Top 10 OpenAI Alternatives

OpenAI has had a good reputation in the Generative AI space since its inception. OpenAI, with its large language models, launched a series of AI content generator applications. Its large language models, like GPT2, GPT3, and GPT4, are trained progressively and have proved to be a better model than earlier versions.

With OpenAI ruling the roost, it is also imperative to know many OpenAI alternatives. There are many OpenAI alternatives; it can be either a large language model creation organization, or it can also be an alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E.

I did my research to find out a few alternatives to OpenAI and am interested in sharing my learnings on those alternatives.

Let me start with MidJourney, an AI Image Generator alternative to OpenAI’s image generation app DALL-E.

MidJourney

MidJourney gained a compelling reputation as an excellent text-to-image generator. MidJourney is an alternative to OpenAI’s DALL-E. MidJourney was founded by David Holz, who previously worked as a researcher at NASA. MidJourney is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

MidJourney accepts natural language descriptions called prompts and generates images. The images generated are usually of high quality and are also known to depict their descriptions as a perfect images. Although sometimes the images may be different from what the user expects, it still does a good work of generating a reasonable-quality image.

Although MidJourney is an alternative to OpenAI’s DALL-E, it can also be thought of as an alternative to Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion. MidJourney has also faced lawsuits for scraping copyrighted materials across the web for training its large language model. You can join MidJourney’s Discord server for any kind of support and help regarding the product.

Now, let’s discuss BardAI from Google.

BardAI

Google is known for its monopoly in the search engine industry. With the advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google found the need to launch a similar product from its guild. Google, with its large team base and multi-functional team, decided to launch its ChatGPT alternative.

The launch of BardAI was Google’s attempt, which was thought of as a direct response to ChatGPT. Although the product generated a decent response to its natural language prompts, there were also controversial receptions for this product. Some sections commented that the response of BardAI was not to the mark.

BardAI was built on Google’s proprietary large language model. BardAI was initially trained in the LaMDA Large language model. Later, BardAI was moved to the PaLM Large language model. The competition between Google and Microsoft was so fierce that Microsoft Bing AI was also in the game.

Now, let’s discover what Microsoft has done in this space.

BingAI

BingAI is an AI chat functionality product launched by Microsoft. This AI Chatbot was launched on February 7, 2023. This new chatbot feature is based on OpenAI’s GPT4 large language model. Microsoft is an initial investor in OpenAI. This led to the easy adoption of OpenAI’s GPT4 model to create the BingAI Chat.

It was reported that over 1 million people joined the waitlist within 48 hours of the announcement. In March 2023, Bing reached a whooping 100 million active users. In the same month, Bing incorporated and launched an AI image generator powered once again by OpenAI. This was DALL-E 2 behind its image generator. Later in October, the Image generator was based on OpenAI’s DALL-E 3.

BingAI Chat is known to write different types of content, from poems to songs to stories to reports, and provide the user with information and insights they need to get their queries addressed. The image generator from BingAI is known to design a logo, draw artwork, and create other images based on text prompts.

StabilityAI

StabilityAI soon emerged to be a perfect alternative to OpenAI. It has its large language models. The company’s research in machine learning and other AI areas led to the development of its large language models. This Startup company was funded and developed to create text-to-image and image-to-image generation capabilities.

Stable Diffusion is one of its flagship products created for text-to-image generation. Other than text-to-image, it also creates image-to-image generation. The output image generated through an input image is of good quality.

Not only text but Stability AI has products that create audio. Yes, Stable Audio is StabilityAI’s launch to generate Audio. Stable Audio generates music and sound effects based on the given prompt. Stable Beluga is very helpful for generating marketing copies and answers to questions.

Stable LM is used for auto-completion of sentences. Japanese Stable LM is a version of Stable LM in Japanese. To create programming codes, StabilityAI has Stable Code. Stable code is known to improve developer efficiency.

Now, HuggingFace another important OpenAI alternative.

HuggingFace

HuggingFace was founded in the year 2016, and it's an important OpenAI alternative. It is a French-American Company founded by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf in New York City. Originally launched as a ChatBot for teenagers, it soon pivoted to be a platform for machine learning. HuggingFace is an open-source community aimed at supporting the development of machine learning, AI, and natural language processing.

It is a community where data scientists, AI enthusiasts, and ML researchers can collaborate. It is a GitHub-like platform aimed specifically to create AI applications. Users can create, build, and train machine learning models with this platform. Users can share models, datasets, and spaces with this community.

