I don’t want an AI girlfriend, I just want to think out loud to another person. It helps me think and solve problems on my own. I feel like AI should be perfect for that. However the couple I’ve seen advertised and tried out… Well they essentially are only programmed to be like:
“Let’s change the subject. Maybe this picture will help” blured picture behind a $50 subscription pay wall
And I’m like “no… If I wanted to change the subject I wouldn’t be talking about this subject. I’m not at all interested in $50 AI tits.”
I have a very low bar of expectations. Even if the AI just responds “wow, that’s crazy” to everything that would probably be fine for my needs. More would be better but I do not need lewd pictures and I’m not paying $50 a month lol.
Yes, this is exactly what I’ve found them to be the most useful for.
Here’s a list:
Lemmy will hate me for this, but it remains the best chat it there is, especially if you subscribe to the pro version. There’s different models but essentially it’s just a good bot that will be really helpful giving you feedback on thoughts and ideas.
A to A- tier
Google AI chat bot which seems to be well received recently. I will be an asshole an assume it’s not gonna be quite as good but it looks like they’re sticking out now.
A- to B+ tier
Microsoft’s AI attempt. It is an AI but it’s only OK. Might get enough out of it for your purpose but it already has a long list of hiccups recorded so this is not something I would hang my head on all the time. Because it’s got bing integration, generally the AI assisted search can be helpful though.
B tier
Basically an open source alternative to ChatGPT done well, although not quite as good. This Facebook’s work which they are graciously providing free of charge for everyone to enjoy and tinker with. Huggingface is great because you will always find live demos of all the models there so if you are not a power user, in a limited way you can use this model on the website.
Between B and C tier
Llama is open source so it is possible to set it up yourself. Using the webui it is possible to do this on your own PC, removing the limitations for conversation speed and message counts. You will be struggling if your graphics card can’t entertain the model though (good models eat vram for breakfast). If you have it setup, you will always get the best experience out of the Llama models which might make this worth it.
C tier
Other than those there are a lot of sites offering subscriptions to what is basically a different frontend for chatgpt or other open source models, which is arguably worse than all the options mentioned. There might be some gems in the rough but I haven’t looked too far into it. This should give you an introductory overview though which is presumably more helpful to you.
I personally use ChatGPT and I am starting to appreciate it a lot. It does still lead ahead of Llama or anything else.
No Claude? It’s pretty good in my experience, and I follow someone on twitter who does absolutely wild things with it.
Copilot and chatgpt are the same just that Copilot gets to search the web and in business 365 is claimed to be GDPR conform. And can search the SharePoint/Onedrive.
I think the benefit of third party AI services is exactly a way around that limited context window. The service can summarize the previous conversations and key facts about the user, store it and feed that back into the AI prompt.
Instead of wasting most of the context window for pages and pages of conversation, it can just prompt the AI with something like “the user is called Timmy, he works as an accountant, he has a girlfriend called Tammy, yesterday he told you that he thinks about proposing.”.
I think even ChatGPT does something like that, but as it’s a very general tool it might not be the best in filtering out information that is relevant for a “personal” conversation.