10 ChatGPT Alternatives I'm Tracking in 2024
And 3 useful tools for upscaling, meeting notes, and job hunting.
Morning y’all!
It’s the first of February and I can’t believe how fast the first month of the year has gone by! Time slows for no man (or woman) and even though I objectively failed to achieve my January goal I’m not worried in the slightest since most things can often times start much, much slower than you’d like.
But our job is to simply not quit, right? 😬
I did get a wonderful surprise yesterday as one of you decided to personally invest in me and my writing and I’m chuffed to have Tom become my first paid subscriber ever! To have your support encourages me to no end and the plan is to continue to build a small and passionate community of generative AI enthusiasts this year!
Although this wonderful surprise did make me realize that I should probably review some of the Stripe integration settings and so I spent an hour tidying things in the backend, even going as far as making sure I have a canonical domain (DED.ai) send emails so it looks even more professional:
I’ll continue to iterate on the “ops” of this newsletter as we move forward. Have a great and wonderful day!
✌(-‿-)✌
— Summer
I like ChatGPT and use it almost every single day from simple tasks to more complex via the GPT store. But it’s far from perfect and since I err on the side of pragmatism than dogmatism I like to keep my pulse on other alternative tools that oftentimes produce better results, depending on the use-case.
Here are 10 alternative (free and paid) tools that I’m test-driving:
Microsoft Bing / Copilot — My respect for Microsoft has shot through the roof over the last few years as they’ve been able to pump out not only great research but useful generative AI tools and I wouldn’t be surprised if Bing (I hate that word) replaces Google with their superior applications; perhaps it’s only a matter of time.
Perplexity AI — Powered by models like GPT-4 and Claude 2, Perplexity Copilot is like a search engine on steroids and continues to refine its results based on your queries. I’ll admit that I haven’t replaced Google entirely for my personal search needs but this tool has landed a spot on my iPhone’s homepage — and that’s saying something.
Google Bard — Google has the resources do AI Chatbots really well and they are throwing a ton of money into their research and applications. Bard is a conversational generative artificial intelligence chatbot that was initially based on the LaMDA family of large language models and then later it was upgraded to PaLM and then to Gemini. I’ve been happily surprised at how useful this tool is becoming even for my small needs.
Jasper Chat — Jasper Chat is self-described as a conversational AI tool that lets you ask your chatbot to generate ideas, revise your content, or make you laugh. A neat addition is the fact that you can chat with Jasper in 30+ languages.
Claude — Built by Anthropic which bills itself as a “safety-first” organization and tool, Claude is a large language model (LLM) trained to be a helpful, honest, and harmless assistant with a conversational tone. Their interface is simple and you definitely won’t be getting NSFW results here; good for kids if you’re a parent.
Llama 2 — Llama 2 is a family of pre-trained (autoregressive) and fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) released by Meta AI in 2023. Released free of charge for research and commercial use, Llama 2 AI models are capable of a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, from text generation to programming code, and more. Facebook is definitely doing things right by giving it away for free and despite my personal distaste for them I’m appreciative of this effort.
HuggingChat — Is a free tool which allows you to quickly switch between models so you can get better results. Presently you can test-drive Mistral, Llama, CodeLlama, NousResearch, OpenChat, and MetaLlama with more models to come. They usually keep their LLMs updated with the latest versions too.
Pi AI — Pi is billing itself as a “personal AI”, designed to be supportive, smart, and there for you anytime. You can ask the tool for advice, for answers, or to simply chat and talk about whatever's on your mind. You can even choose different types of voices if you’d like.
Quora Poe — Poe is a platform that lets people ask questions, get instant answers, and have back-and-forth conversations with a wide variety of AI-powered bots. It is available on iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows and web.
GitHub Copilot — GH is bringing chat and voice interfaces to support pull requests, answer questions on docs, and adopt OpenAI’s GPT-4 for a more personalized developer experience. Useful for developers who are trying to find some productivity gains in their work.
So, what are you using and which ones do you like the most? I’d love to hear it in the comments! Have fun and stay productive!
✌(-‿-)✌
— Summer
Finally, 3 tools that I tried yesterday that didn’t completely make me facepalm. The first is a tool for job searches, the second is an image upscaling web app, and the third is a AI tool for meeting notes.
(-‸ლ)
I test-drove a GPT that allowed you to chat about jobs that you wanted to find and it’s precisely what you think it is. I asked it to find “product engineering” roles and gave it more details such as the fact that I wanted it to be a completely “remote” opportunity. The chatbot can continue to refine results if you wish.
I liked how they gave some of the important high-level information right in the output. Not too shabby if you ask me!
Someone shared a service that supposedly executed image enhancements and upscaling really well and I gave it a whirl. I wasn’t happy for it to just give me one output before it started asking for my money but the results weren’t terrible.
So I gave Nex.art a try and uploaded a very old image of myself (~10 years old) along the shoreline in which I’m wearing a lei and one of my favorite dresses at the time.
The output gave me a much older gal but I was surprised by the quality of the surrounding elements. This might be useful if you’re in need of a tool to do this type of work and don’t mind paying for it.
You can, of course, do this for free via Stable Diffusion XL if you’re not a fan of paying for services like me — the results are just as good too. I put the same image in and played around with the advanced settings:
What I like about local testing the most is that you can unlimited amounts of attempts so you can iterate your way to the results you want since this seems to be the best way to get what you want.
Generative AI isn’t perfect but you can get really close.
Finally, there are a growing number of tools to help you make those meetings suck less with transcription, summarization, meeting notes, and even email integration. One that I’ve used and have been impressed with is Otter and have worked with 2-3 organizations who swear by it.
I’ll admit that while I am impressed with the results I still do not personally use any of the outputs since I take my own notes during the meeting and have never really needed the full transcription. This is, of course, my own workflow that’s been built up over the years but I can see how some parts of a larger organization, like sales, might find this useful with their conversations with (potential) customers.
Competitors that offer similar features are TLDV.io and Krisp.ai so you can try each one and figure out the one that fits the best.
Good luck!
※\(^o^)/※
— Summer