AI race: The growing list of competitors to ChatGPT
As the market for chatbots and artificial intelligence rapidly expands, a growing number of tech companies are competing with OpenAI and Google's ChatGPT and Bard, respectively. These companies are vying to develop the strongest chatbot in the market.
Competitors in the AI industry
- Slack: Slack's owner, Salesforce, recently announced the launch of an AI-powered feature to assist users in managing the app. The in-app service known as "SlackGPT" will summarize threads, write custom messages in appropriate tones, and even take notes during calls. This feature will be available next year.
- Amazon: Amazon Web Services launched its large language model in April this year with the aim of generating text, as well as powering web search personalization for users. Additionally, the company also released a free AI bot called CodeWhisperer to help developers check errors in their code.
- Meta AI: Facebook's parent company has expanded its investment in AI. The company is exploring the possibility of adding chatbots to the multiple messaging services it operates, although a launch date for these services has yet to be announced.
- Anthropic: A.I.-focused startup Anthropic launched its own chatbot named Claude in March. The bot performs similar tasks to ChatGPT but is "much less likely to produce harmful outputs" and is "easier to converse with" and "more steerable."
- Character.AI: Developed by former Google engineers, Character.AI is a chatbot designed to imitate and role-play as historical figures. The bot enables users to request to chat with historical figures such as William Shakespeare and fictional characters.
- Open Source: A collective of open-source AI developers is another source of competition to large corporations. They are addressing several of the issues that these large companies face. According to a leaked document from Google developers, open-source models are faster, more customizable, more private, and pound-for-pound more capable. Although Bard and ChatGPT currently have a "slight edge" in quality, the engineers claim this will close soon.
The AI industry is attracting increasing scrutiny from lawmakers as chatbots continue to gain prominence. The White House announced new initiatives to empower innovation and to determine the safety risks associated with the technology. Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is working on legislation with experts to regulate AI in a manner acceptable to both parties, and Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) submitted legislation to create a task force investigating AI policies and their impact on civil liberties.
