"I'm not convinced Palm 2 (and Bard) fairs well against Claude v2 and GPT-3.5."
From very early tests it seems hard to compare. On 'general' questions it is certainly less capable than ChatGPT-3.5, and not even in the same ballgame as GPT-4.
But if it needs to integrate recent data without much elaboration, it is better than GPT-4 with linkreader plugin or the instance running on Bing.
So I'd say it is more a shot across Bing's bow rather than an ChatGPT rival at this point.
From very early tests it seems hard to compare. On 'general' questions it is certainly less capable than ChatGPT-3.5, and not even in the same ballgame as GPT-4.
But if it needs to integrate recent data without much elaboration, it is better than GPT-4 with linkreader plugin or the instance running on Bing.
So I'd say it is more a shot across Bing's bow rather than an ChatGPT rival at this point.