Generative AI: Exploring Capabilities and Potential of Seven ChatGPT Alternatives
Spiceworks’ rundown of the most advanced chatbots available today besides the undisputed leader, ChatGPT.
- 2023 saw many companies launching AI chatbots to give ChatGPT a run for its money and make a place for themselves in the AI chatbot space, worth $137.6 million this year.
- The AI chatbot industry is expected to rise by 30% to $179.9 million next year.
- As we head into 2024, Spiceworks News & Insights looks at the most advanced chatbots available today besides the undisputed leader of AI chatbots, ChatGPT.
The year 2022 was when the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT was launched to the public, though 2023 is widely considered the year when the AI revolution began. While AI chatbots existed before, the novelty of ChatGPT’s generative capabilities, based on Generative Pre-trained Transformer or GPT-3.5, blew almost everyone away.
Moreover, ChatGPT isn’t the only generative AI tool to have hit the proverbial shelves in 2023. The year saw a host of other AI chatbots emerging to give ChatGPT a run for its money. So far, none have managed to, even as the competition heats up and despite OpenAI’s one-year-old toy suffering multiple power-related outages in the past months.
According to Demandsage, the conversational AI-based chatbot industry is worth $137.6 million in 2023 and is expected to rise to $179.9 million, more than 30% higher. Before you pick a conversational AI for your branding, marketing, storytelling, or writing needs, look at the available chatbots as we head into 2024 and understand the factors that make them unique.
What Makes a Conversational AI Chatbot
The engineering and application of large language models (LLMs) is what makes (or breaks) an AI chatbot. It should necessarily have natural language processing capabilities, possibly with multilingual support.
It should be customizable, scalable, and compatible with multiple platforms (web, mobile, etc.). An LLM needs to be accurate, highly responsive, have a seamless feedback mechanism, and integrations for common uses.
Most importantly, a chatbot should possess sophisticated intent recognition and context management capabilities for a richer user experience.
Based on these capabilities, here’s a rundown of the most advanced chatbots available today besides the undisputed leader of AI chatbots, ChatGPT.
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Top Conversational AI Chatbots and LLMs in 2023-2024
1. GPT-4 Turbo
While not a chatbot itself, OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo is arguably the most advanced LLM today, with an unrivaled 128K context window that allows it to accept 300 pages of text as input at once and trained on over 1.76 trillion parameters.
GPT-4 Turbo features information as latest as April 2023 compared to information up to September 2021 in GPT-4 and GPT-3.5; some UX enhancements, like the ability to automatically pick the right tools, and more. What’s more, GPT-4 Turbo has a 3x lower price for input tokens and is 2x cheaper for output tokens than GPT-4.
2. Claude 2.1
Brought to you by the techies who left OpenAI in 2019, Anthorphic’s Claude 2.1 was released last month in November. The model one ups GPT-4 Turbo with a 200K context window, allowing it to accept 150,000 words (over 500 pages). As a result, the LLM can offer more extensive summarization, Q&A, translation, forecasting, and document comparison capabilities.
Amazon-backed Anthorphic claims that Claude 2.1, which now features in its AI chatbot app and is available for enterprise use, offers a 2x reduction in hallucinations. Since Claude 2.0 was trained on 530 billion parameters, Claude 2.1 is likely to have between 530 billion and one trillion parameters.
3. Gemini
Last week, DeepMind and Google Research offered a glimpse into what they consider to be their second attempt at rivaling ChatGPT and others. The company launched the Gemini model with multimodality at the core of the new LLM.
The Gemini model comes in three sizes: Gemini Ultra, the most compute-intensive for data centers; Gemini Pro, a lighter version; and Gemini Nano, designed to run on mobile devices.
Google said Gemini Nano and Pro would be available on the Pixel 8 smartphone and its AI chatbot Bard, respectively. The latter will also be available to developers and enterprise customers through Gemini API in Google’s AI Studio and Google Cloud Vertex AI from December 13 onwards. Android developers can leverage Gemini Nano through AICore for Android development.
