The Best AI Chatbots To Try Out: ChatGPT, Bard, And More

The idea of chatbots has been around since the early days of the internet. But even compared to popular voice assistants like Siri, the generated chatbots of the modern era are far more powerful.

Yes, you can converse with them in natural language. But these AI chatbots can generate text of all kinds, from poetry to code, and the results really are exciting. ChatGPT remains in the spotlight, but as interest continues to grow, more and more rivals are popping up to challenge its crown.

ChatGPT © Provided by Digital Trends Hatice Baran / Unsplash

This one's obvious, but no discussion of ChatGPT can be had without first mentioning the breakout hit from OpenAI. Ever since its launch in November of 2022, ChatGPT has made the idea of AI text generation go mainstream. No longer was this a research project — it became a viral hit, quickly becoming the fastest-growing tech application of all time, boasting over 100 million users in just a couple of months. The power and accuracy of the natural language chatbot is the main draw, but the fact that it was made free to try for anyone was important too.

ChatGPT is built on GPT-3.5, a robust LLM (Large Language Model) that produces some impressive natural language conversations. It is capped at knowledge from up to 2021, though, so it can't access information that's based on events after that. However, ChatGPT is particularly good at creative texts, so if you're asking it to write stories or imagine scenarios, it's remarkably good. Until it's dethroned, ChatGPT will remain the go-to option for experimenting with AI chatbots, whether to speed up workflows or just to have some fun.

ChatGPT Plus © Provided by Digital Trends OpenAI announced its latest iteration of ChatGPT with greater accuracy and creativity.

Jumping on the success of ChatGPT, OpenAI quickly rolled out a paid service called ChatGPT Plus. At the time, it appeared to be a simple way for people to jump to the front of the line, which was increasingly long during peak hours. ChatGPT Plus was more than that, though. Once GPT-4 rolled out, it gave users access to a much more powerful AI chatbot.

Compared to GPT-3.5, this more advanced model has proven to be significantly more powerful than the version available in the free ChatGPT, especially as a tool to collaborate on longer-form creative projects with. In fact, despite how young it is, people have already done some amazing things with it, including programming an entire game from scratch.

When it comes to the most powerful AI chatbot you can get your hands on, the $20 a month is more than worth it for ChatGPT Plus.

Google Bard © Provided by Digital Trends Google Bard in an open window.

Outside the OpenAI ecosystem, Google has been the first serious competitor to step up to the plate with the release of Google Bard, which is still categorized as an "experiment" by the company. The chatbot got off to a rough start, though, stumbling at answering a question during the demo's first preview, which was such a bad look that it sent the company's stock tanking.

Since then, the company has slowly let more and more people into the free preview via its waitlist, even as Google admits that it's only getting started. Google CEO Sundar Pichai even called it a "souped-up Civic" compared to ChatGPT, while denying the claims that it was trained partially on ChatGPT.

That's not a great look for a company of Google's size, but it seems determined to improve Bard and make it a serious competitor to ChatGPT.

Bing Chat © Provided by Digital Trends Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

Microsoft was an early investor in the rapid success of ChatGPT, quickly putting out its own model based on the same technology. Bing Chat, as you'd guess by the name, builds OpenAI's natural language generative AI into Microsoft's own products. Through the new Bing, the AI chatbot is just one click away from the conventional Bing Search. Microsoft's made lots of changes too, including adding source links, different modes to narrow down your results, suggested follow-up prompts, and even the Edge Copilot, which brings the AI chat with you no matter what webpage you're on. Microsoft is even continuing to roll out Bing Image Creator directly into Bing Chat, which is a great addition.

Of course, the catch to all this is that you'll need to download the latest version of the Edge browser. That's a shame, as are the fairly tight restrictions on how many sessions you can have per day. Still, Microsoft remains one of the biggest players in the game, determined to roll out "Copilot" modes into all its most important products and applications, such as the equivalent of ChatGPT built right into Word or Excel. Compared to the more straightforward ChatGPT, Bing Chat is the most accessible and user-friendly version of an AI chatbot you can get.

