Which AI Assistant is Right For You?

The AI Assistant Landscape in 2023

Last week we talked about using the free version of Chat-GPT vs. shelling out $20/month for the premium version (which offers web access and plugins, significantly increasing the tool’s utility.

But as competition in the space ramps up, competitors are racing at hyper-speed to release and iterate on their own AI assistants. Today, we’ll compare Chat-GPT to two of the other most talked-about assistants: Google’s Bard and relative newcomer Claude 2 from Anthropic.

As you can see from Google Trends data above, Chat GPT has been searched for consistently more than either other tool (a rough proxy for usage), but those lines are converging.

Additionally, searches for “Bard” under-indicates usage of Google’s AI tools in general, since they are increasingly integrating tools into their other tools, including Search, Gmail, and Docs. And people searching for “Claude” is likely to spike in the very near future as awareness increases, since it only launched two days ago.

Here's a quick rundown on how these three stack up against each other:

ChatGPT 3.5

• Free version of OpenAI's popular conversational AI system

• As the most widely used, Chat GPT has a super robust universe of developers working on it, and has the most plugins and tutorials available

• However, the free version currently accesses information from the internet only up to 2021, so if your needs require information on new or rapidly evolving information, it’s probably not the best tool for you.

• Displays improved reasoning, memory and capabilities compared to ChatGPT 3

• Still has issues with providing incorrect information confidently

• Prone to hallucination and fabrication without proper safeguards

Bard

• Google's conversational AI announced to compete with ChatGPT

• Initial demos faced criticism over factual inaccuracies as it’s widely perceived that they somewhat rushed Bard to market to compete with GPT, but improvements have been coming steadily since launch

• Can integrate with search to provide more up-to-date results

• If you’re already using Google Workspaces, like I do, the potential for integrating AI directly into your shared documents is huge, and clearly on the radar. I’m already testing features by signing up for Google Workspace Labs, which you can do here.

Claude 2

• Created by AI safety startup Anthropic with the stated goal to be “helpful, harmless, and honest” - let’s see how that pans out as more people use it, but allegedly it will refrain from providing certain types of harmful, unethical or dangerous information

• Early consensus in the AI nerdom on Twitter seems to indicate that it can be more conversational and natural sounding than past dialogue models, check out @itsPaulAI’s assessment below:

• The ability to upload and have the tool learn from your personal documents obviously has a ton of use cases, in terms of both working with an AI that can write in your voice (assuming you have a repository of docs you’re able to upload)

• Can’t currently access the internet but includes information more up to date than Chat-GPT’s free version, (think 2023 knowledge base vs. 2021 knowledge base)

• Like GPT, it has both free and paid versions. Unlike GPT, they charge by usage rather than a flat monthly rate - full pricing info is here.

Key Differences:

• Claude emphasizes safety and truthfulness controls, as well as an ability to customize itself to your voice by integrating your library of documents

• ChatGPT 4 strives for human-like conversation abilities, has great features and new exciting things in the paid version pretty much daily, but info in the free version can be stale

• Bard's seems like the tool that you might be least likely to go to directly and explicitly for assistance, but I suspect that as it becomes more integrated with your Gmail and Workspace (if you use those!), it will be the tool that just kind of slips into your day to day as a feature across all Google products.

It remains early days for these AI assistants. Time will tell how Claude's focus on ethics stacks up against ChatGPT's impressive, but sometimes problematic conversational skills and Bard's ability to integrate seamlessly with Google’s other ubiquitous products. For now I’m using all three, but only paying for GPT, but I am really excited by the features I’m seeing coming to Google Labs which will likely soon be rolled out more widely.

In the meantime - hope this was useful as you evaluate where to spend your precious time learning to use these new tools, and - as always! - please reach out with any feedback or topics you’d like to see in a future Looly newsletter. What AI questions do you want answers to?

Enjoy the weekend!

Caitlin