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In November 2022, the launch of ChatGPT ushered in a revolution in the technological world.
ChatGPT brought to market an AI-powered chatbot that could not only answer users’ queries with generated text, but could also write articles, content, code, and many more things.
In the months since, more and more AI-powered natural language processing (NLP) have cropped up, and the competition among large language models (LLMs) is becoming increasingly intense.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an AI chatbot developed by Microsoft-backed OpenAI that launched in November 2022.
It is a member of the generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) family of language models. ChatGPT is based on GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 families of LLMs and can query the internet via the Bing search engine.
ChatGPT has been trained by using supervised and reinforcement learning models. It is also a sibling of InstructGPT, which has been trained to follow the user input in detail and respond promptly.
This LLM can process large volumes of data accurately and interact with users intelligently, just like another human being.
ChatGPT’s capabilities will likely evolve significantly over time, particularly as OpenAI has confirmed it is working on the next-generation GPT-5 language model.
Generative AI and the Competition
Generative AI is a type of AI that can generate text images, videos, and other content in response to a user prompt based on its training data. ChatGPT is an example of a text-based generative AI solution.
One of the key advantages of generative AI is that it can produce content with fewer resources. On the other hand, these tools can use copyrighted training data and automate human jobs.
In the emerging market of AI chatbots, generative AI is a real game changer. It takes every piece of data available on the web and trains the AI models.
While ChatGPT is the biggest, a range of competitors, from Google and Meta to Anthropic and Amazon, are using LLMs, deep learning, and fine-tuning to establish dominance in the market.
Who are the Competitors of ChatGPT?
There are a number of promising competitors in the AI LLM space. Below, we’ll be exploring them one by one.
12. GitHub CoPilot
GitHub Copilot is an AI-driven coding assistant designed to help software developers create code using the Codex LLM. The solution is designed to provide auto-complete suggestions for code and syntax while the user is typing.
Unlike ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot was designed specifically to help developers produce code faster.
11. Jasper AI
Jasper is an AI virtual assistant and copilot assistant that’s designed specifically to help produce marketing content with GPT-3.5.
With Jasper, a user can scan their website alongside resources like style guides and product catalogs to give the chatbot an understanding of the organization’s brand voice.
Jasper’s ability to create tone of voice-centric marketing content differentiates it from ChatGPT’s general-purpose text generation.
10. Amazon’s New Language Model
Amazon is another big player in the generative AI marketplace. Earlier this year, it proposed the multimodal chain of thought LLM, which was reportedly significantly more efficient than GPT 3.5.
On the ScienceQA benchmark, this new Amazon language model outperforms GPT3.5 by 16 percentage points (75.17%). The ScienceQA benchmark is a big collection of annotated responses to multimodal science questions.
This indicates that Amazon’s LLM is more efficient at handling complex reasoning.
9. Amazon Codewhisperer
Amazon Codewhisperer is another AI tool that’s been designed specifically for developers. It uses NLP and ML algorithms to check code and provide real-time recommendations.
At a high level, it helps developers to improve productivity by generating code recommendations. Amazon Codewhisperer is also free for developers at the time of writing.
8. Perplexity AI
Perplexity AI is an AI chatbot based on GPT-3 and GPT-4 that acts like a search engine, scanning the internet to respond to user queries. Perplexity AI was originally released in August 2022.
One notable feature included with Perplexity AI is that it also shows the source of the information it provides to the user.
In this sense, Perplexity AI offers a high degree of transparency over its sources and can provide real-time information taken from across the internet.
7. Stability AI
Stability AI is an AI startup founded in 2019 valuation, which has gained significant popularity due to its diffusion model, Stable Diffusion. Stable Diffusion is a text-to-image tool that enables users to generate detailed images.
The organization also boasts several other multimodal solutions. This includes Stable AI, a text-to-audio solution that turns written prompts into 44.1 KHz stereo audio, and the “harmless” natural language generation model stable Beluga.
6. Midjourney
Midjourney is another emerging AI vendor that’s developed its own machine learning model, also called Midjourney, which can convert text prompts into images.
The solution, accessible through the Discord chat app, can make high-quality and high-resolution images for users to download directly to their devices.
5. AI21 Labs
AI21 Labs is a Tel Aviv-based AI startup offering a platform called AI21 Studio, which provides users access to a series of pre-trained LLMs like Jurassic-2.
The platform can add natural language generation, text summarisation, and paraphrasing capabilities to external applications.
4. Google Bard (LaMDA)
One of ChatGPT’s biggest competitors in the market is Google Bard, an AI-driven chatbot launched in March 2023 that uses training data taken from across the web to inform its responses.
Bard was originally built on language models for dialogue applications (LAMDA) and now includes Google’s next-generation LLM PaLM 2.
The biggest difference between Bard and ChatGPT is that Bard processes data taken from the public web and Google Apps and Services, while ChatGPT uses a mix of a proprietary training data set and results taken from Bing.
3. Microsoft Bing Chat
Another key competitor in the LLM market is Microsoft Bing Chat, an AI-powered version of Microsoft’s Bing search engine launched in February 2023.
As Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft, said upon release, “AI will fundamentally change every software category, starting with the largest category of all – search.”
Bing Chat uses GPT-4 as its underlying LLM, giving it an advantage over ChatGPT based on the less powerful GPT-3.5. Bing Chat performs better at answering search queries and providing more relevant results at the time of writing.
2. Meta Llama 2
Llama 2 is Meta’s open-source large language model produced by Meta, which supports up to 70 billion parameters and is trained on 40% more data than the original version of Llama.
This LLM uses training data from as recently as July 2023 and has comparable scores to GPT-3.5 under the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) scoring system.
However, one of Llama 2’s main selling points is that it is free for research and commercial use.
1. Claude
Claude is a next-generation AI assistant produced by Anthrophic that uses natural language processing to generate conversational text based on training data from up to December 2022.
Claude can summarise, search, and create content and creative writing in a more conversational format than ChatGPT.
Other key differences are that it can also process files uploaded by the user, and it supports a large number of words for each prompt with 100,000 context tokens compared to ChatGPT’s 8,000 (if using GPT4).
The Bottom Line
Based on the range of tools above, we can conclude that generative AI tools will disrupt many aspects of human life.
At this point, ChatGPT is the most popular AI chatbot. But the competitors are also developing new, unique features and initiatives.
Some chatbots are generic, and others target specific use cases. Although it is very difficult to predict the future of AI chatbots, they will likely change our lives significantly in the near future.