JasperAI © Provided by Digital Trends JasperAI helping write a bio for a Facebook profile.

If your company or organization is looking for something to help specifically with professional creative needs, JasperAI is one of the best options. It helps creative professionals the most by being able to specify exactly what type of text you're looking for. Need a caption for an Instagram post? How about a professional email, a YouTube script, or even a fully-written blog post? These specific platforms and formats are what JasperAI claims to excel at.

While professional use cases are the focus of JasperAI, the company also has a free Chrome extension, which lets you bring AI-generated text to more casual settings, such as writing personal emails or Facebook posts.

ColossalChat © Provided by Digital Trends Photo by Alan Truly

The initial versions of ChatGPT imagined a completely open-source AI chatbot, but the move to being a privately held company has changed that goal. ColossalChat is a newcomer on the scene that recaptures that open-internet vibe. It's free to use and available in browsers now, which makes it a solid alternative to ChatGPT when it's at capacity. It can speak in Chinese and in English, and it can even write code.

But more than that, the open-source nature of ColossalChat is what makes it important. It's based on LlaMa (Large Language Model Meta AI), which is Meta's open-source natural language model, allowing for the closest thing that's currently available to a completely open-source version of ChatGPT. That makes ColossalChat more important for developers and the future of AI implementations, but it's certainly ready for anyone to just go and try out too.

YouChat © Provided by Digital Trends YouChat shown in a window answering a question about Taekwondo.

You.Com has been a little-known search alternative to Google since 2021, but it's also been one of the early pioneers in implementing AI-generated text into its products. YouWrite lets AI write specific text for you, while YouChat is a more direct clone of ChatGPT. There are even features of You.Com for coding called YouCode and image generation called YouImagine. All of these programs are based on OpenAI's GPT-3 models (except YouImagine, which uses Stable Diffusion). That means it's fairly adept at generating creative text or answering complex questions. Unfortunately, that means it's not quite as useful as ChatGPT, which is currently based on GPT-3.5.

YouChat also offers extra resources to continue research and links out to related topics, which is handy.

So while it might not be as impressive, if you're looking for an alternative, it's close to giving you the same experience as ChatGPT.

The Exciting New AI Transforming Search — And Maybe Everything — Explained

© Malte Mueller/Getty Images

The world's first generative AI-powered search engine is here, and it's in love with you. Or it thinks you're kind of like Hitler. Or it's gaslighting you into thinking it's still 2022, a more innocent time when generative AI seemed more like a cool party trick than a powerful technology about to be unleashed on a world that might not be ready for it.

If you feel like you've been hearing a lot about generative AI, you're not wrong. After a generative AI tool called ChatGPT went viral a few months ago, it seems everyone in Silicon Valley is trying to find a use for this new technology. Generative AI is essentially a more advanced and useful version of the conventional artificial intelligence that already helps power everything from autocomplete to Siri. The big difference is that generative AI can create new content, such as images, text, audio, video, and even code — usually from a prompt or command. It can write news articles, movie scripts, and poetry. It can make images out of some really specific parameters. And if you listen to some experts and developers, generative AI will eventually be able to make almost anything, including entire apps, from scratch. For now, the killer app for generative AI appears to be search.

One of the first major generative AI products for the consumer market is Microsoft's new AI-infused Bing, which debuted in January to great fanfare. The new Bing uses generative AI in its web search function to return results that appear as longer, written answers culled from various internet sources instead of a list of links to relevant websites. There's also a new accompanying chat feature that lets users have human-seeming conversations with an AI chatbot.

Google, the undisputed king of search for decades now, released a chatbot called Bard six weeks after Microsoft's. CEO Sundar Pichai said the company plans to incorporate generative AI chat into search, according to an April 6 report in the Wall Street Journal, though he didn't offer many details or a timeline for this.

