It’s about time somebody ranked generative assistants

A very good article in The Wall Street Journal, “The Great AI Challenge: We Test Five Top Bots on Useful, Everyday Skills”, ranks today’s most popular generative assistants: Perplexity.ai; OpenAI’s ChatGPT; Google’s Gemini; Anthropic’s Claude; and Copilot in that order, giving them specific scores for health, finance, cooking, job applications, creative writing, summaries, current affairs and code, as well as for speed of response.

Given the enormous popularity of chatbot generative assistants, the article is very valuable. We are talking about a highly competitive, rapidly changing landscape, as companies continually launch new versions and refine their products. Until now, little hard information was available, leaving most users to stick with the first generative assistant they had tried or to give others a go based on what friends had said about them.

ChatGPT has the advantage of having been first out of the traps on November 30, 2022, when it released ChatGPT in open access with its free version 3. Microsoft tried to close the field by taking advantage of the fact that it had hosted OpenAI on its Azure by deferring payments for a long time, while Google got off to a false start with Bard, then launched Gemini. We also saw smaller and interesting competitors such as Perplexity or Claude join the race.