by Charles Miller

Last week, I my announced intention to attempt, this week, explaining the differences between AI-Powered Chatbots, Contextual Chatbots, Generative AI Chatbots, Hybrid Chatbots, Keyword Recognition Based Chatbots, Knowledge Base Chatbots, Menu/Button-Based Chatbots, Rule-Based Chatbots, Transactional Chatbots, Voice Chatbots, and Social Media Chatbots. But my plan has been delayed because one reader complained vociferously that I had not yet offered any specifics related to my earlier column describing my experience with seven different search engines. So, I will get back to the differences in chatbots later and this week offer some specific web sites you can visit today.

My go-to AI chatbot for some time now has been Perplexity.ai (that is dot ai and not dot com). An American company, its web site came online only a week after the first publicly-available ChatGPT in late 2022. But that is not to say it was some hastily-assembled attempt. The free and public version of Perplexity employs the GPT-3.5 large language model by OpenAI, while the paid Pro subscription allows users to choose from a variety of more advanced features.

The first, and still a favorite, is the original chatgpt.com. Developed by the American company OpenAI, Inc. and launched in November, 2022. It is based on GPT-4o and proprietary series of generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) models that are constantly fine-tuned by the programmers.

One web site where anyone can find and choose between several AI chatbots is DuckDuckGo.com. Type in a question on this site and when the answer is displayed you should see a link in the upper right that says [Chat]. Click on that button and you will be presented pages that allow you to select one of five different AI chatbots. The options are updated frequently, so the version numbers and even the available chatbots may change by the time you read this.

GPT 4o mini is provided by OpenAI that describes this chatbot as "cost-efficient" intelligence. This is a free version of their paid software.

Claude 3 Haiku provided by Anthropic PBC is described by the maker as their fastest model albeit not the strongest because the company also makes a paid product using "extended thinking."

Llama 3.3 70B is an open-source model from Meta Properties and was originally focused on the multi-language chat needs of social media such as Meta's Facebook.

Mixtral 8x7B, an open-source chatbot created by Mistral AI SAS, a French artificial intelligence (AI) startup, headquartered in Paris. It speaks English as well as French.

o3 mini is another chatbot from OpenAI. This is a free scaled-down version of the company's commercial o3 and o4-mini commercial chatbots that are trained to "think" for longer before responding and are claimed to be the smartest models the company has released to date.

Visitors to the DuckDuckGo.com site may switch between the preceding five models at any time. This is a good way to sample the different flavors of AI chat to gain a better understanding of how they work and experience the differences between them. If you still want more, point your browser to x.ai to find Grok, meta.ai for Facebook's AI chatbot , Yahoo.com also has its AI chatbot, but I really must stop for now.

Most of the AI chatbots cited here are best characterized as a generic chatbots or hybrid chatbots primarily focused on accurate, real-time information retrieval and research integrated with real-time search capabilities to deliver accurate, sourced answers in a conversational manner. Next week I will try again to address some of the distinctions to be found between other different categories of Artificial Intelligence chatbots.

**************

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

Discover Lokkal:
Watch the two-minute video below.
Then, just below that, scroll down SMA's Community Wall.
Mission

Visit SMA's Social Network

Contact / Contactar