ChatGPT Competitors See Opportunity in Management Churn
Established players and startups all move during and after five-day turmoil at the top of OpenAI, providing visibility into a generative AI market with many alternatives
By John P. Desmond, Editor, AI in Business
In the recent management turmoil at OpenAI, its competitors saw an opportunity to exploit.
The Google sales team launched a campaign to persuade customers to switch from OpenAI, matching its pricing and providing cloud credits if customers use Google’s AI software, according to an account in The Wall Street Journal.
Amazon emphasized its strategy of encouraging customers to choose between many AI systems, versus committing to a single vendor.
While OpenAI is the largest player in the generative AI market, thanks to the $13 billion investment from Microsoft, competitors in addition to Google and Amazon include Meta platforms, Baidu and many startups.
Adam Selipsky, the CEO of Amazon’s cloud division, has stated to the Journal that he believes companies “are going to need a lot of different generative AI models for different purposes.”
After the turmoil, Sam Altman was invited to return to OpenAI as CEO and a new board of directors was named, with only one member of the previous board retained. While disruptive, the shakeup did not cause all customers to lose faith, although it may have inspired some hedging.
“The leadership changes at OpenAI, while extremely surprising, did not change our AI strategy,” stated Brian Woodring, chief information officer of Rocket Mortgage. “We remain extremely confident in OpenAI, but if that changes in the future or if a competitor offers a more compelling option, we will be well-prepared to switch seamlessly.”
Anthropic Released Claude 2.1
Anthropic took the opportunity during the OpenAI upheaval to upgrade the language model powering its chatbot, Claude AI. Claude 2.1 is said to deliver “advancements in key capabilities for enterprises, including an expanded context window and adjustments to cut down on hallucinations.
Claude’s context window has been enlarged from 128,000 tokens to 200,000 tokens, equivalent to 150,000 words, the length of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, according to an account from tech.co. Moreover, Claude 2.1 is said to be half as likely to provide false statements via hallucinations than its predecessor. And for long-form documents, such as legal filings and financial reports, “Claude 2.1 demonstrated a 30 percent reduction in incorrect answers and a 3 to 4 times lower rate of mistakenly concluding a document supports a particular claim,” according to the account.
Interested users can sign up to use Claude for free via Anthropic’s website, which also provides the price of token bundles needed to talk to the chatbot.
Meta introduced its Llama 2 generative AI offering in July, and soon followed it up with Code Llama, a version tuned for programming tasks that Meta hopes will appeal to the development community interested in finding new ways to embed AI into software
“It’s exciting that they're releasing the weights to the community,” stated Deepak Kumar, a researcher at Stanford who has studied AI coding, referring to the parameters of the neural network at the core of the model, according to a recent account in Wired. The access to weights will give developers more flexibility than closed-source models from Google or OpenAI, he stated.
Generative AI competitive startup Perplexity AI is attracting interest for its ability to attribute the information it provides to its source. A “co-pilot” mode feature acts as a virtual assistant to a user navigating through tricky searches to find specific matches.
Perplexity founder and CEO Aravind Srinivas has described the product as an “answer engine” as opposed to a search engine. In a recent interview, Srinivas said he built Perplexity so that users can receive an “actual answer” to their queries, rather than a list of links with the answer somewhere within them, according to a recent account in siliconAngle. “Perplexity’s goal is to answer more complex questions that require synthesizing content from multiple pages and providing fast, accurate answers using LLMs,” Srinivas stated.
His vision for the company, he stated, is “To give everyone access to infinite knowledge and productivity, and to improve their lives by enabling them to interact with the internet in more intuitive, efficient ways.”
Many Alternatives to ChatGPT Emerge
Many alternatives to ChatGPT have emerged. (See Watsonx.ai Positions IBM in Generative AI for the Enterprise, AI in Business, Sept. 8, 2023, and Amazon Also in the Hyperscaler Race With Bedrock, AI in Business, August 4, 2023.) A recent account on the website of Writesonic listed the “30 Best ChatGPT Alternatives in 2023.” Reasons provided for considering an alternative include: lower price, factual, leverage existing domain expertise and no-code chatbots.
Here is a selection from the account:
Jasper Chat, formerly known as Jarvis, is an AI writing tool that enables continuous conversation. It is priced starting from $49/month. It does not provide factual content;
Socratic from Google is aimed at young students, who can type in school queries and get a response, sometimes with illustrations. Pricing is $4,99 for the first child each month, then 50 percent off per child. Schools can pay $99 per month for an entire school.
Chatsonic on Opera, accesses information through its AI Prompt option; it can generate AI images. Pricing from Chatsonic, from Writesonic, is $19 per month for 100,000 words. A free trial to Chatsonic, required to use, offers 10,000 words;
NeevaAI offers a search engine developed by the two founders, former executives of Google and YouTube. It provides references in the results. Pricing is by subscription with a monthly fee of $4.95, and free trial period options.
An account in PC World listed 10 ChatGPT alternatives. These included:
Hix.AI, an AI writing copilot with services available without a subscription, although its free plan comes with limitations. Its chatbot services can be accessed from a web app and from a Chrome extension. Hix.AI can summarize web pages and YouTube videos on demand, making it useful for web content comprehension. Its ArticleGPT feature can produce long-form content that is fact-based and SEO-friendly.
Read the source articles and information from The Wall Street Journal, tech.co, the Anthropic website, the Writesonic blog and in PC World.
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