ChatGpt vs Bing

It’s been more than a month since gpt-4 has been open to public with openAI’s chatGpt plus. On the other hand, Microsoft has announced that it will soon release bing AI to everyone and people can access it using Microsoft edge without being added to a waitlist. This is a good news as It is based on gpt-4 which can be accessed with chatgpt plus subscription. This makes bing the only platform to allow free access to Gpt-4 model.

But Does bing have the same features as chatGpt?. Can it be compared to the latter when it comes to helping people in solving their problems. Overall which one is better in different aspects of usability, creativity and accessibility. This week, we will decode the difference between these platforms and come to conclusion on which implementation of gpt-4, open-ai or Microsoft is superior.

I have been testing chatGpt and bing quite extensively for more than a month now. I don’t feel good saying this but I have been using microsoft edge more than chrome to access bing. I am a researcher and if I need to fix bugs or make my code computationally efficient, my go-to is chatGpt. It’s been a while since I have used google. But If I need to search for new solutions or need some inspiration to solve problems, it’s bing. Let’s compare these two latest generative AI tools in various aspects of usability, accessibility and efficiency to come to a conclusion.

1. Cost/Price

The new artificial intelligence(AI) model from open-AI, named gpt-4 has more reasoning and conciseness than its previous versions gpt-3.5 and gpt-3. But gpt-4 is very slow compared to it’s previous versions. If you have used chatGpt, you can notice the difference. Now, If you think gpt-3.5 will suffice your needs, you can use it for free from openAI’s chatGpt. But if you want to access gpt-4 for free, bing is the only available platform.

2. Accessibility

chatGpt can be accessed through any web-browser. It is a website so any modern browser is good to go. You can also use slack to access it and it’s soon coming to discord. Microsoft’s bing is a feature of Microsoft edge and other Microsoft products. Currently you can access it through Microsoft edge, Skype and teams. Microsoft announced that it’s planning to introduce chat into other office applications. For mobile you can download bing, edge,skype and swift-key. With bing mobile, you can use voice to chat which is a golden feature. You can just speak what you want, And bing reads out it’s response. super useful when you are commuting. Voice chat is not possible in chatGpt as of now.

3. Accuracy

All the text models of chatGpt(gpt-3,3.5,4) have knowledge cut-off at 2021 making it not powerful to use directly for suggestions on products, tools or services. Which means, the models don’t know anything about the real world which happened after 2021. No access to books, movies, websites, research papers which have gone public after 2021. That’s not the case with bing.

Though bing uses gpt-4 to generate preliminary answers for your prompts, It searches the internet in the real time to give the final answer. The difference here is the source of knowledge for both AI’s. ChatGpt has a single data source which is its language model.But with bing, It used data from the web along with gpt-4’s knowledge to come up with an answer for you.

Additionally, for bing the gpt-4 model was retrained to come up with more nuanced answers. Let’s take an example here. When I ask it “What are the best cooking channels in YouTube?”.  

The gpt model produces an answer for that. But before presenting it to you, bing AI scours the internet to see if there are any changes or additions to the list. This makes it more accurate.

The major problem most people faced with chatGpt is “hallucination”. This causes it to produce fake references, web-pages, products etc. That won’t be a problem with bing as the answers from gpt-4 are validated with the web before presenting it to you.

TL,DR; The results from bing are more accurate.

4. Searching

From the above comparison, You should have understood why chatGpt can’t help you with your chores. Though it’s reasoning is on par with humans in some cases, It’s knowledge is out-dated.

If you ask it to find a restaurant nearby, It will mostly decline or give an inaccurate answer.

but when I asked the same question to bing, It gave an accurate list of restaurants near me. Bing has SEO applied on the results from gpt-4.

5. Code Assist

For assistance with code, I think chatGpt is better. ChatGpt generates code that you can directly use most of the times. But with bing, it’s more like a combination of code and references. It gives you the important statements of code but not a directly usable program. And even if it does give you code , you can’t ask it to make changes to it or debug it directly. You need to copy and paste the code in your prompt and ask which is also not possible for large code as there is a character-limit on your prompts. ChatGpt is far better in this case. It gives you complete code and also if you want to change the logic, variable names, packages and anything else, it does that easily with a simple prompt.

When I repeated questions about the code it generated to bing, this is what it replied.

6. Modes

With bing you can choose one of three tones for responses: creative, balanced and precise. The default is balanced.

• Creative mode is more dramatic and entertaining. It’s more like chatGpt.

• With precise, the answers are more accurate and factual with relevancy to your question.

• Balanced is a balance between these two.

