Backstory

As you all already know at the beginning of 2023 there was HUGE hype around one product called ChatGPT. In a matter of months, this became one of the most visited websites in the world and AI now went mainstream. All big tech companies now placed big gambles on AI to be the next big thing and so did Google coming up with Google Bard shortly after April 2023.

Why did Bard fail?

Below I will list all the reasons why Google Bard failed to take over ChatGPT as the biggest AI chatbot in the world.

• It was made by Google making it one of many concerns over privacy because judging by how Google earns money a bit of extra data collection through Bard would have helped

• There was no real benefit to switching to Bard apart from the "search on Google" button and the multiple responses. The animation quality is actually even lower than ChatGPT and the model isn't even that good for people to consider switching.

• Google Bard is very hard to find because it is hidden under labs and was barely advertised at all. Due to this only tech and AI enthusiasts and programmers got on to Bard. The rest of the public though had and has no clue how to find Google Bard.

• The language model can sometimes be even worse than ChatGPT, during my test when I told Bard to generate an article about chipmunks being stupid and aggressive it actually did what I told it to do, but the thing I told wasn't true, while ChatGPT (3.5) didn't listen and generated an article about why chipmunks are NOT stupid and aggressive.

Why was ChatGPT so successful?

ChatGPT's extraordinary success is so mind-blowing when looking at it; 500 million users in 3 months.

• It was one of the first of its kind making it a huge hit because there simply were no alternatives and making everyone curious about what it was.

• It was made by a startup which made people more likely to use it than Google's Bard because people are generally more inclined to use a startup's product than an already massive company's new product.

• People were excited, AI was something entirely new for most people except for ML and AI enthusiasts and techies so they were generally very blown away by what it could do, making them lifelong customers.

• When someone already used it they didn't want to switch to Bard because of the ability to customize the Chatbot for you so that you would get a more personalized experience with ChatGPT. People just didn't want to do it al over again and stayed with ChatGPT.

The Future

Bard may actually beat ChatGPT in the future because of the possibility of OpenAI going bankrupt in 2024, but those are just speculations. What isn't a speculation though is that Bard has just been another Google flop that probably will be buried alongside Google Plus, Google Glass, Google Nexus and many more.

You might be wondering, "What about Bing chat?" but the truth is that since Microsoft invested in OpenAI they traded their GPT 4 language model to Microsoft for free so that Bing is based on GPT 4.

Conclusion

Both Chatbots are great, but Bard may just have been a tick too late to catch the trend of AI making it another Google Flop, or it is part of a Google master plan nobody knows about that will change AI forever. For now, though ChatGPT remains the most popular AI chatbot in the world.