After being on the waitlist for a week, I got the email today that notified me that I am now allowed access to the early preview of “The New Bing”. Maybe changing my default browser to Edge (like they were urging me to do) was a factor in getting in so soon.
So, I spent about an hour trying it out, often comparing the Bing response to the ChatGPT response of the same prompt. One prompt I gave Bing was to “Write a 12 line poem that rhymes about a curious bear named Ben who keeps slipping out of his enclosure at the zoo to explore the zoo grounds”. The first thing I noticed in the response is that it gave me 16 lines instead of 12. But besides that issue, I thought that Bing did a pretty good job.
I tried the same prompt on ChatGPT and I would have to say that the ChatGPT poem sounded a little better, plus, it did adhere to my request for 12 lines.
I thought I would see how well Bing responded to a coding request, so I asked for a simple Python script- “Please write a Python script that opens a text file and counts the number of words and prints out the total word count”. After submitting the prompt, Bing showed that it was “Searching for…” various parts of the script. I thought that was a little odd- searching for answer/response instead of just using its vast data model to just create one on its own. In the code comments, it references the website where it got the script. The script worked fine, although I wasn’t intending for it to prompt the user for a text file name.
The same request from ChatGPT resulted in the below result. It churned out the code immediately, so it appears that it created the script from what it has learned. The script was also more like my intention- to just add the file name in the script instead of prompting a user to enter the file name, but I probably should have been more clear in my prompt.
Both Bing and ChatGPT did a good job with putting comments in the code, but I like the way ChatGPT put additional comments in the response to give the user more information about how the script works.
A third prompt I gave Bing was to create a joke, based up my prompt- “I would like you to write a funny joke about attempting to grow tomatoes without having much luck, even though you spend many hours trying to grow them”. Bing’s response
Not so funny, and kind of predictable. Kind of long too, especially for a let down punch line. Below is ChatGPTs joke from the same prompt. Not so funny either, but at least it was on the short side!
I think ChatGPT did a better job than Bing on the first two prompts, and I’d say the 3rd prompt was a tie. Since the chat Bing is still in preview mode, I’m sure there will be improvements to it before the global rollout, especially since Microsoft has put over $10 billion into OpenAI. I tried to get to better know the “New Bing”, but it was not having any part of that conversation!