In other words, the AI wars have begun. And the battles may not just be over search engines. Generative AI is already starting to find its way into mainstream applications for everything from food shopping to social media.

Microsoft and Google are the biggest companies with public-facing generative AI products, but they aren't the only ones working on it. Apple, Meta, and Amazon have their own AI initiatives, and there are plenty of startups and smaller companies developing generative AI or working it into their existing products. TikTok has a generative AI text-to-image system. Design platform Canva has one, too. An app called Lensa creates stylized selfies and portraits (sometimes with ample bosoms). And the open-source model Stable Diffusion can generate detailed and specific images in all kinds of styles from text prompts.

Generative AI has the potential to be a revolutionary technology, and it's certainly being hyped as such

There's a good chance we're about to see a lot more generative AI showing up in a lot more applications, too. OpenAI, the AI developer that built the ChatGPT language model, in March announced the release of APIs, or application programming interfaces, for its ChatGPT and Whisper, a speech recognition model. Companies like Instacart, Shopify, and Expedia quickly moved to integrate it into their products, using generative AI to write shopping lists, offer recommendations, and help users plan vacations. There's no telling how many more apps might come up with novel ways to take advantage of what generative AI can do.

Generative AI has the potential to be a revolutionary technology, and it's certainly being hyped as such. Venture capitalists, who are always looking for the next big tech thing, believe that generative AI can replace or automate a lot of creative processes, freeing up humans to do more complex tasks and making people more productive overall. But it's not just creative work that generative AI can produce. It can help developers make software. It could improve education. It may be able to discover new drugs or become your therapist. It just might make our lives easier and better.

Or it could make things a lot worse. There are reasons to be concerned about the damage generative AI can do if it's released to a society that isn't ready for it — or if we ask the AI program to do something it isn't ready for. How ethical or responsible generative AI technologies are is largely in the hands of the companies developing them, as there are few if any regulations or laws in place governing AI. This powerful technology could put millions of people out of work if it's able to automate entire industries. It could spawn a destructive new era of misinformation. There are also concerns of bias due to a lack of diversity in the material and data that generative AI is trained on, or the people who are overseeing that training.

Nevertheless, powerful generative AI tools are making their way to the masses. If 2022 was the "year of generative AI," 2023 may be the year that generative AI is actually put to use, ready or not.

The slow, then sudden, rise of generative AI

Conventional artificial intelligence is already integrated into a ton of products we use all the time, like autocomplete, voice assistants like Amazon's Alexa, and even the recommendations for music or movies we might enjoy on streaming services. But generative AI is more sophisticated. It uses deep learning, or algorithms that create artificial neural networks that are meant to mimic how human brains process information and learn. And then those models are fed enormous amounts of data to train on. For example, large language models power things like ChatGPT, which train on text collected from around the internet until they learn to generate and mimic those kinds of texts and conversations upon request. Image models have been fed tons of images and captions that describe them in order to learn how to create new content based on prompts.

After years of development, most of it outside of public view, generative AI hit the mainstream in 2022 with the widespread releases of art and text models. Models like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E, which was released by OpenAI, were first to go viral, and they let anyone create new images from text prompts. Then came OpenAI's ChatGPT (GPT stands for "generative pre-trained transformer") which got everyone's attention. This tool could create large, entirely new chunks of text from simple prompts. For the most part, ChatGPT worked really well, too — better than anything the world had seen before.

Though it's one of many AI startups out there, OpenAI seems to have the most advanced or powerful products right now. Or at least, it's the startup that has given the general public access to its services, thereby providing the most evidence of its progress in the generative AI field. This is a demonstration of its abilities as well as a source of even more data for OpenAI's models to learn from.

OpenAI is also backed by some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley. It was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab with $1 billion in support from the likes of Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, Amazon, and former Y Combinator president Sam Altman, who is now the company's CEO. OpenAI has since changed its structure to become a for-profit company but has yet to make a profit or even much by way of revenue. That's not a problem yet, as OpenAI has gotten a considerable amount of funding from Microsoft, which began investing in OpenAI in 2019. And OpenAI is seizing on the wave of excitement for ChatGPT to promote its API services, which are not free. Neither is the company's upcoming ChatGPT Plus service.

