bot’s creators.

• Google’s bot doesn’t fare quite so well compared to its competitors. “ChatGPT is the most verbally dextrous, Bing is best for getting information from the web, and Bard is... doing its best,” a team of reporters at The Verge found during extensive bot testing earlier this year. They said it was surprising how “limited” Bard seemed compared to the other two, given that Google’s chatbot messed up a simple chocolate cake recipe request, wrote the dullest poem about a worm, and got a basic math answer incorrect.
• Earlier this week, San Francisco-based AI startup Anthropic debuted Claude 2 — its ChatGTP rival — in the U.S. and U.K. The bot is still in beta testing and is trained on principles based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It’s capable of summarizing texts up to 75,000 words, but still appears to suffer from “hallucinations” — an issue seen in bots which prompts them to lie, fabricate, or offer incorrect answers. — The Guardian
• Anthropic employees spent the weeks ahead of Claude 2’s launch worrying: Not just that the app would buckle under pressure from new users, but also about the existential fear of launching a powerful tool which could fall into the wrong hands. Tech columnist Kevin Roose spent weeks embedded in the company’s offices, hearing the concerns of employees who fear being “modern-day Robert Oppenheimers.” — The New York Times
• As other companies launch their own bots, ChatGPT creator OpenAI is now subject to a wide-ranging Federal Trade Commission investigation. The FTC is probing whether the company is putting personal data and reputations at risk. The U.S. has not yet implemented new regulations on AI, but the FTC is warning OpenAI that existing consumer regulations apply to the company. — The Washington Post

Bard launched in the EU alongside some new upgrades. Now, the bot can speak its answers to you, and it has been trained on 40 different languages. It’s also capable of responding to image prompts.

Bard’s launch in the EU was delayed over concerns of privacy violations for users accessing the software. But Bard is still lagging behind ChatGPT in terms of monthly users: The Wall Street Journal reports that Bard’s website gets 140 million visits a month, less than a tenth of ChatGPT.

Twitter owner Elon Musk also launched his own company called xAI to rival OpenAI which he had walked away from in 2018 after failing to run it himself.