Analysis: Pushing forward and besting Bard

Obviously beefing up the performance of the Bing AI to do better with local queries
is an important move to make. It’s no good having an all-singing and dancing AI
(you have asked the chatbot to sing to you already, right?) if it falls down
embarrassingly when it comes to making basic recommendations about locations and
services near you.

Mind you, the enhanced performance for these kind of queries sounds like it’s in
the early stages of getting a good coat of polish. As Microsoft puts it: “Expect us
to make further improvements in local grounding based on your feedback.”

Like everything with Microsoft’s ChatGPT-powered AI, then, it’s very much a work in
progress. Still, the amount of progress being made is impressively sure and steady,
which has got to be a worry for Google.

Google’s rival AI, Bard, has been notably slow off the starting blocks. Indeed, it
feels like Google forced Bard onto the starting blocks before it had even laced its
trainers, because the firm felt like the new Bing couldn’t be left unanswered,
seeing as the ChatGPT-powered AI is already boosting traffic to Microsoft’s search
engine.

We’re told that Bard will become more capable, and will receive improvements to its
reasoning skills later this week, and it’s clear enough that Google recognizes it
needs to move faster with its rival AI. At the same time, it can’t afford any
missteps as seen with Bard’s launch (and to be fair, with the Bing AI’s launch too,
although Microsoft seems to have recovered pretty well from the mishaps Bing
encountered early on).

Our main worry about Microsoft is that the success of the Bing chatbot – so far –
could go to the company’s head. There’s already worrying talk of jamming adverts
into Bing AI, which we very much hope won’t happen. That’s probably a forlorn hope,
and if it turns out that way, this could be an area that Bard could turn to its
advantage. That said, it’s not like Google won’t be surveying every avenue of
monetization down the line, too – it’d be pretty naïve to think otherwise.

Both companies would do well to remember that these AIs must be perceived as
helpful friends, though, and not ones with a hidden agenda. Or, more to the point
we suppose, a poorly hidden agenda which becomes painfully transparent…

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally
T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other
hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of
three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What
You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).