Alphabet, Microsoft back in the race to rule the internet

Alphabet and rival Microsoft are back in the race to rule the internet zeitgeist after Google owner Bard launched a new AI chatbot sensation, ChatGPT.

Just minutes after Google announced the launch of Bard on Monday, Microsoft said it would hold an event at its Redmond headquarters to reveal its AI, setting the stage for the next Chrome-versus- Internet Explorer or Gmail-versus- Hotmail.

Since it opened for public use last year, Microsoft backed OpenAI's ChatGPT has taken the tech world by storm as people worldwide have creative ideas with prompts that the conversational chatbot uses to create everything from poems and novels to jokes and film scripts.

There is a chance that the artificial intelligence service could change how consumers search for information or create content on command, and free up time for white-collar workers.

The services that Google's Bard and ChatGPT would offer are similar. Users will have to key in a question, a request or give a prompt to receive a human-like response.

Microsoft and Google plan to embed AI tools in their search services, Bing and Google Search, which account for a lot of revenue.

Both technologies can distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to digest formats, but the most apparent difference is Bard's ability to include recent events in the responses.

Alphabet's Bard will have access to more data, even though it is not immediately clear how the two services will differ.

Bard draws on information from the internet, while ChatGPT has access to data until 2021.

Bard is based on LaMDA, short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications. A company engineer called the AI generated text with such skill that the technology giant and scientists dismissed it as being sentient.

OpenAI's GPT, or Generative Pre-trained Transformer, was first released in 2020, and the GPT 3.5 series of language models that finished training in early 2022 is the backbone of ChatGPT.

ChatGPT can sometimes write plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers, according to Open AI in a blog post.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post that the conversational AI service will be widely available in the coming weeks.

In the two months after ChatGPT's launch, a number of tech companies have doubled down on generative AI technology, while a number of startups are working on their own projects.

Baidu, China's answer to Google, is the latest company to join the frenzy. Its AI is called Ernie.