ChatGPT vs Bard vs ERNIE Bot | The race between Microsoft, Google, and Baidu to dominate this tech segment

The impact of ChatGPT is already well known. There's no denying how innovative and interesting it is, particularly its intelligence and multitasking capabilities.

But this goes much further…

If ChatGPT achieves the same level of productivity as it currently does, it would be a major blow to Google. Furthermore, it would alter, among other things, how websites are ranked in search results, since Microsoft is integrating ChatGPT into its Bing search engine. This would allow users of the platform to ask direct questions and receive specific answers, rendering current website ranking methods obsolete and jeopardizing a significant part of Google's business.

Google responds with Bard

What is Bard? According to Sunda Pichai (CEO of Google and Alphabet):

“Bard is an experimental conversational AI service powered by LaMDA.” Recall that Google released LaMDA in May 2021. Ref 1

We also know that Google suffered a major setback when introducing Bard to the public. This involved a Twitter post about Bard providing inaccurate information on a historical topic related to the James Webb Telescope. This caused his stock to drop by 7%, among other things.

But despite Bard's mistake, let's remember that these technologies are still under development and competition is fierce and rapid among the major players, meaning they don't have as much time and flexibility to conduct all the necessary tests and release a fully functional product. Therefore, we can't ignore how Bard is built and how it evolves.

As I was saying, Bard is based on LaMDA, which stands for "Language Model for Dialogue Applications." It's a very powerful model for resolving interactions with natural dialogue. It can handle a wide range of topics quite smoothly, allowing humans to interact with technology in a much more natural way.

LaMDA is based on Transformer, a neural network architecture developed and released by Google Research and made publicly available in April 2017. Ref 2

Transformer's architecture has the ability to create models that can be trained to read many words. The model, in turn, can pay attention to how these words relate to each other, and then predict the possible words that will come next. In other words, it learns from the interaction and the information provided.

With this information, we can see that Bard would be a fairly strong competitor for ChatGPT. However, Microsoft has a significant advantage in marketing and generating market opinions.

What's happening in Asia? Baidu answers

ERNIE Bot, or "Wenxin Yiyan" in Chinese, is a tool developed by Baidu, the most widely used search engine in China. This search engine is specifically designed to work in Chinese and is headquartered in Beijing. Some call it "The Chinese Google." We're talking about a very powerful tech giant, so we have no doubt that it has the resources, funding, and capacity to develop sufficient capabilities for ERNIE Bot to compete head-to-head with Bard or ChatGPT.

To give an idea of the power of this company, we can cite examples of some of its most important developments, such as robotaxis. Ref 3

Baidu has obtained the permits to begin operating its robotaxis (driverless taxis), Apollo Go, making it a pioneer in its country and much of the world.

Baidu plans to launch ERNIE Bot to the public in March 2023. The company says that ERNIE Bot will be able to generate human-sounding texts based on user input.

It is also important to note that no company in China has the same level of technology (in AI) as Baidu, especially in the field of natural language processing.

Baidu claims that ERNIE's model surpasses the technology behind ChatGPT (Gpt-3.5) in every parameter, thanks to a neural network with 260 billion parameters, the largest known. Among the tasks it is capable of performing are language understanding, language generation, and text-to-image conversion. Ref 4

Baidu shares surged as much as 14.41 percent during the first part of trading on Tuesday in Hong Kong.

Summary

The truth is, we're witnessing a very exciting competition, based on the opportunities presented by Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, data, and the clash between two tech giants. This competition is deepening the design of models and technologies that enhance the ability of tools to understand user information and needs, transforming it into knowledge and useful answers more efficiently. This will make it easier for people to find answers more directly to the questions we typically search for in our browsers. In other words, we won't have to navigate through a sea of links to find the right pages; instead, the search engine will deliver the most direct answer to what we're looking for.

This will definitely impact users, but also very strongly different business models, such as the advertising generated in each of the searches and in the visits we generally make to web pages to look for the information we need.

Therefore, it is very important to follow this technological competition very closely, as it will affect us all equally (businesses, people, governments, etc.).