In general, chatbots are computer programs that simulate digital conversations by responding to text inputs. Digital assistants from Microsoft Word’s Clippy to Amazon’s Alexa have incorporated different iterations of chatbot technology over the years, but recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLM) have taken the tools to a whole new level.
The most well-known AI chatbot is ChatGPT, created by OpenAI. Its release on November 30, 2022, kicked off the tech world race to create the best generative AI LLM tool. Since then, a handful of competitors have entered the field, including Bard by Google, Bing Chat by Microsoft, Llama by Meta, and Claude by Anthropic.
AI chatbots have seemingly captured the world’s attention because of their potential to revolutionize certain aspects of different industries and people’s everyday lives. So far, some of their biggest impacts have been in education, finance, and medicine where they have been used to automate everything from writing school reports to picking stocks to answering patient questions.