Snipe the GPT-4 plugin! Google's AI assistant Bard is getting an extension soon, as competition with Microsoft heats up

Image source: Generated by Unbounded AI

Original source: AGI Innovation Lab‌

Google appears to be picking up pace in the field of generative AI. Google's AI chatbot, Bard, which is also a ChatGPT competitor, has recently been upgraded, narrowing the gap with ChatGPT, and even surpassing it. Last week, Google just announced the opening of Bard to users in Europe and Brazil, as well as rolling out more updates. Bard's recent updates have been well received by the community, praising it for finally being multimodal, such as Bard's ability to generate voice responses and support for over 40 languages, including Chinese.

And the latest news is that Bard's "extension/plugin" is also coming soon.

In May of this year, Google announced at the Google I/O conference that Bard will integrate various extensions in the future to integrate the functions of Google applications and services (documents, cloud drives, Gmail, maps, etc.) into the Bard experience. Not only that, but the products and services of external partners may also be integrated into Bard, such as Adobe's AI painting tool Firefly, which helps users directly transform ideas into high-quality images.

They've gotten an early preview of the extensions and how they'll appear in Bard's Web application, according to people familiar with the matter. According to the information obtained, there will be 9 extensions in the first batch (may change when they are officially released), including:

• Google Flights
• Google Hotels
• Google Maps
• Instacart
• Kayak
• OpenTable
• Redfin
• YouTube
• Zillow

Interestingly, there is some overlap between the services offered. For example, Kayak overlaps with Google Flights and Google Maps, while Redfin and Zillow offer similar services.

The above extensions are basically in line with Google's official announcement in May, when Google said it was working to connect Bard with useful Google apps and more partners, including Kayak, OpenTable, ZipRecruiter, Instacart, Wolfram and Khan Academy, etc. .

In fact, after Google announced at the I/O conference that it would integrate extensions, OpenAI quickly announced that it would launch plug-in functions and create a plug-in store. At that time, many people thought that this ecology was like Apple's AppStore. At present, OpenAI has nearly 700 plug-ins, but many people think that this step of OpenAI is not successful. First, the developers of these plug-ins have no special profit model, and second, these plug-ins are highly repetitive, and many of them are useless.

What about Google? I think Google will be stronger than OpenAI in terms of plugins, because Google is much stronger than OpenAI in terms of ecological partners and their quality, and Google's rich experience in Chrome browser extension programs will have a great advantage.

Google vs Microsoft

If you say which AI product is getting the most attention at the moment? The answer may be GPT-4, Bard, New Bing, Claude2. They account for most of the active users. Although Meta and the Musk team have also made progress in the AI model, they have no actual products.

Google Bard, which only launched in March, got off to a slow start, but in June, Bard's traffic increased by 187%, while ChatGPT's traffic dropped by 10%. Bard, which is free to use, is already more attractive than ChatGPT.

The competition for generative AI is entering a fierce stage, and it is still unclear who will win the game. In particular, Anthropic, another ChatGPT competitor invested by Google, recently launched a new generation of AI chat assistant Claude2, which performed equally amazingly, surpassing GPT-4 in multiple benchmark tests and actual use.

Google has Bard and Claude2, while Microsoft has New Bing and GPT-4. This generative AI race seems to be turning into a duel between Google and Microsoft. After experiencing the highlights brought by GPT-4 and New Bing, Microsoft may now have entered Google time.