ChatGPT vs Google Bard (2024): What Are The Main Differences?

ChatGPT and Google Bard are AI chatbots designed to generate responses to prompts. When used appropriately, ChatGPT and Google Bard can be used to support certain business processes in content production, development and more. Take a look at each tool’s features, pros and cons to see which AI chatbot would be best for your business.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI that generates human-like responses based on text input. It has been trained on a huge amount of internet text and is called a large language model.

What is Google Bard?

Google Bard is another AI chatbot. Like ChatGPT, Google Bard can answer questions and generate text from prompts.

ChatGPT vs. Google Bard: Comparison table

Google Bard vs ChatGPT: Main differences

One major difference is that the free version of ChatGPT lacks up-to-date information, while Bard can access the internet. Bard also does not yet feature a paid tier.

The underpinnings of the two AI chatbots are also different: ChatGPT is based on OpenAI’s GPT 3-5 or GPT-4, depending on free or paid access, and Bard is based on Google’s Gemini Pro or PaLM 2, depending on the language and country. Bard can interpret images, is interoperable and supports extensions that draw data from Google products such as Google Flights, Hotels, Maps, Drive, Gmail, Docs and YouTube. An upgrade to ChatGTP Plus allows access to many third-party plugins for expanded functionality.

Bard allows people to upload files for analysis, identification or captioning, which is not possible in ChatGPT. An upgrade to ChatGPT Plus, however, allows image analysis features as well as the ability to create an image from a prompt.

SEE: OpenAI’s GPT Store is Now Open for Chatbot Builders (TechRepublic)

ChatGPT and Google Bard pricing

ChatGPT

ChatGPT’s basic version is free. For $20 per month, ChatGPT Plus gives subscribers faster response times, access to new features and access to GPT-4 (the free version provides access to GPT-3.5). The GPT-4 API was made generally available in July 2023. A ChatGPT Team plan adds management of team account roles and the ability to share conversations and GPTs among team members.

Google Bard

Google Bard is free, with an unlimited number of questions. Google’s products have often remained free since the company mostly profits off of advertising.

Feature comparison: ChatGPT vs. Google Bard

Text generation

ChatGPT and Google Bard are useful tools for producing text –– anything from summarizing information to generating a list to creating a poem to writing an essay. Ask either AI system to explain a topic, compare or contrast two or more things or draft an email, and you’ll likely obtain a useful response.

Conversational responses

ChatGPT and Google Bard are trained on datasets that include hundreds of billions of parameters, which results in remarkably human-like responses. Further, GPT-4 has more than 100 trillion parameters.

Since Google Bard  has instant access to the internet, it can produce more current responses than ChatGPT’s responses. For instance, if asked “what happened yesterday in Budapest?” Google Bard can give several bullet points of news events, whereas ChatGPT makes inferences based on the data available as of the most recent training update. However, ChatGPT Plus can browse the internet and return similarly up-to-date answers as Google Bard.

Employs context

ChatGPT collects information from previous conversations and prior interactions with the user, which means it can use context when engaging in a chat. Bard is also able to use context in the conversations and can pick up where a user left off.

For instance, if you ask: “What do you think about the new employee description I mentioned the other day?” Bard can respond using the previous cues. However, it sometimes struggles. In this case, “the first Moon mission I asked about” was Chandrayaan-3. Neither of these systems offer as long a context window as another generative AI alternative: Claude.

Uploads: Images and documents

Google Bard lets you upload an image and ask the system to analyze and tell you details about the image or create a caption for it.

While the free version of ChatGPT does not support image uploads, an upgrade to ChatGPT Plus not only allows image upload, analysis and captioning, but also lets you create an image with a prompt. For example, you use a text prompt to create an image to illustrate a story, suggest a setting or convey a concept. Similarly, you may upload a document, such as a PDF, then ask ChatGPT questions about the document or for a summary.

