The Verge: “The chatbots are out in force, but which is better and for what task? We’ve compared Google’s Bard, Microsoft’s Bing, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT models with a range of questions spanning common requests from holiday tips to gaming advice to mortgage calculations. Naturally, this is far from an exhaustive rundown of these systems’ capabilities (AI language models are, in part, defined by their unknown skills — a quality dubbed “capability overhang” in the AI community) but it does give you some idea about these systems’ relative strengths and weaknesses. You can (and indeed should) scroll through our questions, evaluations, and conclusion below, but to save you time and get to the punch quickly: ChatGPT is the most verbally dextrous, Bing is best for getting information from the web, and Bard is… doing its best. (It’s genuinely quite surprising how limited Google’s chatbot is compared to the other two.) Some programming notes before we begin, though. First: we were using OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-4, on ChatGPT. This is also the AI model that powers Bing, but the two systems give quite different answers. Most notably, Bing has other abilities: it can generate images and can access the web and offers sources for its responses (which is a super important attribute for certain queries). However, as we were finishing up this story, OpenAI announced it’s launching plug-ins for ChatGPT that will allow the chatbot to also access real-time data from the internet. This will hugely expand the system’s capabilities and give it functionality much more like Bing’s. But this feature is only available to a small subset of users right now so we were unable to test it. When we can, we will…”