ChatGPT is the first artificial intelligence (AI) brand to go mainstream and it was the fastest-growing tech product ever. The brand returns more than three million results on Google News Search. Late-night TV talk show hosts mention ChatGPT by name — and their audiences know what they’re talking about.
In business and tech circles, as among the general public, ChatGPT is synonymous with Large Language Model (LLM)-based chatbots. But it’s time to stop obsessing over ChatGPT and start discovering the world of powerful alternatives in this new world.
First, let’s be clear about what we’re talking about.
LLMs, and the tools built on top of them
An LLM is a kind of AI system typically trained on petabytes of text data. It looks for patterns in all this data to predict the next word or sentence when queried, resulting in human-like interaction.
A chatbot is a tool that accesses an LLM. ChatGPT is a chatbot. The free version accesses an LLM called GPT-3.5 and the paid version GPT-4.0.
Those are just two LLMs, or two versions of the same LLM. But there are many comparable models out there. In fact, the number is astonishingly high.
Stanford scientists recently published their work taxonomizing LLMs. They identified — wait for it — 15,821 currently available LLMs. And to help us understand and contextualize them, the researchers built a resource called Constellation, which is what they call an “atlas” of LLMs for visualizing them.
Moving beyong ChatGPT
LLM chatbots are fundamentally multipurpose. But that doesn’t mean that you should use one tool like ChatGPT for everything. Besides, a controversial new report from Stanford and UC Berkeley suggests that for some uses, ChatGPT is actually getting “dumber.” (By the way, that links to a PDF. If you don’t want to read through a long, academic PDF, you can load the PDF into an LLM site like Scholar Turbo and just ask the PDF questions.)
One of the newest LLM offerings comes from Microsoft and Meta; it’s called LLaMA 2. (The companies claim LLaMA 2 is open source, but critics say it’s not. Still, it’s far more “open” than LLMs from Google or OpenAI.) There are many ways to try LLaMA 2.
You can try Llama 2 via a demo hosted by the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. You can download the code from Meta or the AI sharing platform Hugging Face, access it through Microsoft Azure or try it on Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. Or you can check out a unique resource that combines LLaMA 2 and Perplexity.ai to give answers to queries.
Beyond that, there are many more LLMs coming soon. Even Apple has reportedly built one on top of the Google machine learning framework Jax, which runs on Google Cloud. It’s codenamed “Ajax” and unofficially referred to by some internal engineers as “AppleGPT.” Employees use it for product prototyping work and other uses.
(Apple famously banned employees from using ChatGPT out of concern that they might introduce Apple trade secrets…
2023-07-25 20:48:02
Article from www.computerworld.com rnrn