ChatGPT pros and cons

Pros of ChatGPT

• Speedy response times: ChatGPT is superior to previous generations of AI chatbots because of the speed of its responses, which makes it help businesses become more efficient. ChatGPT Plus is faster than Google Bard.
• Ability to generate human-like responses: ChatGPT can produce more natural-sounding text than previous generations of AI chatbots, largely due to the vast amount of data it has been trained on.
• User friendly: ChatGPT can perform a wide range of tasks, from translating to condensing paragraphs to producing song lyrics, and it can do so for a wide audience. Its simple interface and straightforward responses make it an easy tool for those without technical expertise.
• Supports many programming languages: ChatGPT supports Python, JavaScript, Java and a dozen other programming languages.
• Supports 20+ languages: ChatGPT “can understand and generate text” in more than 20 languages.

Cons of ChatGPT

• Limited accuracy and reliability: ChatGPT’s responses may contain errors since it is using training data. It is also not current, although ChatGPT Plus allows access to internet information.
• Hidden bias: ChatGPT may produce biased responses due to the dataset it is trained on. The source material itself may contain biases, which can affect the responses offered by ChatGPT. For instance, ChatGPT is not great at answering questions that are not in English and may produce errors.
• No real-world understanding: ChatGPT is limited to the dataset it was trained on, and though it can produce impressive responses, it is based on what is available online, not what has been learned through real human experience.

Google Bard pros and cons

Pros of Google Bard

• High-quality text generation: Google Bard can produce human-like text that can be used for a range of tasks, from answering queries to summarizing material to translating text.
• Large dataset: Google Bard is pretrained on a massive dataset of text and code, which allows it to generate more comprehensive and informative responses than smaller models.
• Creative text output: Google Bard can assist in creating a variety of text, from job descriptions to hiring letters to writing reports, which makes it a versatile tool for the enterprise.
• Write code in many programming languages: Google claims that Bard can generate code for simple and complex tasks alike in several programming languages from prompts written in natural language.
• Language support: Bard supports more than 40 languages.

Cons of Google Bard

• Computational resources: Large transformer models use a lot of computational resources.
• An Experiment: As an experiment, Bard may get things wrong or provide inaccurate information.

SEE: How to use Google Bard (2023): A comprehensive guide (TechRepublic)

Cautions when using AI chatbots

ChatGPT and Google Bard are still in development and may contain errors or biases. Therefore, users should be critical of the information provided by ChatGPT and Google Bard to ensure its accuracy. Bard offers a “Google button” to double-check a response against trusted search sources.

In addition, there are privacy concerns that come along with using ChatGPT or Google Bard, which collect personal information much like search engines do. Your IP address, text and even links to your information, like phone, email and social media can be gathered.

Should your organization use ChatGPT or Google Bard?

ChatGPT and Google Bard are free — unless you opt for the paid ChatGPT Plus or ChatGPT Team — and both AI chatbots are trained on large natural language models, meaning their responses tend to be similar.

Google Bard has several features that help it stand out. For one, you can get “draft” versions of the response, which offers a variety of responses. Further, Google Bard is completely up-to-date, with access to online information. In December 2023, Google upgraded the engine behind Bard from PaLM 2 to Gemini Pro, which should significantly improve the system’s capabilities.

ChatGPT, on the other hand, provides impressive responses but lacks access to current internet information. ChatGPT Plus — with GPT-4, access to DALL-E for images, browsing and advanced data analysis — is widely considered the leading AI chatbot.

It’s important to remember that both AI chatbots can be prone to error and bias and collect your personal data — not just the information you input — and can be tools of misuse for bad actors. Learn more about how generative AI works along with its benefits and dangers.

Methodology

We evaluated these products based on the free versions of ChatGPT and Google Bard, which are free by default. We tested out how the two AI chatbots would answer the same questions, and we asked ChatGPT and Google Bard about more current news items to test the limitations.

Editor’s note: This article was originally written by Hope Reese. It was updated by Megan Crouse and extensively updated by Andy Wolber.