Gemini vs. ChatGPT: Which is Better and What’s the Difference?

In the world of chatbots, two solutions are capturing all the attention: Google Gemini (ex-Bard) and ChatGPT.

But which is better? In this article, we look at Gemini vs. ChatGPT to determine their major capabilities and differences.

Our comparison includes an overview of each solution, a head-to-head comparison detailing their unique selling points, and a test of how they each responded to certain prompts.

Table of Contents Table of Contents

1. Key Takeaways
2. Gemini vs. ChatGPT: How Do They Work?
3. Gemini vs ChatGPT: Which is Better?
4. Gemini Advanced vs. ChatGPT Plus
5. Gemini vs ChatGPT 4: A Short Test
6. The Bottom Line
7. FAQs
8. References

Show Full Guide

Table of Contents

1. Key Takeaways
2. Gemini vs. ChatGPT: How Do They Work?
3. Gemini vs ChatGPT: Which is Better?
Show Full Guide
4. Gemini Advanced vs. ChatGPT Plus
5. Gemini vs ChatGPT 4: A Short Test
6. The Bottom Line
7. FAQs
8. References

Gemini vs. ChatGPT: How Do They Work?

How to Use Gemini?

It’s worth noting that Gemini is an upgrade to Bard (released in March 2023), which was trained on data scraped from the internet, including webpages, books, and articles.

This includes Common Crawl, a collection of over 250 billion web pages; Infiniset, a curated dataset designed to improve its dialogue capabilities; Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, and user conversations.

Gemini is notable as a product because it’s designed to perform better at coding, logical reasoning, and following instructions. Its use of Google’s text-to-image model Imagen 2 also gives it the ability to create images on demand.

So, How Does Gemini Work?

The standard version of Gemini uses the Gemini base model, but users can also upgrade to Google Advanced to use the chatbot powered with Gemini 1.5 Pro. This model has a 1 million token context window that Google has confirmed will be expanding to 2 million tokens.

Gemini uses various technologies including machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and natural language generation (NLG) to analyze its training data and user inputs.

The chatbot scans text included in its training data with NLP to learn patterns in natural language. Once the user enters an input, Gemini then uses NLP and NLG to provide a response that matches their request. The response is generated by predicting the words most likely to address their prompt.

It’s worth noting that Gemini also supports image and voice inputs.

How to Use ChatGPT?

It’s worth noting that the standard version of ChatGPT features a fine-tuned version of OpenAI’s GPT 3.5 LLM. Like Gemini, GPT 3.5 uses various technologies, including machine learning, NLP, and NLG to process and respond to user input. ChatGPT also offers paid users two more powerful models: GPT-4 and GPT-4o.

ChatGPT was also trained on a large dataset of web pages, books, and articles, most notably with the Common Crawl dataset, and is also trained on user conversations.

However, it’s important to highlight that the base version of ChatGPT has a knowledge cutoff of April 2023 and has no knowledge of any events after this date.

How Does ChatGPT Work?

The chatbot processes natural language in its training data and uses it to predict relevant responses to user input. Users can enter a query via text, voice, or image.

Users can ask ChatGPT questions in natural language, generate content, translate text, write code, solve math problems, or even generate images (with a paid plan like ChatGPT Plus or ChatGPT Enterprise with the DALL-E 3 integration).

The latest GPT 4o capabilities will be available for both free users and paid subscribers.

The primary remaining differentiator between ChatGPT and ChatGPT Plus is usage limits: free users will face restrictions on the number of messages they can send.

Gemini vs ChatGPT: Which is Better?

Gemini and ChatGPT each have plenty of unique selling points. Below, we’ve created a brief list of reasons to choose Gemini or ChatGPT and a more detailed comparison table to provide a more thorough overview.

Choose Gemini because:

• Gemini is better at searching the internet
• Gemini supports larger inputs
• Can create images with Imagen 2 (Google plans to use Imagen 3 in the future)
• It’s free but can be upgraded to Gemini Advanced, which uses Gemini 1.5 Pro
• Gemini 1.5 Pro supports video inputs
• Mobile app available via Google Play
• Searches the internet for real-time data and current events
• Retrieves articles from the internet and can point you to the website which has the image you’re looking for
• Analyzes input images for free but can’t read images of humans yet
• Supports over 40 languages
• Gives the option to choose between multiple outputs
• Integrates with Google Workspace and services like Gmail, Docs, and Drive
• Offers faster responses

Chose ChatGPT because:

• ChatGPT is better at generating long-form content
• You can generate images with DALL-E 3
• Use the powerful GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo, or OpenAI’s latest multimodal LLM GPT-4o
• Talk back and forth with the chatbot via a mobile app
• Paid upgrades available for enterprise users and teams
• Create your own custom version of ChatGPT and share it on the GPT store
• App for iOS and Android
• Wide range of integrations

Based on the overall capabilities of each tool, we recommend Gemini for research tasks and ChatGPT for content generation.

