The AI War – ChatGPT vs Sparrow

Giuseppe Sciascia - 1st February 2023

We all know what ChatGPT (which stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is. All marketers, social media managers, PR account managers, web developers and geeks have tried it in the past few weeks and we have all exclaimed: “WOW, this is fantastic.”

Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, probably thought the same thing. It seems he has called in the founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page to review the future strategies of the well-known search engine, especially given the interest and substantial investment made by Microsoft (said to be $10 billion) towards OpenAI and the idea that Microsoft would like to use OpenAI’s APIs to improve Bing, the search engine of the Redmond company.

The countermove hasn’t taken long to come, as it seems that Google intends to launch its own chatbot called Sparrow – the private beta should be released this Spring.

These anticipations are made by Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind (a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet), who also states that this will bring new features that are currently missing from chatGPT, such as the ability to quote sources and improved machine learning technology that should produce a better ability of the software to improve and learn from its mistakes (reinforcement learning).

Personally, as a marketer and tech enthusiast, I believe the most interesting thing is to see how Google will integrate its new toy with all its services and the big mass of information it has collected over the years and to which it has access; in fact, what could be the real winning factor will be the speed of access to recent and real-time data, at the moment chatGPT works on a dataset updated to 2020 that, in the virtual world, corresponds to geological eras.

Of course, if this hypothesis is realised, it will also change the way we access information and how we interact to request it. For example, our search for information could change from simply typing or pronouncing questions to a dialogue mode in which our personal chatbot will have a memory of all our tastes, opinions and past choices and, through models and algorithms, it will also be able to predict the future and guide us (or condition us – read as “new challenges for marketers”) in our choices.

We can officially say that “The AI War” has started, and significant innovations and progress will be made in the coming months/years in this field. As always, here at Carswell Gould as integrated marketing specialists, we will keep an eye on the developments and try to use these tools to always offer the best marketing solutions for our clients.

You can read a blog post from Ed, our creative director, related to how AI can help an agency to make better marketing at this link.

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