It has libraries aiding the development of machine learning applications. One of its libraries is named Transformers. You can try Transformers if you are an AI techy. All of its products can be deployed on Amazon Web Services. Top companies like SalesForce, Amazon, Google, IBM, and Qualcomm led its funding.

We are now moving on to discuss LightningAI.

LightningAI

LightningAI is another OpenAI alternative was founded by William Falcon, the creator of Pytorch Lightning. Pytorch Lightning is an open-source Python Library that provides a high-level interface for Pytorch, a popular deep-learning framework. It is a lightweight and high-performance framework, making deep learning experiments easier to read and reproduce.

Currently, LightningAI is available for users to join the waitlist. You can join the early access waitlist from their website. This is a platform to train, build, and deploy AI with PyTorch Lightning faster and better.

William Falcon launched Lightning AI to shape the development of artificial intelligence products for commercial and academic use. Currently, this AI platform is not open to independent developers, but William said it will become generally available soon. This platform can pave the way to create many generative AI applications, like generating images from text.

How about Cohere next?

Cohere

Cohere is another OpenAI alternative for the enterprise specializing in large language models. Cohere is a Canadian multinational technology company. Cohere was founded in 2019 by Aiden Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst. This company has headquarters in Toronto and San Francisco.

Aidan Gomez, one of its founders, was previously part of Google. All of the co-founders attended the University of Toronto. Gomez served as the company’s CEO since its inception. In 2022, YouTube CFO Martin Kon was hired as the company’s Chief Operating Officer.

Cohere’s large language model for understanding text was available in over 100+ languages. Cohere collaborated with companies like Google, Oracle, McKinsey, and LivePerson with its large language models and Generative AI.

Cohere raised $40 million in series A funding, $125 million in series B funding, and $270 million in series C funding from many investment companies worldwide. Finally, Cohere empowers every developer and enterprise. To build incredible products and capture actual business value with its powerful AI language model.

Another OpenAI alternative from the software behemoth.

IBM Watson

IBM proved to be another perfect alternative for OpenAI. Your business has a large document base, heavy data-loaded websites, and a vast knowledge base. Your employee or customer needs help traversing through this extensive data to find a piece of information.

IBM Watson Assistant can help you inquire into that extensive database, get the information your employee or customer wants, and help them perform the intended action. All this will be done in a jiffy.

IBM watsonx Assistant leverages deep learning, machine learning, and natural language processing and helps you build your AI ChatBots. The happy news is the platform has multi-language support. Even greater news is IBM offers a free plan. Why not give it a try?

It provides natural language processing capability. It supports voice conversations. The user will experience a steep initial learning curve. It is sometimes difficult to connect to the API.

Next, the Startup PerplexityAI.

PerplexityAI

Perplexity AI was founded in 2022. Andy Konwinski, Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, and Johnny Ho are the four co-founders behind PerplexityAI. The four co-founders met while working at Google AI, where they were all involved in developing large language models. They were frustrated with the lack of an excellent way to access and use the knowledge contained in these models, so they decided to start their own company to address this problem.

The company is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and is funded by several venture capital firms. The company was committed to giving users accurate and sensible information, and it is the reason behind the choice of the name “Perplexity.” The company’s mission is to “democratize access to knowledge” by making it easier for anyone to learn and explore new topics.

This AI-powered tool is a fusion of search engine and chatbot that utilizes advanced technologies such as natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to provide accurate and comprehensive answers to user queries. The intuitive user interface that can help users find information on a wide range of topics

How about Anthropic next? Read on.

Anthropic

Anthropic is an American Artificial Intelligence Startup Company and an OpenAI alternative. Former employees of OpenAI founded it. Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei are the co-founders and siblings behind the Startup Anthropic.

Consisting of former researchers involved in OpenAI's GPT-2 and GPT-3 model development, Anthropic began development on its own AI chatbot named Claude. Like ChatGPT, Claude uses a messaging interface where users can submit questions or requests and receive highly detailed and relevant responses.

The name "Claude" was chosen either as a reference to Claude Shannon (an American Mathematician) or as "a friendly, male-gendered name designed to counterbalance the female-gendered names (Alexa, Siri, Cortana) that other tech companies gave their A.I. assistants". Claude 2 was launched in July 2023 with even more efficiency than Claude.

That’s all from me

These were the 10 OpenAI alternatives that I researched to discuss with you. These OpenAI alternatives are ruling the roost. Do share your experience if you have used any of these alternatives. If you feel that some essential alternative needs to be included, do let me know. You can write to [email protected]

Talk to you soon in another blog.

It’s Shyam signing off.