GPT 3.5 Instruct and Google Bard Extensions

It's been a big day of announcements today with OpenAI announcing GPT 3.5 Instruct and Google announcing Bard Extensions. Lets unpack these product announcements and understand how this will affect both Google's and OpenAI's core positioning in the AI race.

Lets get started with GPT 3.5 Turbo Instruct. This is a model that is similar to GPT 3.5 Turbo. The major difference between Instruct and Turbo is the purpose of the model. Instruct is more useful for procedural tasks while Turbo is more useful for general chat interfaces.

This is great for deterministic tasks and getting a step towards AGI or Artificial General Intelligence, which is a main mission of OpenAI as a company.

The interesting point of the instruct model is that this is just a temporary model on the path to transition to GPT 3.5 Turbo while also maintaining the same speed if not faster. Speed is an important factor in the AI models since historically AI models are very computationally expensive and hence slow.

Google Bard Extensions

On the other side of the fence, Google just announced Google Bard Extensions for their popular chatbot. These Bard Extensions have the ability to plug into your Google apps like Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Flights, Hotels, Youtube, Maps, and more. Google launching these extensions is really flexing their competitive advantage of having access to high quality data that OpenAI will probably never be able to access.

Not only are these data streams probably of the highest quality, but Bard also now has a deep repository of knowledge that it can access to be even more useful to you such as your old emails and old documents.

Another thing that is particularly interesting about the Bard Extensions launch is the language of the product naming. The word Extensions infers the expansion of the service while ChatGPT plugins infers the positioning that the chat window is the main app while the other data streams, such as Zillow, Expedia, and more simply plug into it and feed it data. This might appear as OpenAI is thinking of more of a product centric model where their product is the center, however Google has almost a data streams for every one of OpenAI's partner extensions.

One main thing to look out for is going to be how open Google is to allowing non Google extensions from being used with Bard. Maybe they'll allow for users to upload their own data into Bard via API? Who knows.

All in all, with a simple inclusion of Extensions, Google Bard is now competitive to where ChatGPT was just a few months ago and is also a step towards AGI. While Google Bard still has significantly less search traffic compared to ChatGPT, they are catching up fast. Now only time will show where this is going.