ChatGPT has long enjoyed the first-mover advantage ever since it burst into the scene in November last year and there’s no telling when or if it’ll be dethroned from its position. However, following the initial shock, the ChatGPT rivals have been scrambling to improve their competitiveness. This week saw a bunch of updates released for the OpenAI product’s top opponents, making it clear that the arena is fast heating up. From Claude 2.1 to Grok, here’s what’s new.
Anthropic’s release this week of Claude 2.1 equips their chatbot with the ability to ingest textual prompts of up to 150,000 words, a vast increase over previous versions that enables uploading entire books or codebases for analysis. Coupled with a doubling in response accuracy that should reduce inaccurate replies and hallucinations, the upgrade makes Claude an increasingly compelling option for users whose workflows hover around processing vast amounts of text.
Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot, while still seemingly lagging rivals in core accuracy, will roll out next week for premium Twitter Blue subscribers a unique capability to provide real-time responses drawing on the latest available information from X. This gives it an edge over ChatGPT’s April 2023 knowledge cutoff. For users who like their output more contextually relevant to the times, the feature could prove a major differentiation.
Even as most of the top AI chatbots today find their origins in the US, China has been developing its own bots in tandem. One of these is Ernie, developed by Chinese search engine giant Ernie. Ernie 4.0 recently reached an impressive 70 million users, presenting perhaps the most serious threat to ChatGPT’s position in the long run.
Bard’s latest update enables the search giant’s AI chatbot to directly answer questions about the content of YouTube videos. While Bard has had basic YouTube analysis functionality since September, this new feature significantly lets it answer specific queries related to video details. For example, if searching for tutorial videos on baking an olive oil cake, Bard can now identify not just relevant clips, but also pull out key instructions within them like required ingredients or oven temperature.
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