ChatGPT vs Google Bard: Which is better? We put them to the test.
Enlarge / An AI-generated image of two robots fighting in an arena. (credit: Benj Edwards / Midjourney)
In today's world of generative AI chatbots, we've witnessed the sudden rise of OpenAI's ChatGPT, introduced in November, followed by Bing Chat in February and Google's Bard in March. We decided to put these chatbots through their paces with an assortment of tasks to determine which one reigns supreme in the AI chatbot arena. Since Bing Chat uses similar GPT-4 technology as the latest ChatGPT model, we opted to focus on two titans of AI chatbot technology: OpenAI and Google.
We tested ChatGPT and Bard in seven critical categories: dad jokes, argument dialog, mathematical word problems, summarization, factual retrieval, creative writing, and coding. For each test, we fed the exact same instruction (called a "prompt") into ChatGPT (with GPT-4) and Google Bard. We used the first result, with no cherry-picking.
It's worth noting that a version of ChatGPT based on the earlier GPT-3.5 model is also available, but we did not use that in the test. Since we used GPT-4 only, we will refer to ChatGPT as "ChatGPT-4" in this article to reduce confusion.