It has only been two months since the lunching of AI chatbot ChatGPT by the firm OpenAI - and it did not take too long for the world to start noticing what a total definitive change this really is.
No matter what the subject is about, whether to write a specific program code, an occasional speech to give or a homework question to be answered, ChatGPT has proved that it can deliver - and in a correct way.
Google's parent company Alphabet made $104bn (£86bn) in revenue in 2020 alone, just from search. Taking even a tiny fraction of that market would be a huge prize - and it is no coincidence that Microsoft, which owns the search engine Bing, has announced a multi-billion-dollar partnership with OpenAI.
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The internet is full of supposedly leaked pictures of a ChatGPT-powered Bing. Imagine going to a search engine, typing in your query and back comes one definitive answer, rather than pages and pages of links and ads to wade through?
Google has just announced the launch of its own rival - an AI chatbot called Bard. It is understood to have brought the announcement forward following all the speculation about Microsoft and ChatGPT.
Bard is based on Google's language learning model Lamda, which is said to be so human-like in its responses that one engineer who worked on it said he believed it was sentient but he was fired after that, and Google has always denied the claim. The tech giant has also just announced a $300m investment in a firm called Anthropic, which is developing a rival to ChatGPT.
Meta, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, launched its own AI chatbot Blenderbot in the US last summer, and in China, the tech giant Baidu says an advanced version of its chatbot Ernie (also known as Wenxin Yiyan) will roll out in March 2023.
Are we about to see a battle of the chatbots?
ChatGPT itself said, rather diplomatically, that "it is not a matter of one being better than the other" and "I do not have the capability or intention to harm any company, including Google," it added when someone asks her.
After reviewing what’s mentioned above we would admit that with investment dollars pouring into AI chat, ChatGPT has to toughen up on that particular viewpoint.