ChatGPT has taken the entire world by storm. Imagine a new innovation that gets to over 100 million monthly active users (MAU) just 2 months after it is launched. ChatGPT is a chatbot whose language model enables it to give realistic, human-like, text-based responses to any input phrase it is given. You can ask or input virtually anything. You might be wondering why the name ChatGPT. ChatGPT stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer. OpenAI is the one behind ChatGPT. OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company. ChatGPT is based on GPT-3 which is the most robust natural language processing model in existence. Anyways, today we are looking at top competitors or alternatives of ChatGPT.

PENPAL PLAYGROUND

First off I want to let you know about a Zimbabwean alternative in this regard. I am currently in touch with a team of Zimbabwean developers working on something. Their thrust is to bring access to these AI tools to people in Zimbabwe. That way Zimbabweans will not be left behind in these developments. They have been working on a website that will allow Zimbabweans to access ChatGPT without any restrictions. It is still a work in progress but you can access it here. It is free to use. Kindly check it out and leave some feedback.

OPT

OPT stands for Open Pretrained Transformer. It is a large-scale Transformer Model with 175 billion parameters. It is the first of its kind to be made widely accessible. Its performance is literally just like that of GPT-3. OPT was developed by Meta. You will also find it titled OPT-175B. The OPT AI was trained using or on data sets that are publicly available. The other unique thing about OPT-175B is that it uses a much smaller carbon footprint during training. It uses only 0.14 of what ChatGPT uses. Overall, OPT is considered to be ChatGPT’s biggest competitor. Unlike ChatGPT, OPT is open source.

PaLM

PaLM stands for Pathways Language Model. PaLM is on the list of some of the world’s biggest AI language models. One of the unique things about PaLM is that it is scalable to 540 billion parameters. That is just over 3 times more than ChatGPT’s capacity. PaLM is Google’s offering on the large language models (LLM) front. PaLM was trained using English and datasets in different languages.

Examples of datasets used are Wikipedia, web documents, books, and conversations, amongst others. PaLM was found to eclipse ChatGPT on a number of metrics namely, natural language inference, common sense reasoning, in-context reading comprehension, and question answering, amongst others. PaLM is particularly exceptional when it comes to natural language inference.

BLOOM

Bloom is labelled as the biggest open multilingual language model in the world. In other words, it is the biggest open-source large language model (LLM) in the world. One of the key things about Bloom is that anyone in the world can access it. It does have 176 billion parameters almost just like (but slightly more than) ChatGPT. No wonder it is commonly termed a good alternative to ChatGPT. Bloom was trained from March to July in 2022. Bloom as developed as a collective effort of around 1000 AI scientists. Bloom is notably accurate when it comes to things like mathematics, coding, and translation, amongst others.

LaMDA

Google’s LaMDA is a large language model (LLM) that was built on Transformer. By the way, Transformer is a neural network architecture Google launched in 2017. It also made it open source the same year. LaMDA was particularly trained on dialogue tasks. LaMDA stands for Language Model for Dialogue Applications. There have been debates regarding whether or not LaMDA is sentient.

The truth is LaMDA is not and cannot be sentient. To be sentient denotes the ability to experience sensations, thoughts, or feelings. The fact that some claim LaMDA to be sentient simply speaks to how good it is. It does feel like you are conversing with a person when you interact with LaMDA. LaMDA will be available to the general public and on iOS and Android in weeks to come.

Character AI

Character AI is also a neural language model chatbot web application. It can generate textual responses that sound like a human person. Character AI makes it possible to have a contextual conversation with an AI. You can even create characters and talk to them. That is one of the uniqueness which makes it a strong alternative to ChatGPT. Character AI is presently in beta mode. If you go onto the Character AI website you will find so many things you can do. For instance, you can practise a new language, practise interviewing, brainstorm ideas, plan a trip, write a story, and get help making a decision, amongst others.

To date, ChatGPT is one of the most powerful chatbots ever produced. Regardless, there are still countless other powerful competitors or alternatives to ChatGPT. That is why we had to explore some of them today. These were just some top ones. Otherwise there are thousands more with various capabilities. When it comes to AI adoption, Zimbabwe is still lagging behind. We really need to see more AI adoption and AI innovations coming out of Zimbabwe.