Since its public launch in November 2022, ChatGPT, OpenAI’s exciting AI chatbot, has grown in popularity like wildfire. Social media feeds are full of amazing things that people are doing with the chatbot. Job seekers, programmers, high school teachers, content creators – professionals in almost every field are finding good uses for the tool.
However, when one tool takes center stage, it’s easy to lose sight of alternatives that might offer equal or even better value. We’ve rounded up three of the best ChatGPT alternatives that you can use right now.
The underlying technology behind ChatGPT (which is GPT 3.5) is the same technology that powers Chatsonic, which makes it just as interesting as ChatGPT itself. Rather than just being a clone of ChatGPT, Chatsonic goes a step further and builds on ChatGPT’s abilities while fixing some of ChatGPT’s limitations.
If you ask ChatGPT who won the 2022 World Cup, it won’t know. Hopefully a powerful AI model like ChatGPT will answer this simple question in no time. However, because the ChatGPT knowledge base has a deadline of 2021, the AI ​​model cannot answer questions about anything that happened after 2021.
Worse still, ChatGPT cannot access data from the Internet in real time. This means that you cannot access the World Wide Web to retrieve information about recent events or events that are not included in your training data.
This is where Chatsonic beats ChatGPT. Chatsonic can access the Internet and pull information from Google’s Knowledge Graph to create enhanced responses that are up-to-date and more consistent with recent events. Of course, we asked Chatsonic who won the 2022 World Cup and who got the best player award; we were not disappointed.
Another notable problem with ChatGPT is that it cannot generate images. Since OpenAI is a heavyweight in AI arts, it’s a bit confusing why your ChatGPT model can’t create images. There are probably technical explanations for that, but it’s a problem nonetheless. On the other hand, Chatsonic can create digital art from prompts. Use the Stable Diffusion and DALL-E APIs to generate awesome AI art.
Although ChatGPT has a simple and intuitive user interface, there are some features that could make the user experience even better. Chatsonic adds some of those. If you’re tired of typing back and forth, Chatsonic can use voice commands and, if needed, also get responses via voice, just like you would with Siri and the Google Assistant. There is also a feature to help you share, edit and download your conversations with the AI ​​chatbot.
However, Chatsonic is not all rosy. Although you will get free access when you sign up, unlike ChatGPT, Chatsonic is a paid service. You get tokens allocated, and once you run out of tokens, you’ll have to stick with the barebones on offer. Also, compared to ChatGPT, Chatsonic is not very good with computer codes.
We asked ChatGPT to solve different problems in PHP, JavaScript and HTML. ChatGPT’s responses were more “complete” and correctly formatted in all cases, though not necessarily more accurate.
You will find that ChatGPT’s responses are more detailed and longer than Chatsonic’s. In several cases, Chatsonic tends to summarize your responses. That might work for some people, but we didn’t find it useful when we needed a long answer. Those limitations aside though, Chatsonic is exciting and one of the best ChatGPT alternatives you can find.
Even before ChatGPT went viral, there was GPT-3 Playground, a platform for the public to play with OpenAI’s GPT-3 AI model. Unfortunately, the tool didn’t create as much of a buzz as ChatGPT. This is partly due to its rather technical user interface and lack of consumer-focused advertising.
Ironically, while ChatGPT is getting a lot of attention, GPT-3 is a much larger and significantly more powerful AI model. Without a doubt, it is one of the most powerful AI language models out there.
ChatGPT is like an iteration of the GPT-3 model that has been simplified and tweaked to be more conversational and human in its response. You can better understand human intent, provide context-specific responses, and have coherent conversations.
You can imagine GPT-3 Playground as ChatGPT for advanced users. You can modify it to do what ChatGPT does and even more. There are more options and settings to customize the AI ​​model to behave the way you want.
There are also some differences in the nature of the response you’ll get from both demo models. While ChatGPT will refuse to answer questions on some sensitive topics, the GPT-3 Playground tool is less likely to refuse to answer questions. If you want to get familiar with the GPT-3 Playground, here is a guide on how to use the GPT-3 Playground.
YouChat, like every other ChatGPT alternative on our list, is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 AI model. This gives it capabilities similar to those of ChatGPT. It has a stylish and colorful interface and is seamlessly integrated into the You.com search engine.
As a result, YouChat can act as a search engine, providing you with a list of links to indexed web pages relevant to your query. Or, you can get typical ChatGPT-style conversational responses to questions. If you are looking for a search engine and a chatbot like ChatGPT in one product, YouChat is a great option.
Unfortunately, YouChat is plagued with limitations of GPT-3.5, which is its base technology. Remember, GPT-3.5 and all related models cannot provide accurate answers to events that occurred after 2021 (which is their knowledge base cutoff date).
As a result, if you ask YouChat questions about recent events, be prepared for unpredictable results. While ChatGPT will refuse to answer questions related to events after 2021, YouChat may attempt to answer such questions with incorrect answers.
However, YouChat still has the edge over ChatGPT when it comes to handling queries about recent events. We asked YouChat and ChatGPT to compare the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro smartphones.
YouChat made a decent effort to make a comparison.
ChatGPT, on the other hand, simply said that it couldn’t provide a proper answer.
Apart from the difficulties in dealing with queries related to recent events and a few other limitations, YouChat is a solid alternative to ChatGPT. When ChatGPT eventually goes premium, simple and powerful ChatGPT alternatives like YouChat will likely get the exposure it deserves.
ChatGPT: a glimpse of what’s to come
Since OpenAI released its latest AI model to the public, technology companies have experimented with it and refined it for various purposes. Although ChatGPT is still unique in many ways, you will find a handful of tools that offer similar capabilities and features online.
In the long run, there are sure to be even more ChatGPT alternatives as more developers take advantage of the technology that powers ChatGPT to create even more amazing products.