The ability to search for information on the internet makes Gemini the superior tool for day-to-day research, but ChatGPT is better at offering highly detailed content.

A more detailed comparison of each tool’s capabilities is provided below:

ChatGPT vs Bard: A Head-to-Head Comparison

Gemini Advanced vs. ChatGPT Plus

Gemini Advanced and ChatGPT Plus are paid subscription plans offered by Google and OpenAI. In this section, we’ll examine how each service stacks up.

Gemini Advanced is available as part of the Google One AI Premium plan for $19.99 per month.

Purchasing this subscription means that Gemini will use the Gemini Pro 1.5 model with a 1 million token context window, exclusive features, as well as a Google One subscription with Gemini accessible in Gmail and Docs and 2TB of storage.

ChatGPT Plus provides users with access to ChatGPT powered by GPT-4, GPT-4o, plus image creation capabilities with DALL-E 3, and supports a higher overall number of requests.

In addition, users have access to GPTs — custom versions of ChatGPT — which can be shared on the GPT Store. Users can also access other users’ custom GPTs and gain priority access to new features as they emerge.

Gemini vs ChatGPT 4: A Short Test

To get a feel for the capabilities of each tool firsthand, Techopedia entered a series of prompts to see how Gemini and ChatGPT would respond.

For the purposes of this comparison, we used the GPT-4 version of ChatGPT versus the free Gemini Pro version of Gemini. This enabled us to evaluate how the base version of Gemini compares against OpenAI’s flagship model.

It’s important to note that this test is highly subjective – and the results generated in each example could be improved further with some prompt engineering and adding more context about what type of content the user wants to generate.

The test includes a comparison of:

• Text summarization
• Content generation
• Brainstorming
• Graph creation
• Image creation

Text Summarization

To test the two chatbots’ text summarization capabilities, we asked each tool to write a short summary of William Shakespeare’s famous play Macbeth.

Gemini’s response was as follows:

Gemini produced a short summary that was difficult to read in places (e.g. Macbeth “encounters witches who prophecy his rise to king”) but provided a basic high-level overview.

Now let’s look at ChatGPT’s response:

ChatGPT provided a more detailed response to our prompt as well as a more logical summary of Macbeth. While it could have been shorter, it was much better than the response provided by Gemini.

Content Generation

The next capability we decided to test was content generation. In this exercise, we opted to test each tool’s ability to generate emails due to their rigid formatting.

We did this by entering the prompt “Write a cold email selling an SEO marketing service.”

Gemini’s response was as follows:

This prompt generated a basic email template, but the quality was poor and would likely require significant edits from a human marketer before it could provide value.

Now let’s look at ChatGPT’s response:

ChatGPT’s response took noticeably longer to generate, but the quality of the email template it generated was well beyond Gemini’s, even though the paragraphs were too long in places.

Brainstorming

Many users use language models as brainstorming tools, so we tested these capabilities as part of this comparison.

To do this, we wanted to test what ideas each tool could come up with if asked to produce an outline for a blog post on social media marketing. The results on Gemini were as follows:

We felt that the outline generated by Gemini was extremely generic and far below what you could expect from a content professional or industry insider, though it provided some basic structure.

Here is what ChatGPT generated in response to the prompt:

ChatGPT’s outline was much less developed than Gemini’s, with each section lacking the array of talking points that Gemini highlighted.

Graph Creation

Both Gemini and ChatGPT had the ability to create graphs (we tested this capability as part of a previous comparison, so we decided to test this again by asking Gemini and ChatGPT to create a graph of historical World War 2 events.

The output on Gemini was as follows:

As you can see, the tool declined to create a graph for us. While the initial prompt was vague, we did use it in the past to get Bard to produce a graph output. This is shown in the prompt below:

In this sense, Gemini’s failure to produce a graph in this instance was very disappointing and a step back from Bard.

In contrast, ChatGPT’s response was much better:

Not only did the presentation of the graph look much better than Bard’s, but it also provided an accurate timeline of key WWII events.

The Bottom Line

Based on all factors, ChatGPT showed better results than a free version of Gemini Pro in our short test. We would recommend Gemini based on its ability to respond to simple questions succinctly and quickly. However, ChatGPT offers a broader range of functionality and a more powerful long-form output.

At the same time, while ChatGPT can produce outputs quickly, waiting for it to generate responses felt noticeably more tedious than with Gemini, probably due to the lack of a “skip response” button.

As it stands, Gemini is more than Google’s version of ChatGPT, it is a useful research assistant in its own right, but it remains to be seen whether it can unseat OpenAI’s chatbot as the dominant tool on the market.

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