ChatGPT Vs Bing Chat: The Big Differences And Which Is Best
Artificial Intelligence is slowly becoming integral to human lives in the 21st century. From the security measures on your smartphone to the weirdly specific ads you see on search and social media, AI is everywhere and you might not even have been aware of it.
Virtual Assistants like Siri and Alexa are some of the most popular integrations of AI in day-to-day life, and if you like them you have to love AI chatbots. With an AI chatbot, you can just sit back and relax while it follows your instructions to write an essay, compose a poem, write computer code — they can do all these and more, the possibilities are quite nearly endless.
ChatGPT and Bing Chat are two of the most popular chatbots out there. Both are fundamentally AI-powered chatbots, but they have their differences. This begs the question, which one is better? But in order to find out, you first have to know more about them individually.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT has become every student's best friend ever since OpenAI unveiled it on November 30, 2022. It can process human languages using AI technology and, as described by OpenAI itself, "interacts in a conversational way".
Completely free and open to the general public as of now, ChatGPT can be accessed by simply visiting chat.openai.com or lesser known ai.com and signing up for a free account. Both controversial and revolutionary in equal measure, this chatbot has created quite a stir recently, with people running to its website in droves.
ChatGPT recorded 100 million monthly active users in only two months since its release, which is much quicker than the likes of Instagram and TikTok. The usage of the chatbot is certainly sky-high at the moment, in fact, it is so high that the website is often at maximum capacity, prompting you to check back in later when network traffic is less. As a solution to this problem, OpenAI now offers an option for you to subscribe to ChatGPT Plus which gives you a few additional benefits including priority access even when the server is at maximum user capacity.
What is Bing Chat?
With the instant fame and success of ChatGPT after its release, the ideal background was created for more of the same and Microsoft wasted no time in creating Bing Chat. Another AI-based natural language processor capable of carrying out conversations, Bing Chat was announced by Microsoft on February 7, 2023.
Similar to ChatGPT, this will also cost you nothing to use but you need to download the new version of Microsoft Edge. After downloading it, you can immediately start conversing with Bing Chat in one of two ways. You can go to Bing using Microsoft Edge and choose the "Chat" option or you can click the "Discover" button on the top right corner of the Microsoft Edge web browser.
Microsoft has also laid out certain conditions for using Bing Chat including imposing a limit on the number of daily conversations you can have with it. So as of this moment, you can only have 150 chats with Bing Chat per day, with the number of chats per session being limited to 15.
The technology behind the two
One of the biggest differences between the two is their respective technologies. Both chatbots are powered by an LLM or a Large Language Model and while ChatGPT uses the GPT-3.5 LLM, Bing Chat uses the newer GPT-4 LLM.
Microsoft claims that GPT-4 is the more accurate and capable one, and when diving a little deeper, it indeed has an edge over its predecessor GPT-3.5. When compared with GPT-3.5, Chatbots powered by GPT-4 can provide more creative replies to queries, retain the memory of previous conversations for longer, and can even accept and reply to visual queries like pictures.
Both chatbots can be used with GPT-4, but while Bing Chat does it for free, you have to pay to upgrade ChatGPT with this perk. It is also another benefit of subscribing to ChatGPT Plus. So when it comes to this, Bing Chat takes home the cake.
Their respective limitations
With the impressive arsenal of capabilities both ChatGPT and Bing Chat offer, it seems almost a given that they would have restraints in some shape or form.
Microsoft's chat limit imposed on Bing Chat is one such limitation. This was deemed necessary by Microsoft after events were reported of the chatbot going seemingly haywire and providing strangely worrying responses following prolonged conversations. Current usage of the chatbot would make you deem it perfectly professional and even courteous with nothing untoward going on. While chats with Bing Chat are capped at 150 per day, ChatGPT places no such limits on its users. However, ChatGPT has an hourly limit for queries that you can hit — there's no official statement from OpenAI on what that limit is.
ChatGPT also has a specific limitation based on its accessibility of information. It does not use the Internet to provide services to users, which restricts its knowledge of world affairs to only up until 2021 and also means that it can't cross-reference with other sources to ensure that its responses are factual. On the other hand, Bing Chat has the ability to access the internet for information purposes, so it has no knowledge restrictions of this type.
Which one takes the win?
When it comes to Bing Chat vs. ChatGPT, Bing Chat seems like it does a lot of things better and more accurately than ChatGPT, but its chat limitations take away some of its credit. On the other hand, ChatGPT looks as if it is less capable than Bing Chat, but its ability to learn from its training data makes it better at writing in a specific style or tone than Bing Chat.
Lengthy writing is also not Bing Chat's thing, with it usually providing accurate, short, and to-the-point answers while ChatGPT can go deeper and add flair to its writing (even if accuracy is questionable).
This goes to show that neither chatbot is inherently better than the other, as they are both the best in what they are specialized to do. It all just boils down to your personal preference and what you are looking for from your AI chatbot.