Other big tech companies have for years been working on their own generative AI initiatives. There's Apple's Gaudi, Meta's LLaMA and Make-a-Scene, Amazon's collaboration with Hugging Face, and Google's LaMDA (which is good enough that one Google engineer thought it was sentient). But thanks to its early investment in OpenAI, Microsoft had access to the AI project everyone knew about and was trying out.

In January 2023, Microsoft announced it was giving $10 billion to OpenAI, bringing its total investment in the company to $13 billion. From that partnership, Microsoft has gotten what it hopes will be a real challenge to Google's longtime dominance in web search: a new Bing AI search will give us the first glimpse of how generative AI can be used in our everyday lives ... If it works

Tech companies and investors are willing to pour resources into generative AI because they hope that, eventually, it will be able to create or generate just about any kind of content humans ask for. Some of those aspirations may be a long way from becoming reality, but right now, it's possible that generative AI will power the next evolution of the humble internet search.

After months of rumors that both Microsoft and Google were working on generative AI versions of their web search engines, Microsoft debuted its AI-integrated Bing in January in a splashy media event that showed off all the cool things it could do, thanks to OpenAI's custom-built technology that powered it. Instead of entering a prompt for Bing to look up and return a list of relevant links, you could ask Bing a question and get a "complete answer" composed by Bing's generative AI and culled from various sources on the web that you didn't have to take the time to visit yourself. You could also use Bing's chatbot to ask follow-up questions to better refine your search results.

Microsoft wants you to think the possibilities of these new tools are just about endless. And notably, Bing AI appeared to be ready for the general public when the company announced it in February. It's now being rolled out to people on an ever-growing wait list and incorporated into other Microsoft products, like its Windows 11 operating system and Skype. In mid-March, the company announced that it would add a chatbot called "Copilot" to its Office apps.

This poses a major threat to Google, which has had the search market sewn up for decades and makes most of its revenue from the ads placed alongside its search results. The new Bing could chip away at Google's search dominance and its main moneymaker. And while Google has been working on its own generative AI models for years, it's only released to the public a chatbot called Bard, which it calls an "experiment," and has yet to incorporate it into search though it plans to do so in the coming months. All of this suggests that, so far, Microsoft is winning the AI-powered search engine battle.

Or is it?

Once the new Bing made it to the masses, it quickly became apparent that the technology might not be ready for primetime after all. Right out of the gate, Bing made basic factual errors or made up stuff entirely, also known as "hallucinating." What was perhaps more problematic, however, was that its chatbot was also saying some disturbing and weird things. One person asked Bing for movie showtimes, only to be told the movie hadn't come out yet (it had) because the date was February 2022 (it wasn't). The user insisted that it was, at that time, February 2023. Bing AI responded by telling the user they were being rude, had "bad intentions," and had lost Bing's "trust and respect." A New York Times reporter pronounced Bing "not ready for human contact" after its chatbot — with a considerable amount of prodding from the reporter — began expressing its "desires," one of which was the reporter himself. Bing also told an AP reporter that he was acting like Hitler.

In response to the bad press, Microsoft has tried to put some limits and guardrails on Bing, like limiting the number of interactions one person can have with its chatbot. But the question remains: How thoroughly could Microsoft have tested Bing's chatbot before releasing it if it took only a matter of days for users to get it to give such wild responses?

Google, on the other hand, may have been watching this all unfold with a certain sense of glee. Its limited Bard rollout hasn't exactly gone perfectly, but Bard hasn't compared any of its users to one of the most reviled people in human history, either. At least, not that we know of. Not yet. But the Center for Countering Digital Hate was able to get Bard to give false answers to questions about controversial topics and conspiracy theories, including denying the Holocaust happened and recommending that gay people try conversion therapy. A Google spokesperson told the Daily Beast that Bard is an "early experiment that can sometimes give inaccurate or inappropriate information."

