The first half of 2023 has provided an explosion of tools harnessed to the promise of generative AI. It would be impossible to
summarise everything that has come down the pike—there have been so many! What follows is a summary of a few, in no particular order and with no claim that the applications listed here are more important than other generative AI applications.
Nitin Sharma provides us with some new alternatives to ChatGPT. Some, such as Wavtool, generate music. Others, such as Spline, create 3D diagrams.
Gamma and Opus AI (early access only) are two interesting text-based tools.
Gamma creates presentation decks using AI and human produced prompts. Gamma is aimed at business owners, designers, and content creators. Users input a topic or select a template and Gamma crafts their content. Gamma can produce more than web pages: it also creates presentations and documents. Right now it is free of charge.
Opus AI extracts features from any English literary style, with no special syntax to learn. It is designed to generate content for movies, games, and simulations. The user provides prompts or instructions, and Opus AI generates unique and engaging content as needed. Their website tells us:
You're part of an elite tribe whose job is to give birth to imaginary characters, fantastical environments and bring entire worlds into existence. You make fantasy real.
Yes, that sounds like me.
Upanishad Sharma in Best ChatGPT Alternatives discusses twenty-five (twenty-five!) generative AI applications. Some of the alternatives mentioned in the article include Microsoft’s XiaoIce, Google’s Meena, and Facebook’s Blender.
His article discusses the capabilities of these models in terms of natural language understanding, context retention, and generating coherent responses. It explores alternative options to ChatGPT and provides waypoints to help choose the most suitable conversational AI model with respect to the task at hand. A few of the applications described include the following:
Perplexity AI is a ChatGPT alternative that has also been trained on OpenAI’s API. The website is minimalist and hence easy to use. It can hold conversations and provide nuanced responses. Unlike ChatGPT, it cites its sources (for example, Wikipedia). And it’s free.
The whimsically spelled Caktus is an interesting and perhaps noble application (well, not that noble—it’s ten bucks a month). It is designed for high school and college students. According to the company, Caktus is the first-ever educational artificial intelligence tool that lets students automate their homework so they can focus on other tasks. It uses a large language model and the CORE database, a searchable resource of 260 million research papers. It can take lectures notes, suggest ideas, and adjust it’s writing output to a student’s particular style (uh-oh).
A Google Contribution. Google has also come out with the scholastically-oriented and pompously named Socratic AI, for the smartphone. It takes an almost Montessori-like approach to learning, and targets high school and university students and their academic tasks, using Google AI to connect users to on-line educational resources. Google claims that Socratic curates the most relevant online resources. It has study guides, videos, and step-by-step explanations. You can interact by:
- Providing a photo of your problem, such as a textbook page or handout.
- Speaking your question.
- Typing in your question.
Neeva. Even with all the useful things you can do with ChatGPT, one of its shortcomings is that its database is restricted to information up to 2021. What’s more, unless you use extensions for ChatGPT, the service can’t access information from the internet to improve or augment its answers (at least for now). Neeva AI overcomes these two limitations of ChatGPT. It integrates multiple data sources to present answers in an easy-to-read fashion, similar to Google's response page. Neeva includes source citations in its summaries, and does not track users or display ads—at least in the paid version.
Finally, Gizmodo all tells us that ChatGPT is decent at writing malware, but never mind about that.
