I wanted to love Google’s Generative AI for The Analyst’s Companion …

… I truly did. I am a huge fan of Google for lots of reasons; I rely on Google every day to get me places and keep me in touch with the world, and … the list is pretty long. So when I was granted access to the Google Bard AI API program I jumped right in and started translating The Analyst’s Companion calls to OpenAI to Palm.

It didn’t work.

I mean, it did, the code was super easy to write and I had Google’s AI answering questions in about 15 minutes. The problem was the answers. Consider the following responses that Google AI gave to some pretty basic questions about our GA4 data set:

The answers are all … answers … but they aren’t particularly helpful or interesting. At least not when I compare the same answers from OpenAI GPT-4:

Other, more complex questions had bigger differences, and so for now I will keep an eye on Google’s AI API but continue to develop against OpenAI and GPT-4.

Also, big news: Anyone can now subscribe to The Analyst’s Companion and use our GPT-4 API key for less than $20 USD per month via our Professional plan. Have a look at the subscription page and give it a try! You can cancel at any time and I think you’ll be impressed with what OpenAI can do.