Google claims Gemini Pro-powered Bard (as opposed to the poorly-received PaLM-powered Bard) outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4-powered ChatGPT in “30 of the 32 widely used academic benchmarks.” However, its context window is still smaller at 32K, with an ability to input approximately 24,000 words.
Bard’s most significant advantage over ChatGPT is its ability to search for verified information online.
4. Copilot (Bing Chat)
Speaking of web search-based results, Microsoft was the first among Big Tech companies to release its web search-based and GPT-4-powered AI chatbot in February 2022, way before Google.
Released as Bing Chat initially, Microsoft rebranded it (not to mention its entire line of AI assistants) as Copilot in November during the Microsoft Ignite 2023 event. This month, the company took it up a notch and added GPT-4 Turbo to Copilot, making it the first chatbot infused with the advanced LLM.
The biggest advantage of using Copilot is undoubtedly its integration with the vast Microsoft ecosystem.
See More: The State of AI in Cybersecurity 2023: A Comprehensive Analysis
5. Llama 2
Compared to others on this list, Meta’s Llama 2 only has a 4K context window (~3,500 words input). However, it earns a place on this list because Llama 2 is the first LLM driven by an open-source philosophy. It allows developers to use, copy, distribute, reproduce, create derivatives, and modify the Llama Materials.
Llama 2’s three versions, trained on 7 billion, 13 billion, and 70 billion parameters, are available on Azure, AWS, and Hugging Face’s model hosting platform. Primitive workings of the raw model can be seen on its website, with implementation restricted to developers.
6. Grok
Grok is possibly the product of Elon Musk’s aim of leveraging the valuable X data, whose API-based access the company limited this year, and his experience with AI development at Tesla and as the co-founder and board member of OpenAI.
Amid much fanfare, as are all things Musk-related, xAI began the rollout of Grok for X Premium Plus subscribers in the U.S. last week. Grok offers responses with information up to Q3 2023 and has a knowledge base resembling GPT-3.5. It runs on Grok-1.
While Grok-1’s number of training parameters is undisclosed, it can be significantly higher than 33 billion in Grok-0, and xAI claims the chatbot outperforms Llama 2 and GPT-3.5. The quirky new AI chatbot, which has “a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak,” has an 8K context window and pools real-time information from Twitter.
Same query on Grok, ChatGPT, and Bard! 🤯
We are vastly underestimating the power of real-time data. Grok nails it!
h/t Scobleizer pic.twitter.com/mWH8FMFxIG
— Bindu Reddy (@bindureddy) December 7, 2023
7. Chatsonic
Chatsonic is Writesonic’s AI content creation engine. The primary difference between the above generative AI tools and Chatsonic is that the latter isn’t purely machine learning-based but simultaneously leverages a rule-based approach.
With the tagline “Best ChatGPT Alternative for Content Creation,” Chatsonic also uses GPT-4, can write as different personas, and is integrated with Google search to create accurate copies. The paid tool also has multimodal features.
Wrapping Up
Besides Chatsonic, it seems like the short-term intention of other vendors, which currently have nil to basic charges for their generative AI products and services, is getting people accustomed to these tools.
How the casual user would respond to charges extracted for ChatGPT is unclear. Nevertheless, offering it for free to make them used to such generative AI services, which may eventually translate to enterprise/corporate-level applications, seems like a sound strategy for now. In this regard, Microsoft is miles ahead of any other company, having integrated and commercialized generative AI across its product portfolio.
And for those who are already familiar with ChatGPT and similar tools and are wary of its limitations, OpenAI and Anthorphic already have GPT-4 Turbo. It will be interesting to see how the rest of the companies, including those not limited to this list, catch up.
Which generative AI chatbots have you enjoyed using? Share with us on LinkedIn, X, or Facebook. We’d love to hear from you!
Image source: Shutterstock
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