Seems like no one has talked about anything else for weeks. ChatGPT, the popular chatbot from OpenAI, is on fire. Some have even compared its arrival with the birth of the Internet. One single data shows the weight of its overwhelming landing in our lives: in January, just two months after its launch, the app was estimated to have reached 100 million monthly active users, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history, according to a UBS study cited by Reuters.

For those who are not familiar with the tool, a chatbot is a software application designed to mimic human-like conversation based on user prompts. According to OpenAI its ChatGPT model can simulate dialogue, answer follow-up questions, admit mistakes, challenge incorrect premises and reject inappropriate requests. Its machine learning technique is called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF).

Popular AI-generated content for ChatGPT includes product descriptions, blog posts, email drafts, law briefs, jokes or memes and social media posts. Of course, deep concerns have been raised in schools and universities about how the tool could help students cheat, allowing them to produce an essay, for example. However, OpenAI calmed them down immediately by announcing yet another tool to distinguish between AI-written and human-written text.

If you snooze you lose

As it happened in the first era of the OS for computers, with Apple’s Steve Jobs and Microsoft’s Bill Gates fighting to be the first and the best, or when social network came to light, with Facebook’s Marc Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey performing a growing rivalry that worsened every year, the chatbot boom foresees a new big tech companies quarrel.

As everybody knows, in the tech sector you need to move fast. Two months after Chat GPT was available for any user, Alfabet Inc company’s Google announced the launch of a similar tool, Bard, and just some minutes later, Microsoft said it would hold an event at its headquarters to reveal its own AI. Doesn’t it remind you of old episodes of the Chrome Vs Explorer and Gmail Vs Hotmail clashes?

As Reuters has explained, Microsoft and Google plan to embed AI tools to bolster their search services Bing and Google Search, which account for a big chunk of revenue. Both technologies can distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, but the most apparent difference is Bard’s ability to include recent events in the responses.

While OpenAI made a free research preview of ChatGPT available for public use on Nov. 30 last year, Bard is currently only open to a group of testers.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post that the conversational AI service will be made widely available in the coming weeks.