The Fifth Person is a bespoke investment advisory firm in my country. The other day, it released a YouTube video that explores the use of AI in stock investing. 

This piqued my attention because I am in the process of carving a niche for myself in the education fraternity. I want my name to pop up in people’s minds whenever they need an expert who is great at leveraging AI for teaching and learning. So, I was motivated to watch this video because I wanted to consolidate my domain expertise.

To start with, I thought it was a great idea for the investors to contrast the use of ChatGPT and Google Bard. What struck me immediately was their prompts. As a teacher, I’m all about assigning a role to the AI chatbot so that it understands what I need and gives me answers that are relevant to my needs. Hence, I am used to writing prompts in the form of paragraphs. So, I was a bit surprised to see them use one-liners like “What’s Amazon’s business model”. 

Thanks to their exploration, I understood the differences between these popular AI chat bots. As data is fed into ChatGPT, it can only provide answers that are valid up to September 2021. On the other hand, Google Bard is connected to the Internet, so the responses it provides are more updated.

I thought it was neat for them to test out the chatbots by using a company they are familiar with - Amazon. This allowed them to verify quickly whether the answers they obtained were accurate or just conjured out of thin air. It goes to show that we cannot outsource our thinking to AI because we need to acquire deep knowledge first before we can ask the right questions. Ignorant people would be limited by their lack of knowledge and not know to ask the chatbots probing questions to gather more in-depth insights.

The investors also commented that ChatGPT employs a Wikipedia-like style of engagement whereas Bard sounds more conversational and even flaunts investor lingo like network effect, cost advantage, economic most, and high switching cost. Plus, according to them, Bard is more helpful as a research assistant as it proactively provides more than is needed. They gave the examples of how Bard suggested reasons for Amazon’s success as well as specific ways TikTok is competing for Amazon’s market share. Hence, they could corroborate the information with other authoritative sources.

However, Bard is not infallible. It was happy to generate numbers that proved to be inaccurate after the investors went to fact check. Hence, if we were to engage it as our research co-pilot, we cannot sidestep the important step of poring over financial statements and checking out financial data sites in order to arrive at an accurate picture of the company’s financial health.

All in all, I thought The Fifth Person’s video offered me compelling insights into the similarities and differences between ChatGPT and Google Bard. I haven’t explored Google Bard yet, so that’s what I need to do. Stay tuned for more AI insights!