The generative AI landscape has morphed into a high-stakes battleground in 2024, with an army of upstarts storming the castle once ruled by OpenAI.

Everyone and their tech-savvy grandma seems to be vying for a piece of the AI pie, cooking up language models, agentic AIs, image generators, and even an AI meme coin shiller or two.

The benchmarks are changing faster than our human ability to keep up. Barely a week goes by without some shiny new toy hitting the market—an updated LLM here, a turbocharged image generator there, or a next-gen AI flexing some exotic training technique.

But here at Decrypt, we've rolled up our sleeves and tried them all.

We've kicked the tires, pushed the buttons, and gotten deep inside the inner workings and the outputs provided by the most popular AI models—and some that are not so well-known.

Now that it's clear that OpenAI isn't the only sheriff in town, we've compiled a list of the cream of the crop—the generative AI models that have wowed us, befuddled us, and occasionally made us spit out our coffee.

Chatbots

A chatbot is a computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users. It uses natural language processing and artificial intelligence to understand user inputs and generate appropriate responses. Usually, people confuse chatbots with LLMs, or large language models.

Today, chatbots are a bit more complex, with capabilities that extend beyond text generation. They can now browse the web, generate and understand images, talk to the ...