Google’s Bard vs ChatGPT : Who knows Singapore restaurants better?

Today, I got access to Bard, Google’s new generative AI tool that it is trialing with the public.  And of course, I am very curious (as we all are) – how does it compare to ChatGPT?

Many have said that Google – given its extensive investment into AI for years now – could potentially beat out Microsoft and OpenAI (current frontrunners and creators of ChatGPT) with Bard. Google currently dominates the search engine market, with approximately 91% of users opting to use Google search over competitors like Bing (also owned and operated by Microsoft) and Yahoo. We shared this insight in our latest report “the future, by ChatGPT”.

So, we gave Bard the ultimate litmus test; we prompted both generative AI platforms with the exact same string of words: 

“What are the 20 best restaurants in Singapore for a budget under $20 per person?”

Here are the results:

I have to admit, I initially thought that Google would be the clear winner given the extensive reach of their review platform. Google reviews are also tied to maps, hotels, flights and other aspects of their widely used search engine. And, naturally, Bard’s datasets come from many of Google’s products. The generative AI model itself answered a query from one of it’s users, stating:

“Bard’s dataset comes from a variety of sources, including:

Publicly available datasets: These include datasets of text and code from the web, such as Wikipedia, GitHub, and Stack Overflow.

Google’s internal data: This includes data from Google Search, Gmail, and other products.

Data from third-party companies: This includes data from companies that have partnered with Google to provide data for Bard’s training.”

However, as we can see from the above responses, ChatGPT actually named several restaurants in Singapore, whereas Bard simply stated types of food that would be available under the $20 budget. 

Whether that is because the prompt was not digested as well by the AI model, or because Google’s datasets don’t include this variety of information is unknown, but ChatGPT clearly produced the more relevant answer.

I wasn’t ready to give up on Google, however, so we took a shot at regenerating the response:

Although Bard now responded with some restaurant names, most of the suggestions were broader areas, and not specific. Not to mention, some of the restaurants mentioned (Sky on 57 and Raffles Grill) would not fit the under $20 budget specified.

What, if anything, does this say about the AI race? I’ll leave that to you to decide.

P.S. If you have both Bard and Google – do try this test out and let me know what you think of the results! I would love to hear from you.

We are also hosting an event on Thursday, April 6th titled, Off the Record: The Future, by ChatGPT, where we will discuss the implications of generative AI; what is it, who is OpenAI, its impact on major tech companies, and its impact on the rest of us. 

RSVP here:

https://www.eventbrite.sg/e/off-the-record-the-future-by-chatgpt-tickets-594336886627