Bard | David Lee King

Yes folks, the AI chatbot era has hit, big time. Some of you have been playing with ChatGPT, which has made a huge splash in recent months. It does a good enough job of writing things (i.e., student research papers, etc) that the company has also released a tool that can tell if a chunk of text was written by AI or by an actual person.

All that to say – this version of AI is a pretty big deal, and one that you need to pay attention to. I think there’s the potential for AI to change a bunch of stuff in our lives; certainly a bunch of stuff related to our jobs.

Including how we search the web. Pretty soon, we won’t be looking for search results. We’ll be looking for answers. And AI chatbots will provide those answers for us.

Lazy? The most amazing thing since sliced bread? You’ll have to be the judge of that.

For now, here are three pretty new AI technologies to start learning about:

1. ChatGPT (the “granddaddy” of the new AI chatbots).

What is ChatGPT? Here’s how they describe themselves, from their website: “ChatGPT is an advanced AI chatbot trained by OpenAI which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.”

ChatGPT basically looks like a search box that you type something into. Or copy/paste a bunch of text into. You can ask it questions of all sorts, or ask it to do something (i.e., write a new bio for me), and then it provides a response.

2. Microsoft’s new AI-powered Bing search.

Microsoft has their own version of an AI chatbot that works through the Bing search engine. To use it, you have to visit Bing, put yourself on a waitlist … and then use Microsoft’s Edge web browser to check it out (I’m on the waitlist).

This one uses the newest version of OpenAI’s large language model. It’s the successor or next-generation version of the AI model that ChatGPT isn’t yet using. It’s apparently been customized for search.

The Bing model provides search insights (not just search results). They’re pitching this as bringing together search, browsing, and chat into one unified experience.

Through that unified experience, the goal is this: when you do a search, you’ll get search results, just like normal. But you’ll also get an answer. For example, if you search for how to make a chocolate cake, you’ll get the usual cake recipe results. But you’ll also get detailed instructions for making a chocolate cake.

And of course, it’s a Microsoft product. So they really, really want you to download the MicroSoft Edge web browser to try out the new chatbot.

3. Bard by Google.

Google also has an AI chatbot that will be released soon. Their product is named Bard, and should be released in the next couple of weeks. Bard is a conversational AI service, powered on Google’s LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications).

Bard sounds similar to ChatGPT and the new Bing product. One of Google’s examples is to “explain new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old.” That sounds very ChatGPT-like to me!

Google is also planning to add Bard into Google Search. So again, instead of just asking for search results, you can ask for search insights (i.e., answers).

Bonus #4! Quora’s Poe app.

Quieter, but also interesting – Quora has launched a new AI chatbot app called Poe. The Poe app lets you ask questions (sorta like you do with Quora). The difference is that you’ll get answers from a range of AI chatbots, including OpenAI and Anthropic. They’re hoping this app helps evolve their Quora service. It’s only an iOS app at the moment, so iPhone users, test it out!

There are definitely other AI services starting to appear (photo and video AI generators come to mind). But these, for the most part, have all appeared in the last couple of weeks.

And I think these all have the potential to change the web as we know it!

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