So far, Microsoft is winning the AI-powered search engine battle. Or is it?

Again, Microsoft and Google aren't the only companies working on generative AI, but their public releases have put more pressure on others to roll out their offerings as soon as possible, too. ChatGPT's release and OpenAI's partnership with Microsoft likely accelerated Google's plans. Meanwhile, Meta is working to get its generative AI into as many of its own products as possible and just released a large language model of its own, called Large Language Model Meta AI, or LLaMA.

With the rollout of APIs that help developers add ChatGPT and Whisper to their applications, OpenAI seems eager to expand quickly. Some of these integrations seem pretty useful, too. Snapchat now has a chatbot called "My AI" for its paid subscribers, with plans to offer it to everyone soon. Initial reports say it's just ChatGPT in Snapchat, but with even more restrictions about what it will talk about (no swearing, sex, or violence). Instacart will use ChatGPT in a feature called "Ask Instacart" that can answer customers' questions about food. Shopify's Shop app has a ChatGPT-powered assistant to make personalized recommendations from the brands and stores that use the platform. Expedia says its ChatGPT integration helps users plan vacations, though it also stressed that this was still in a beta-testing phase and highlighted some of the ways Expedia already uses less-sophisticated forms of AI and machine learning on its app and website.

Generative AI is here to stay, but we don't yet know if that's for the best

Bing AI's problems were just a glimpse of how generative AI can go wrong and have potentially disastrous consequences. That's why pretty much every company that's in the field of AI goes out of its way to reassure the public that it's being very responsible with its products and taking great care before unleashing them on the world. Yet for all of their stated commitment to "building AI systems and products that are trustworthy and safe," Microsoft and OpenAI either didn't or couldn't ensure a Bing chatbot could live up to those principles, but they released it anyway. Google and Meta, by contrast, were very conservative about releasing their products — until Microsoft and OpenAI gave them a push.

Error-prone generative AI is being put out there by many other companies that have promised to be careful. Some text-to-image models are infamous for producing images with missing or extra limbs. There are chatbots that confidently declare the winner of a Super Bowl that has yet to be played. These mistakes are funny as isolated incidents, but we've already seen one publication rely on generative AI to write authoritative articles with significant factual errors. And a law professor discovered that ChatGPT was saying he was accused of sexual harassment, basing that assertion on a Washington Post article that didn't exist. Bing's chatbot then repeated that false claim, citing the professor's own op-ed about it.

These screw-ups have been happening for years. Microsoft had one high-profile AI chatbot flop with its 2016 release of Tay, which Twitter users almost immediately trained to say some really offensive things. Microsoft quickly took it offline. Meta's Blenderbot is based on a large language model and was released in August 2022. It didn't go well. The bot seemed to hate Facebook, got racist and antisemitic, and wasn't very accurate. It's still available to try out, but after seeing what ChatGPT can do, it feels like a clunky, slow, and weird step backward.

There are even more serious concerns. Generative AI threatens to put a lot of people out of work if it's good enough to replace them. It could have a profound impact on education. There are also questions of legalities over the material AI developers are using to train their models, which is typically scraped from millions of sources that the developers don't have the rights to. And there are questions of bias both in the material that AI models are training on and the people who are training them.

And there's the possibility that generative AI will be used to deliberately spread disinformation. An AI-generated image of the Pope wearing a stylish coat, made using Midjourney, fooled a lot of people and demonstrated how close we may be to a world where it's nearly impossible to tell what's real and what isn't.

On the other side, some conservative bomb-throwers have accused generative AI developers of moderating their platforms' outputs too much and making them "woke" and biased against the right wing. To that end, Musk, the self-proclaimed free-speech absolutist and OpenAI critic as well as an early investor, is reportedly considering developing a ChatGPT rival that won't have content restrictions or be trained on supposedly "woke" material.

