ChatGPT 3.5 vs 4 vs Bing Chat

When to use which?

Quick Summary

• ChatGPT cannot access the internet, it doesn’t know anything that happened after 2021, and it doesn’t know details of niche topics. So use Bing Chat if your question/task involves recent information or a very niche area (for example, a specific company or person, a specific paper or article)

• Bing Chat is slower, allows much shorter questions (2000 characters only), and fewer follow-up questions (conversations limited to 20 questions only), so use ChatGPT if you don’t really need the abilities of Bing Chat

• Always use Bing Chat in “More Creative” mode

• Pay for and use ChatGPT 4 if you can afford it. But the free ChatGPT 3.5 is good enough for most experimentation

What are these 3 options?

(As of today) there are 3 different variations of ChatGPT that are generally available: ChatGPT 3.5, ChatGPT 4, and Bing Chat. This post helps you understand the difference and when to use which.

ChatGPT 3.5 is the default you get when you use the website chat.openai.com.

If you pay for ChatGPT Plus (by paying $20 per month (which is $23.60 for Indians, with ChatGST)) you get ChatGPT 4, which is better than ChatGPT 3.5. If you can afford the fee, you should definitely pay for ChatGPT 4 and use it as much as possible. But it is not necessary: for most purposes, ChatGPT 3.5 is pretty good. (Just keep in mind that ChatGPT 4 lies far less than ChatGPT 3.5: in one case, only 2% lies by ChatGPT-4 vs 27% for ChatGPT 3.5)

If you sign up for a Microsoft account and use its Bing search engine using the Microsoft Edge browser (which works on Linux and Macs too!) or the Bing app on your phone, then you can access Bing Chat which is basically an Internet Search Engine with ChatGPT built into it. This makes Bing Chat it a different beast from ChatGPT 4. In addition, Bing also gives you access to the DALL·E image generation AI.

How to Use Bing Chat

To use Bing Chat, open bing.com using the Edge browser or the Bing app. Then navigate to the Chat page by clicking on the Chat link at the top

On the next page, choose the “More Creative” mode (the other two modes are not very good; if you wanted that you would have just used Google):

Now you can use this just like you use ChatGPT, with the additional benefit that it can access the internet and specific websites and answer questions using that information.

For example, try this:

Can you get me an email address to contact someone at ReliScore, the company whose website is at reliscore.com

This is not a question ChatGPT can answer because ReliScore is too obscure for it. And asking this question to Google just gives you a bunch of links that you have to click on yourself and search for the information. But Bing Chat brings you exactly the information you asked for.

Similarly, consider this:

Can you give me information about Amit Paranjape, founder of ReliScore?

ChatGPT, the coward, just says there is no such public person it is aware of. Any prompt tweaking you try here will give you information about 3 or 4 different Amit Paranjapes mixed up into an unwholesome hybrid. Google just gives you a bunch of links that you have to navigate yourself.

By contrast, Bing Chat gives you a pretty good summary extracted from 3 different websites (reliscore.com, crunchbase.com, arthlive.in).

Bing Chat Gives Real References

Remember how ChatGPT is a big fat liar? One possible workaround to this problem is asking ChatGPT for references supporting its claims. Unfortunately, ChatGPT often makes up references, so that doesn’t always work great. By contrast, Bing Chat always gives links to real websites that it got its information from.

Keep in mind that Bing Chat can also lie to you, so you should click on those links and double-check that those sites actually say what Bing Chat claims they say. But this is easier, unlike ChatGPT which can hallucinate the websites too.

Disadvantages of Bing Chat

Why wouldn’t you always use Bing Chat?

• Since Bing Chat does a web search before each of your questions, it is slower

• Bing Chat has a limit of 2000 characters for each of its questions. This is significantly smaller than ChatGPT, which is approximately an order of magnitude higher.

  • As we’ve discussed earlier, the best prompts are long prompts (in some future articles, I will show some examples of really long prompts) so in some cases, this can be a serious disadvantage

  • In some cases, you need to paste an entire article or email or document into the prompt (for example, to summarize it, or fix English grammar and spelling): this is often not possible with Bing Chat

• Bing Chat allows a maximum of 20 questions in a single conversation. This might not be enough for some more advanced use cases.