5 models that aren't ChatGPT and what you can use them for

OpenAI isn't the only one having fun

It’s now many months since I wrote about ChatGPT, and there’s even more going on in AI. OpenAI definitely took the world by storm, but open source models – and even closed source competitors like Midjourney – are catching up. Theoretical interest aside, this matters because these models can actually be useful to you at your job: generating marketing copy, cover images, doing research, writing your blog posts for you, you name it.

In the post about why ML models seem to be getting so much better, I wrote something I think is important:

Over the past couple of years, models have gone from private, code first, and inaccessible to widely available to the public.

If you look at models that have made it into the public discourse recently, like DALL-E or Stable Diffusion, they share a unique quality: whoever built the model (or their friends) also built an interface to the model. Using ChatGPT is as simple as typing a prompt into OpenAI’s website; generating a photo with DALL-E is too. It’s for everyone! And that is very weird.

In other words: models are getting better, but they’re also getting more accessible. On the cutting edge of research though, there’s less of a concern about how you – assuming you’re not someone who can code – can use the model. When a new model gets released, the interface is usually a bunch of code and some model weights, not a slick web application you can sign up for. So some of these models will be more difficult for the average person to use.

Anyway, this post will run through 5 non-OpenAI ML models, what you can use them for, and how you can get started.