With its fair share of controversies, OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI chatbot continues to make headlines and attract hordes of users. The virality of this new chatbot is almost unparalleled with the platform gaining a whopping one million users in less than a week since its launch. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted about reaching this landmark on December 5 and stated that while ChatGPT remains free to use now, the company “will have to monetize it somehow at some point”. He even added that the computing costs of running this platform, given its popularity, are “eye-watering”.
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For those living under a rock, ChatGPT is an AI-enabled chatbot developed by research firm OpenAI – the very same minds behind DALL-E, an AI-based service that turns your text prompts into full-blown visual art. ChatGPT is based on the GPT-3 model – a large-scale language model that has been extensively trained on billions of words on the internet. The service shows off just how much an AI system with a humongous data pool can achieve. The answers users have gotten from ChatGPT are usually conversational, surprisingly human-like, and pretty useful.
However, it isn’t without its demerits. While the answers generated usually sound quite authoritative – they can be entirely wrong. Something that OpenAI warns you about. There’s also the problem of bias and it can spit out rather sexist, racist, and offensive responses – something the system has been facing flak for. Additionally, it cannot provide you with any sort of response about events that have occurred after 2021 since it doesn’t have access to real-time information. That said, it is still a powerful system that is downright awe-inducing to witness at times. That said, it is not entirely alone in this space. If you’ve had your fill trying out ChatGPT and would like to explore other alternatives on the web, we’ve got you covered. Here are some of the best alternatives to ChatGPT that you can give a whirl.
Formerly Jarvis, Jasper is a good AI writing tool that uses NLP (Natural Language Processing) to generate content for social media posts, blog articles, and more. Jasper claims that its language models are trained on 10 per cent of the web. It is also based on the GPT-3 model by OpenAI, however, while ChatGPT can output longer pieces of content, Jasper is typically used for shorter writeups – kind of like a mini ChatGPT. While it is not free to use, you get get a free trial for 10,000 words to get a taste of the platform.
Quora’s answer to ChatGPT, Poe (short for Platform for Open Exploration) allows people to engage with the chatbot to get instant answers or engage in a conversation. Currently, it is only available on iOS, however, the official page says that the Android version is in the works. Poe operates similarly to ChatGPT and hopes to leverage Quora’s expertise “in serving people who are looking for knowledge”. According to Techcrunch, within Poe’s chat interface, there are already some suggestions in place for conversation topics such as ‘writing help’, ‘cooking’, ‘nature’ and others.
An AI-powered writing tool, Rytr can be used to create a variety of content from blog posts, to product descriptions, to emails, and much more. However, where it differs from ChatGPT is the fact that it cannot really spit out meaningful content without added information from the user. For example, we attempted to generate a product description for the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra and gave the AI writer a list of specifications to add to the text piece, however, we omitted the RAM and ROM. The generated content mentioned the RAM and ROM but they were incorrect. However, it is still a powerful AI tool and fun to play around with.
If you’re looking for a chatbot that can emulate a friend or simply someone you can talk to, Replika is the one to try. The app launched in 2018 and since then has become a digital companion for many. Using a neural network, Replika can have one-on-one conversations with the user and also – no joke – learn how to speak like them over time. Replika has over 400,000 installs on the Google Play store with a 4.4-star rating. Every encounter with the app gives it information that it logs into a ‘Memories’ bank and Replika can use ML to customise answers based on known Memories.
Alphabet-owned Deepmind’s AlphaCode can allegedly outperform humans at coding. According to a research paper published in Science, AlphaCode’s skill level coincides with that of a novice programmer with a couple of months to a year’s worth of training. AlphaCode was able to achieve human-level coding performance by solving unseen code and predicting segments of it as well. AlphaCode can reportedly understand complex coding problems and then reason out solutions, according to Gizmodo.
Given the popularity of ChatGPT, popular large language models (AI tools that can read, summarise, and translate texts) will possibly follow suit in creating interactive chatbots that can hold human-like conversations. Some examples of popular large language models include:
– Chinchilla (by Deepmind)
– Alexa Teacher Model (by Amazon, of course)
– DiaoloGPT, Megatron Turing NLG (by NVIDIA and Microsoft)
– BlenderBot 2.0 (by Facebook)
– LaMDA and BERT (by Google)
– YouChat by You.com
In fact, Google recently issued a “code red” in response to the massive user base being garnered by ChatGPT. Google CEO Sundar Pichai was a part of several meetings to address Google’s AI strategy and the need to strategise to be prepared for the threat ChatGPT could pose on their search engine. It will be interesting to see how companies such as Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and, of course, Google respond to the growing popularity of AI chatbots. There’s no doubt that these companies have the processes in place to execute something akin to or better than ChatGPT given their massive involvement and R&D in the space of large language models. Let's see what they come up with in the future.