Triggered by the success of San-Francisco-based OpenAI’s language model chatbot, ChatGPT, Silicon Valley contenders and tech hubs around the world are rushing to grab ranks in the emerging sector of avant-garde Artificial Intelligence.
The business market’s inflation-influenced volatility has goaded innumerable startups and has flustered even Big Tech to make frantic decisions in the heat of the moment, in regard to their AI-powered game. The stakes are higher than ever and companies are vying to go down in history as the worthy adversary of all the other AI models in the market.
The controversial tech showdown has begun with the first big rival of ChatGPT – Bard, powered by Google’s language model LaMDA.
Companies are headed towards making impulsive decisions with products built on state-of-the-art technology that has the potential to make breakthroughs in AI and reshape the biggest players of the industry. It’s a literal treasure mine and companies are on their eleventh hour to compete with the pace or be left behind.
Now tech companies that are attempting to produce new text, images, or other outputs like music and code on their own, are grouped under the umbrella term of artificial intelligence. The capability of products like ChatGPT to generate content without reflecting any errors, biases or falsities, has been heralded as the dawn of a new tech age.
In the few short months that ChatGPT has been live and free for public usage, many frontiers have felt threatened to be replaced, raising fears and concerns over authenticity.
Facing backlash over the fear of sharing data, JPMorgan Chase has restricted its employees to use the chatbot, while Amazon reported similar concerns. Teachers are grappling to ascertain if students are using ChatGPT to cheat; Media outlets are contemplating on using the tool to report news stories.
While the market is aware of tech giants like Microsoft and Google’s versions of conversational AIs, there are many lesser-known companies that have proclaimed themselves as rivals and foes to challenge the superiority of ChatGPT. If you’re wondering how to make the best of the AI tool, here are five uses of ChatGPT.
AI Wars: ChatGPT Versus Competing Companies
Welcome to AI Wars: In this feature, we’re rounding up the pulse of the companies ready to battle with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Google:
When Microsoft launched an AI tool to its beta testers, Google was spurred to launch Bard, as it couldn’t let any competitor challenge its core strength – its search engine.
Parent company Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai announced the release of Bard, currently available only to a limited group of trusted testers. The conversational AI powered by Google’s in-house language model LaMDA, draws on information from the internet to display high-quality responses, in contrast to ChatGPT which uses the data fed to it before 2021.
The frenzied launch announcement failed to impress viewers who criticized Pichai’s haphazard decision and erased $100 billion in valuation from Alphabet on displaying a factual erroneous answer in the first demo and promotional video, squashing people’s standard expectations from Google. This was another blow to the woes of Google amidst volatile layoffs.
The chatbot will be made available to the mass audience in the ‘coming weeks’.
Microsoft
When Microsoft’s voice assistant Cortana was silenced in July 2020, critics lauded the tech giant’s decision to concede in the battle of virtual assistants between Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. CEO Satya Nadella had envisioned something else entirely for Cortana but accepted its defeat in this AI war.
Microsoft’s venture into AI chatbots is considered quite calculated, with its billions of investment into OpenAI, proving that the company doesn’t back down from every challenge and instead is leading this one by tapping into the potential of ChatGPT, well ahead of its competitors.
The tech company’s debut into AI-powered tools planned to infuse ChatGPT’s abilities by leveraging the same technology fuelled in the chatbot, to enhance its Bing search engine and Edge web browser, both heavily superseded by Google search engine and Google Chrome respectively. This move could define the big tech of the next generation, with a promise of upending the way people use the internet to search for information.
Albeit, the results of the ‘more powerful AI tool’ have rippled between impressing and unhinged responses. The new Bing was made available to beta users who found flaws and that the tech could be exploited to give wacky replies.
Users could ask questions and receive annotated answers that were either descriptive or highlighted the particular responses.
But this flex of Bing, also resulted in toying and misuse. Users found a glitch – a now-disabled prompt that revealed the bot’s internal name, Sydney and some of the parameters that were tampered with, such as the behavior defined as ‘Sydney’s responses should avoid being vague, off-topic, or controversial.’