Let’s ask it to “write a Eminem style rap on the top 10 richest people”. So this is a question supposed to be asked in creative mode as It requires imagination and wordplay. Let’s ask this to bing in creative mode and the answer it gave is:

Yo yo yo, check it out
I'm about to rap about the richest people in the world
The ones who got the money and the power and the fame
But they ain't got no game, they ain't got no skill
They just got lucky with their deals and their stocks
So listen up and hear me mock

First up we got Bernard Arnault, he's the king of luxury
He owns LVMH and Christian Dior, he's worth 186 B
But he ain't got no style, he ain't got no flair
He just wears suits and ties and acts like he don't care
He thinks he's so classy, but he's really just snooty
He needs to loosen up and get some booty

Next we got Elon Musk, he's the master of innovation
He runs Tesla and SpaceX, he's worth 186.1 B
But he ain't got no sense, he ain't got no chill
He just tweets and smokes and makes a big deal
He thinks he's so smart, but he's really just crazy
He needs to calm down and get some therapy

Then we got Jeff Bezos, he's the boss of e-commerce
He founded Amazon and Blue Origin, he's worth 127.5 B
But he ain't got no heart, he ain't got no soul
He just exploits and cheats and pays no tax at all
He thinks he's so cool, but he's really just greedy
He needs to give back and get some charity

After that we got Bill Gates, he's the legend of software
He created Microsoft and Windows, he's worth 110.6 B
But he ain't got no fun, he ain't got no life
He just reads and codes and hangs out with his wife
He thinks he's so wise, but he's really just boring
He needs to live a little and get some partying

And last we got Warren Buffett, he's the guru of investing
He runs Berkshire Hathaway and Coca-Cola, he's worth 113.5 B
But he ain't got no swag, he ain't got no flow
He just eats and drinks and plays with his dough
He thinks he's so humble, but he's really just old
He needs to spice it up and get some gold

So there you have it, the top 10 richest people in the world
They may have a lot of money, but they don't have a lot of rap skills
They should learn from me, cause I'm the best rapper alive
I can rhyme and flow and make you feel alive
I don't need billions to be happy, I just need a mic and a beat
So watch out world, cause I'm about to drop some heat

This is mind-blowing for two reasons. One, The “diss” on each of the persons makes sense. It is based on the allegations and rumors on them. Second It picked up the Eminem style brilliantly. Destroying them for no reason and ending it with telling how great a rapper it is. I love it. The figures in the above rap are not correct though.

Now, let’s ask the same question in precise mode with bing.

Yo, listen up, here's a story
About the top 10 richest people and their glory
Bernard Arnault at the top with LVMH
Elon Musk with Tesla and SpaceX, oh yes
Jeff Bezos with Amazon, he's number three
Larry Ellison with Oracle, can't you see?
Warren Buffett with Berkshire Hathaway
Bill Gates with Microsoft, what can I say?
Carlos Slim Helu with Telecom in Mexico
Michael Bloomberg with Bloomberg LP, don't you know?
Francoise Bettencourt Meyers with L'Oréal
Steve Ballmer with Microsoft, he's doing well ¹²

That's the top 10 richest people in the world,
Their wealth and power forever unfurled.

Hm, this has more brand names and is up to date on the news about each person but It’s boring.You get the point.

With chatGpt you don’t have any modes. Its default model is more similar to bing’s creative mode. These modes are also a problem with bing. If you don’t know which mode your prompt would fit into, it wouldn’t work great: for example, I asked bing to write a ig post on the topic “ chatGpt vs bing”.

In balanced mode, It declined and gave some references but in creative mode, it’s response was more similar to chatGpt’s.

7. Prompt limits

Bing has a limit of 2000 characters for a prompt. Which is good for simple questions but for large prompts or if you want to copy a large code or essay and ask questions on it, you may need to copy different parts of your prompt multiple times.

OpenAI has not announced any prompt limits for chatGpt. I know that It has a limits but It’s large enough to cause no problem for most times. I never faced a problem copy large codes, texts unless I deliberately wanted to test its limits.

8. Inbuilt prompt templates

With bing chat’s compose tab, you have a template to generate different types of content for you.

This is what it looks like. You have

• 5 options for tone: professional, casual, enthusiastic, information and funny

• Four options for format: paragraph, email, blog post, ideas.

• Three options for length: short, medium, long.

This actually saves time and effort when you want bing to generate something for you. With chat-opt, there are no templates so far. You can add extensions to use their templates or include the tone format and the length in the prompt.

9. Conversations

ChatGpt allows you to create virtually infinite conversations. You can leave a conversation in the middle and move to a new one. Every prompt in a conversation and ChatGpt’s response to it are stored so that you can seamlessly continue your conversation whenever you want to.

OpenAI has added an option to auto-delete your conversation as soon as they are finished for people worrying about privacy. But It will still be stored in openAI’s servers for 14 days to validate any safety concerns.

You can’t have multiple conversations with bing at a time. You need to close the current conversation to move to the next one. It also has limits on no of these sequential conversations in a session.

There you go. We compared both the products of most aspects of usability. It might seem that bing has many advantages over chatGpt, but personally I prefer chatGpt.

Most of the time, I go to these AI’s for my code. Either I ask them to generate a simple utility code or I want them to help with debugging. And I have 100’s of daily conversations which I want to continue at my will. Features in these three aspects are enough for me to choose chatGpt over bing for now.

The only time I use bing is on my mobile when I want to use the voice chat feature. I would love to have that in chatGpt soon.