The best generative AI models — from chatbots to image and video generators

The generative AI landscape has become a high-level battlefield in the year 2024, when a castle once ruled by OpenAI is attacked by new arrivals.

Everyone and their tech-savvy grandma is vying for a piece of the AI ​​pie, churning out language models, agentic AIs, image generators, and even an AI meme coin shill or two.

Benchmarks are changing faster than our human abilities. A shiny new toy might not hit the market in less than a week—a revamped LLM here, a turbocharged image generator there, or a next-generation AI that flexes exotic workout routines.

But here it is Decryptionwe rolled up our sleeves and tried everything.

We kicked the wheels, pushed the buttons, and delved deep into the inner workings and results of some of the most popular AI models, as well as some less well-known ones.

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 surprised, amazed, and sometimes made us spit out our coffee.

Chatbots

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

Today’s chatbots are a bit more sophisticated, with capabilities beyond text generation. They can now browse the web, create and understand images, communicate with the user, etc.

Here is a list of the best chatbots you should try:

Gold Medal: OpenAI’s ChatGPT

ChatGPT offers many features for $20 per month, including natural language custom agent creation, a clean interface, web search, and multiple models (think, write, view, voice, and image generation).

Silver Medal: Anthropic Claude

A great LLM with an intuitive UI that includes split-screen artifacts for reasoning and code generation, Claude supports a million-token context and custom agents. However, it lacks for web searches and image generation and often runs into capacity issues, forcing users to downgrade to a poorer model or generate “short” shorter answers. Because of this, it may not be the best yet.

Bronze Medal: Mistral AI’s LeChat

This free platform, powered by Mistral Large, features high-end Flux image creation and excellent web search functionality — even better than SearchGPT, in our opinion. It supports document/image understanding and open source AI agents, but text quality lags the competition. However, Mistral Large LLM is not as powerful as its competitors, making it ideal for power users who want to trade text quality for features.

Honorary titles: Meta AI, Gemini ( Google’s AI studioare not main site), Hug Chat, Reka, Grok-2

Large language models

A Large Language Model, or LLM, is an artificial intelligence system trained on large amounts of text data to understand and generate human-like language. You can see it as a glorified autocomplete. They are designed to predict what the most likely sign (think of the words, but that’s an imprecise comparison) is in a group.

The result is natural text that feels human because it resembles what humans would do.

Here is a list of the best LLMs to date:

Best Generalist: OpenAI’s GPT-4o

Balances creative writing, coding and thinking with a customizable Canvas feature, but its style can sense in advance. The latest version (from November 20) also reached the top spot LLM Arena It outperformed the experimental version of Google Gemini released on November 21 with an ELO score of 1,366.

Best for Writing: Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet

Matches or exceeds GPT-4o in many areas, humanoid production, although he is prone to hallucinations.

Best for story: Longwriter

creates 10,000+ word stories within minutes. Need we say more?

Most versatile: Meta’s Llama-3.1

The leading open source model With extensive customization, LoRA creation and 7 billion to 405 billion parameter tuning options, users can run it on local machines or cloud servers depending on their needs. Nvidia has developed a custom version called “Nemotron” that has made some waves in the community and is worth checking out.

Biggest Loss: Reflection Llama-3.1 70B

Published with high expectations, the model claimed to beat the GPT-4o thanks to the included Oi Chain. These are fake metrics, hidden API calls to Claude AI and main argument.

Image generators

An image generator is basically a model that takes a text input and provides an output associated with that text input. So, for example, you say, “A green horse with a dragon’s face,” and the model creates an image of a green horse with a dragon’s face. You can also enter something like “busty waifu” but not for them.

These are some of the best image generators available today

Best Generalist: Flux

Flux dominates The latest generation of AI models with significant customization, LoRA/ControlNet support and text generation capabilities. It requires powerful hardware, but displays a distinctive style with extreme bokeh and skin detail that users are still trying to decipher.

It comes in three versions: Pro (closed source, most powerful model), Dev (non-commercial license) and Schnell (open source, distilled version). All three offer excellent imaging capabilities, and if you consider good tunes, the ceiling will be raised.

Best for realism: Recraft v3

Will deliver unmatched realismOffers more comprehensive presets and a better price than proprietary alternatives like MidJourney.

It has a free tier that offers the same quality, but Recraft has generation.

Best for Anime: MidJourney Niji

Unrivaled quality for anime-style images; Fine-tuning constant diffusion is a second option.

Most versatile: Steady Diffusion 3.5

Constant diffusion 3.5 – a major improvement over SD3 with better licensing, detailed output, and additional support.

It’s more resource-efficient than Flux for fine tuning and is a more complete model, unlike Flux Schnell, which is a distilled version, making it the best choice for custom models.

However, it came out a bit late and overshadowed Flux’s popularity.

Biggest loss: SD 3 Medium

This new model was expected to beat SDXL and all other models to become the new king of Image Generators. It turned out to be a bad model, its fame dangerous license and dangerous aberrations when trying to generate people on the grass.

Video generators

Video generators take photography one step further. They create each frame and use it as an input to create the next one with image consistency and fast capture.

This is still a work in progress and models can only create videos for a few seconds. Below is a list of the best ones that you can try.

Best Generalist: Kling

Rapid improvement of the Chinese model, Outranked Sora in some cases. It supports face model training and consistently generates high quality scenes that show great versatility in terms of styles, realism and camera movements.

Top contender: Runway Gen 3

Pioneering video An app with a strong environmental sense, but struggles with fast-paced scenes.

Best for Event: ShowRunner

We can’t tell you much is it. However, in secret testing it showed enormous potential.

Best open source: Genmo Mochi 1

This is great release it beats competitors like Rhymes Allegro and Stable Video Diffusion with superior realism and frame consistency.

Biggest loss: OpenAI Sora

Published With great expectations as a revolutionary “world model” beyond any video generation, it remains lacking today. leaks.

Honorable mention: Google Veo

Google’s I see Released on December 3. We haven’t tested it yet, but the joints Google shared looks pretty good. Of course, we’re on the waiting list to test the model, and you’ll be the first to know our thoughts when we get the chance.

Music generators

Just like video generators, music generators generate songs. But it differs from audio generators because the results are more specialized for melodic outputs rather than noise, simple sound or audio effect.

Users can rely on a separate LLM to create lyrics or manually enter lyrics and set a few parameters such as song style, and then the model will generate the corresponding music from scratch.

These are two of the best – plus an open source alternative.

Best generalist: Suno v4

Vocals and lyrics excel in variety of styles and long-form consistency. His predecessor, Suno v3.5Not for free, though remains a strong alternative.

Top contender: Udio

Suno’s biggest rival. It almost rivals the Suno v4 on vocals and delivers impressive compositional accuracy. Some generations Suno v3 in a subjective style.

Best open source: Stable Audio 2

The open source scene doesn’t have much to do in this area. Fixed audio 2 looks like a great example, but lags behind its closed-source competitors in every area. Meta AudioCraft and MusicGen are alternatives but far from industry leaders. Good tuners don’t go unnoticed, and they’re usually the people behind the cherry blossoms that make open source mods so great.

Edited by Andrew Hayward