Other miscreants toyed with the chatbot and triggered wayward responses, which forced Microsoft to curb the outlandish replies by setting limits on how many answers or questions a user could be entitled to.
Baidu
Chinese tech giant Baidu is preparing to launch its AI chatbot named ‘Ernie Bot’ by integrating it into its search engine services, in March. Baidu, best known for its search engine namesake, is supported by other online services such as Baidu Maps (mapping), Baidu Baike (encyclopedia), and Baidu Wangpan (cloud storage).
Ernie (Enhanced Representation through kNowledge intEgration), actually came to life in 2019 and has been evolving into a chatbot that can generate conversational responses, ever since. Baidu spokesperson told The Verge that Ernie is trained to excel at natural language understanding (NLU) as well as generation (NLG), along with containing innumerable data with a massive knowledge graph.
Other AI ventures of this Chinese behemoth include developing a text-to-image model named Ernie ViLG, similar to the attributes of OpenAI’s DALL-E and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion AI Image Generator. The future plan for Ernie, as per Baidu, is to be integrated into the search engine, much like Microsoft’s efforts as well as building the chatbot into the interface of Baidu’s upcoming electric vehicle manufactured by Jidu.
Meta
Can there ever be a tech war without the AI tech leader Meta? The owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp has held back in this battle of ChatGPT rivals with fears that its AI tools could spread biased or misleading information. When Meta developed Galactica, which is trained with data from over 48 million papers, reference material, textbooks, and other sources of scientific information, it expected the language model to assist researchers and scientists with summaries and abilities to annotate molecules. But the November launch went up in flames when the scientific community criticized the tech giant’s model for producing disappointing results, and potentially “dangerous” due to its biased and incorrect responses. Meta took the chatbot offline after that. Prior to Galactica, Meta tried creating a digital assistant named BlenderBot 3, but left the audiences unimpressed.
The latest attempt of Meta in the AI space will come to fruition soon, with CEO Zuckerberg announcing its team dedicated to pursuing AI, which will create ‘AI Personas’ depicted to aid people, and also text-to-image based tools for Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.
Anthropic
With Google’s $300 million investment in late 2022, Anthropic is slated to launch its ChatGPT competitor, Claude. An AI research company founded by former employees of OpenAI, Anthropic’s language model is developed via reference to the framework of Constitutional AI, which involves training the chatbot with a set of 10 natural language principles and instructions, based on which the responses are revised automatically.
The aim of this model is to train more and more harmless AI assistants without the requisite of human feedback.
Scale, an AI data platform, concluded that Claude and ChatGPT had a crystal difference – Claude was more inclined to refuse inappropriate conversations and was also prone to making more factual errors, but considered it to be a serious contender in the language model industry.
Many More Contenders To Follow
Other serious companies catching onto the trend of rivaling ChatGPT include Chinese behemoths such as Alibaba, JD.com, You.com and WeChat parent Tencent. They have reported their progress over language models and chatbots to multiple sources including Reuters, CNBC, and The Verge.
Amongst the U.S. giants, Apple might have been consciously absent from this AI race because it’s letting its silent success make the noise. The upcoming event of June, The Apple AI Summit, has fans exhilarated and eagerly awaiting news on the tech giant’s swerve into the AI sector.
Amazon recently announced its partnership with AI startup, Hugging Face to symbolize its entry into the forefront of this rivalry.
Snapchat, once known for its game-changing ‘filters’ tech, is working on a chatbot named MyAI, which is quite similar to ChatGPT’s interface and works as an in-app version, but is currently only available to its $3.99 per month Plus subscribers.
Final Words
With conversational AI tech at the world’s perusal, big tech companies, as well as medium tech companies, are at loggerheads to produce only the best AI services to the audiences. The interesting question is, which one will survive in the coming years to make way for our daily lives, and which one will be left to bite the dust?
