These two AI models claim to be better than ChatGPT. Here’s what we know

ChatGPT was the first AI chatbot to gain massive popularity, setting the standard for all future competitors and making it the one to beat. Now, two new chatbots claim to be better than ChatGPT, and one hasn’t even been released yet. 

Baidu Inc., China’s leading search engine provider, has been working on developing a worthy ChatGPT competitor since March with the release of Ernie Bot. The company is claiming that its latest version of that chatbot, Ernie 3.5, surpasses ChatGPT. 

Also: GPT-3.5  vs GPT-4: Is ChatGPT Plus worth its subscription fee? 

In a statement, the company reported that its chatbot surpasses ChatGPT built on GPT-3.5 in “comprehensive ability” scores and outperformed GPT-4 on “several Chinese-language capabilities.”

To back up its claims, the company cited a report by China Science Daily, a Chinese national newspaper, that ran a test using two benchmarks, AGIEval and C-Eval, to measure the performance of AI models. 

Ernie 3.5 has been testing in public beta for three months. Since then, the company claims it has improved in “efficacy, functionality, and performance.” In the statement, the company also disclosed that the chatbot will support plugins as ChatGPT does. 

Also: ChatGPT vs Bing Chat vs Google Bard: Which is the best AI chatbot? 

Google is also vying to steal ChatGPT’s spot. The tech giant’s first attempt at a ChatGPT counterpart, Google Bard, has not been successful at dethroning ChatGPT and delivered an underwhelming performance. 

Even when Google switched Bard from a lightweight version of LaMDA to a much more advanced LLM, PaLM 2, the performance of the chatbot didn’t greatly improve. 

Now, in an interview with Wired, Google DeepMind’s co-founder and CEO, Demis Hassabis, is claiming that its next model will be more capable than that of ChatGPT. 

The model Hassabis is referring to is Gemini, which was initially unveiled at Google’s keynote event where the company made many AI announcements. 

In the interview, Hassabis revealed that to build Gemini, DeepMind is using techniques from AlphaGo, the company’s very capable AI system, which was the first to defeat a Go human professional. 

Also: ChatGPT vs Bing Chat: Which AI chatbot is better for you?

“At a high level you can think of Gemini as combining some of the strengths of AlphaGo-type systems with the amazing language capabilities of the large models,” Hassabis said to Wired. 

Gemini is still being developed by DeepMind and it could take a number of months, according to the report. 

The Gemini development follows Google’s Brain Team, its Google Research team that focuses on machine learning and AI, merging with DeepMind to create a new group called Google DeepMind in April.