And then there's the fear not of generative AI but of the technology it could lead to: artificial general intelligence. AGI can learn and think and solve problems like a human, if not better. This has given rise to science fiction-based fears that AGI will lead to an army of super-robots that quickly realize they have no need for humans and either turn us into slaves or wipe us out entirely.

There are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about generative AI's future, too. It's a powerful technology with a ton of potential, and we've still seen relatively little of what it can do and who it can help. Silicon Valley clearly sees this potential, and venture capitalists like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia seem to be all-in. OpenAI is valued at nearly $30 billion, despite not having yet proved itself as a revenue generator.

Generative AI has the power to upend a lot of things, but that doesn't necessarily mean it'll make them worse. Its ability to automate tasks may give humans more time to focus on the stuff that can't be done by increasingly sophisticated machines, as has been true for technological advances before it. And in the near future — once the bugs are worked out — it could make searching the web better. In the years and decades to come, it might even make everything else better, too.

Oh, and in case you were wondering: No, generative AI did not write this explainer.

Update, April 6, 12 pm ET: This story was originally published on March 4 and has been updated with information about Expedia and Bard.

AI 'brain' Created From Core Materials For OLED TVs

ChatGPT's impact extends beyond the education sector and is causing significant changes in other areas. The AI language model is recognized for its ability to perform various tasks, including paper writing, translation, coding, and more, all through question-and-answer-based interactions. The AI system relies on deep learning, which requires extensive training to minimize errors, resulting in frequent data transfers between memory and processors. However, traditional digital computer systems' von Neumann architecture separates the storage and computation of information, resulting in increased power consumption and significant delays in AI computations. Researchers have developed semiconductor technologies suitable for AI applications to address this challenge.

A research team at POSTECH, led by Professor Yoonyoung Chung (Department of Electrical Engineering, Department of Semiconductor Engineering), Professor Seyoung Kim (Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Department of Semiconductor Engineering), and Ph.D. Candidate Seongmin Park (Department of Electrical Engineering), has developed a high-performance AI semiconductor device using indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO), an oxide semiconductor widely used in OLED displays. The new device has proven to be excellent in terms of performance and power efficiency.

Efficient AI operations, such as those of ChatGPT, require computations to occur within the memory responsible for storing information. Unfortunately, previous AI semiconductor technologies were limited in meeting all the requirements, such as linear and symmetric programming and uniformity, to improve AI accuracy.

The research team sought IGZO as a key material for AI computations that could be mass-produced and provide uniformity, durability, and computing accuracy. This compound comprises four atoms in a fixed ratio of indium, gallium, zinc, and oxygen and has excellent electron mobility and leakage current properties, which have made it a backplane of the OLED display.

Using this material, the researchers developed a novel synapse device composed of two transistors interconnected through a storage node. The precise control of this node's charging and discharging speed has enabled the AI semiconductor to meet the diverse performance metrics required for high-level performance. Furthermore, applying synaptic devices to a large-scale AI system requires the output current of synaptic devices to be minimized. The researchers confirmed the possibility of utilizing the ultra-thin film insulators inside the transistors to control the current, making them suitable for large-scale AI.

The researchers used the newly developed synaptic device to train and classify handwritten data, achieving a high accuracy of over 98%, which verifies its potential application in high-accuracy AI systems in the future.

Professor Chung explained, "The significance of my research team's achievement is that we overcame the limitations of conventional AI semiconductor technologies that focused solely on material development. To do this, we utilized materials already in mass production. Furthermore, Linear and symmetrical programming characteristics were obtained through a new structure using two transistors as one synaptic device. Thus, our successful development and application of this new AI semiconductor technology show great potential to improve the efficiency and accuracy of AI."

This study was published last week on the inside back cover of Advanced Electronic Materials and was supported by the Next-Generation Intelligent Semiconductor Technology Development Program through the National Research Foundation, funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT of Korea.

---