Accessing AI: Answer engines & LLM chatbots

How-to access GPT-4, Claude, ChatGPT, Poe, Bing chat, You.com, Perplexity, etc.

AI Art Moody Style

TL;DR - The best consumer access to the best LLM-based AI chat interfaces right now are Bing chat and Poe.com (which gives you access to Claude and GPT-4).

An AI that has gorged on the internet and can recite answers and synthesize new ideas in response to my queries seems like something more valuable than a search engine. It seems like an answer engine.” - Derek Thompson

Derek Thompson described these next-generation LLM-based AI chatBots as "an answer engine”¹ The name fits. They are fulfilling the promise of early internet iterations of search engines (remember Ask Jeeves) that aspired to be oracles but ended up being Links-o-rama.

Today’s iteration - with Bing chat the leader - gets us closer to the promise, although I must say I was disappointed that my attempt to get Bing Chat to help list the leaders in the space flopped., getting a list of top “LLM-based answer engines and chatbots” that went 3 for 10.

Here are the top 8 LLM-based AI answer engines with either APIs or chat interfaces available right now:

1. Microsoft - Bing Chat (GPT-4 under the hood): https://www.bing.com/

   1. Need Microsoft Edge with a Microsoft/ outlook acct to use directly.

2. OpenAI - chatGPT (GPT-3.5): https://chat.openai.com/chat

   1. GPT-4: API waitlist, alternatively you can buy chatGPT+ to access it

   2. Easiest free way to access GPT-4 now is to use Bing chat

3. Google - Bard - limited release, join the waitlist: https://bard.google.com/

   1. While you wait, here’s a Bard vs Bing chat faceoff from Tom’s Hardware.

   2. Google also is opening up their PaLM AI model.

4. Anthropic - Claude - limited release / waitlist: https://www.anthropic.com/product

5. Quora - Poe: https://poe.com - Poe is an “all-in-one” Chat interface, that gives you access via a thin layer to several of the leading LLMs: Sage (OpenAI gpt-3.5turbo), GPT-4 (limited access), Claude+ (limited access), Claude-instant, ChatGPT, Dragonfly (OpenAI davinci-003). Poe is the only open consumer access to Claude+ right now, and while free level Claude+ and GPT-4 is limited access (a few prompts/day limit), you can use a subscription to Poe to get full access to it.

6. You.com - YouChat: https://you.com/

   1. They also have a YouCode - coding assistant, YouWrite - writing assistant, and YouImagine - image generator built-in.

7. PerplexityAI - Perplexity: https://www.perplexity.ai/ - this is an LLM-backed search engine, remaking search into an ‘answer engine’. Their twist is their answers are curated to be citation-based and thus more grounded in fact.

8. Consensus - Consensus beta: https://consensus.app/search/ They tout “Ask a question, get conclusions from research papers” My initial attempts with this suggest it’s AI understanding is not on par with best-in-class LLMs like chatGPT or GPT-4.

Bottom line: The best consumer access to a best-in-class LLM-based AI chat interface right now is Bing chat (which runs GPT-4 under the hood) ,and following that chatGPT and Poe.com (which gives you limited access to Claude+ and GPT-4) are best options. There are also interesting alternatives with startups like you.com which are worth looking into for their unique approaches and features. Google: Step up your game!

1. Derek Thompson, “Your Creativity Won’t Save Your Job From AI”, Dec 1, 2022, The Atlantic online. https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/12/why-the-rise-of-ai-is-the-most-important-story-of-the-year/672308/