If you’ve seen 1001 posts on Twitter about Google Bard blowing ChatGPT out of the water, but failed to reproduce any meaningful results with Bard – it’s not about you.
As of May 2023 there are strong indicators that Bard is a rushed launch just to catch up with Microsoft / Open AI. I’ll briefly explain why.
Note: Given the pace of change in the industry, this almost certainly won’t age well.
The Challenge
I had to come up with a bunch of niche YouTube channels to launch ads in. Bard was my natural choice to find those. YouTube is owned by Google after all.
And this is how it went. Apparently Bard is only a language model and doesn’t have the capacity to understand and respond.
Note: For the purpose of documenting this, I replicated my initial experience with channels for marketers.
As you can see, it’s able to list channel names, provide descriptions, but not the URLs. So much for using Bard to search the web.
Where it gets interesting
This was initially it, I understood this is going nowhere and went to get the channels I needed in Bing Chat, which performed the task perfectly fine.
It became interesting when I decided to spend some more time in Bard just to make sure it wasn’t me providing a low quality prompt.
Bard, when asked about it, doesn’t show the slightest doubt it’s able to do this. It states: Yes, Google Bard can find YouTube channel URLs.
We all see how that went in the screenshot above.
This is exactly what leads me to think that Google Bard is a rushed launch with functionalities planned, yet not actually available.
How many other things are there that Bard says it can do, but it actually can’t even if you follow its own instructions word for word? Have you personally ran into one of those? Are there release notes for Bard available somewhere?
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