Use Bing/Bard/Claude instead of the free ChatGPT

ChatGPT4 (the paid version) continues to be the best

Today's big news is that Google finally released the much-awaited Gemini update to Bard, their ChatGPT competitor. Until yesterday, Bard was terrible and I found it unusable because of the low-quality answers it produced and high hallucination rate. I was using it only for YouTube video summarization.

But starting today, Bard is using Gemini, which is much better. Here is an amazing video showing off Gemini’s capabilities:

Click here if you can’t see the video above.

Very impressive¹. However, we have access only to Gemini Pro (they have 3 versions, Ultra (high-end), Pro (available to us), and Nano (for Android/Pixel)) and that is nowhere as good as this. I compared it with ChatGPT4 and it didn’t do as well.

A few months back, I wrote about ChatGPT4’s impressive ability to read, understand, and explain handwritten maths. I asked Bard/Gemini to do the same and it bailed on me:

This doesn’t mean that Bard/Gemini can’t read. Consider this task of analyzing the screenshot of a graph:

I asked Bard: “Describe this image and give me a few ideas of what interesting information could be extracted from it ChatGPT”. It gave a decent-ish answer (which contained a some mistakes but was mostly correct):

This answer is comparable to the answer given by ChatGPT4. It made similar mistakes and came up with suggestions of a similar quality.

I asked it a programming question:

Unfortunately, this answer is wrong. Bard has hallucinated the “(clipboard)” function which does not exist. ChatGPT4 (the paid version), Bing/Chat, and ChatGPT3.5 (the free version) all of them give the correct answer. So Bard/Gemini continues to have the problem that the earlier Bard had: higher rates of hallucination.

But, in general, I feel that Bard/Gemini is overall better than ChatGPT3.5 (the free version).

Unfortunately, as of today, OpenAI has paused the creation of paid ChatGPT accounts: so you can’t get access to the best GenAI. (Update: Signups for ChatGPT4, the paid version, are now open again, so if you can afford it, you should buy it. See the recommendations below if you can’t afford it.) Here are my recommendations for the free alternatives:

1. Bing/Chat remains the best free alternative because it uses GPT4. You have to use the Microsoft Edge browser to access it. You need to create a free Microsoft account. When using Bing/Chat, make sure to pick the “More Creative” or “More Precise” mode to get GPT4 quality: in the “More Balanced” mode, it falls back to GPT3.5. One disadvantage is that the questions can only be 2000 characters, which is much lower than others, and which disallows some use cases.

2. I’d say Google Bard/Gemini is the second-best free alternative. Just be careful of its hallucinations.

3. Claude by Anthropic is also good. It is free, but some people have had trouble getting an account; so I’m not sure if you can get access. But do try it if you get access: one major advantage of it is is the huge context window: 200k tokens².

1. It appears that this demo is manipulative and misleading. Bard wasn’t listening to the speaker’s voice and responding: they fed text prompts to Bard and the person on video just read those text prompts aloud. Also, in many cases, the text prompts contained additional instructions/context which were dropped from the video, making Bard’s performance seem more impressive. And, any delays between the question and Bard’s answer were edited from the video, giving the impression that Bard was responding very fast, which wasn’t the case. Source.

2. Earlier I had written 100k here, but Claude 2.1 has increased the token limit to 200k. Thanks Parth Pandya for pointing this out.