2 June 2024

The Great AI Challenge: We Test Five Top Bots on Useful, Everyday Skills

Dalvin Brown, Kara Dapena and Joanna Stern

Would you trust an AI chatbot with family planning? Investing $1 million? How about writing your wedding vows?

Human-sounding bots barely existed two years ago. Now they’re everywhere. There’s ChatGPT, which kicked off the whole generative-AI craze, and big swings from Google and Microsoft, plus countless other smaller players, all with their own smooth-talking helpers.

We put five of the leading bots through a series of blind tests to determine their usefulness. While we hoped to find the Caitlin Clark of chatbots, that wasn’t exactly what happened. They excel in some areas and fail in others. Plus, they’re all evolving rapidly. During our testing, OpenAI released an upgrade to ChatGPT that improved its speed and current-events knowledge.

We wanted to see the range of responses we’d get asking real-life questions and ordering up everyday tasks—not a scientific assessment, but one that reflects how we’ll all use these tools. Consider it the chatbot Olympics.

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