The Best Generative AI Models— From Chatbots to Image and Video Generators

In 2024, an army of upstarts are swarming the tower that was once held by OpenAI, making the landscape of relational AI into a high-stakes battle.

Everyone and their tech-savvy aunt seems to be vying for a piece of the AI pizza, cooking up vocabulary versions, agentic AIs, picture generators, and even an AI image gold hedger or two.

The metrics are evolving more quickly than our society can. Rarely a week passes without a brand-new toy hitting the market, including an updated LLM below, a turbocharged image generator there, or a brand-new AI flexing some unusual training technique.

But here at , we’ve rolled up our arms and tried them all.

We’ve kicked the wheels, pushed the keys, and gotten strong inside the interior workings and the output provided by the most common AI models—and some that are not so well-known.

We’ve compiled a list of the best of the breed, the conceptual AI versions that have wowed us, befuddled us, and often made us vomit out our espresso now that it’s clear that OpenAI isn’t the only judge in town.

Chatbots

A robot is a piece of software that simulates conversations with real people. It comprehends user input and generates suitable responses using natural language processing and unnatural intelligence. Often, people confuse bots with LLMs, or significant language models.

Now, chatbots are a bit more difficult, with abilities that extend beyond words generation. They can then browse the web, make and comprehend images, talk to the consumer, etc.

Here is a list of the top ai we recommend trying:

Gold prize: OpenAI’s ChatGPT

ChatGPT offers a wide array of features at$ 20/month, including custom agent creation with natural language, a clean interface, web search, and multiple models ( reasoning, writing, vision, voice, and image generation ).

Gold prize: Anthropic’s Jean

A better LLM with an instinctive Interface featuring split-screen artifacts for logic and script generation, Claude supports million-token context and specialized agents. But, it lacks web search and image generation and generally faces capacity problems, forcing people to change to a weaker type or generate” clear” shorter solutions. Because of this, it cannot be the best just yet.

Bronze medal: Mistral AI’s LeChat

This free platform is powered by Mistral Large, featuring top-tier Flux image generation and superior web search—the best, in our opinion, even beating SearchGPT. It supports document/image understanding and open-source AI agents, though text quality trails competitors. However, the Mistral Large LLM isn’t as strong as its competitors, making it ideal for power users willing to trade text quality for features.

Honorable Mentions: Meta AI, Gemini ( from Google’s AI studio, not the main site ), Hugging Chat, Reka, Grok-2

Large language models

An artificial intelligence system that is trained on vast amounts of text data to comprehend and create human-like language is known as a large language model or LLM. You can see it as a glorified autocomplete. They are designed to predict what the most likely token ( think about words, though it’s an inaccurate comparison ) is in a group.

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

Here is our top picks for the most successful LLMs to date:

Best generalist: OpenAI’s GPT-4o

Balances creative writing, coding, and reasoning with a customizable” Canvas” feature, though its style can feel predictable. With an ELO score of 1, 366, the most recent version ( from November 20 ) also took the top spot in the LLM Arena, defeating the experimental Google Gemini that was released on November 21.

Best for writing: Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet&nbsp,

Matches or exceeds GPT-4o in many areas with more creative, human-like output, though it’s prone to hallucination.

Best for storytelling: Longwriter

Generates 10, 000+ word stories within minutes. Do we need to say more?

Most versatile: Meta’s Llama-3.1

The leading open-source model with extensive customization, LoRA creation, and fine-tuning options, available in sizes from 7 billion to 405 billion parameters so users can run it on their local machines or cloud servers depending on their needs. A custom version called” Nemotron” by Nvidia was released that caused some unease in the community and is worth checking out.

Biggest letdown: Reflection Llama-3.1 70B

Announced with high expectations, the model claimed to beat GPT-4o thanks to its embedded Chain of Thought. It ended up being a major fiasco with fake benchmarks, hidden API calls to Claude AI, and a&nbsp, major controversy.

Image generators

An image generator is essentially a model that receives text input and generates an output corresponding to that text input. So, for example, you say,” Green horse with a dragon face”, and the model will generate a photo of a green horse with a dragon face. You can also enter something like “busty waifu,” but that is not what they are used for.

These are some of the best image-generation tools that are currently at hand.

Best generalist: Flux

Flux dominates the latest generation of AI models with substantial customization, LoRA/ControlNet support, and text generation capabilities. Users are still trying to solve because it requires powerful hardware but also has a distinctive style with extreme bokeh and slack skin detail.

It comes in three flavors: Pro ( closed-source, the most potent model ), Dev ( noncommercial license ), and Schnell ( an open-source, distilled version ). All three offer excellent image generation capabilities, and the ceiling will go higher if fine-tunes are considered.

Best for realism: Recraft v3

offers better value than proprietary alternatives like MidJourney, and unmatched realism with versatile presets.

It has a free tier that offers the same quality—though Recraft owns generations.

Best for anime: MidJourney Niji

Unrivaled quality for anime-style images, a Stable Diffusion fine-tuning is a secondary option.

Most versatile: Stable Diffusion 3.5

Stable Diffusion 3.5 is a major improvement over SD3 with better licensing, detailed output, and add-on support.

It is more resource-efficient than Flux for fine-tuning and is a full model—unlike Flux Schnell, which is a distilled version—making it the best pick for custom models.

However, it came out a little bit late and has been overshadowed by Flux’s popularity.

Biggest Letdown: SD 3 Medium

Everyone anticipated that this brand-new machine would defeat SDXL and all other models to become the new King of Image Generators. It ended up being a terrible model who was known for having horrible licenses and terrible abscesses when attempting to generate traffic on grass.

Video generators

Video generators take the production of images one step further. They create each frame and use that as input to create the following one with high promptness and image consistency.

Models can only create a few seconds of video, so this is still a work in progress. Which ones are the best ones you can try, listed below?

Best generalist: Kling

The Chinese model is rapidly improving, sometimes outperforming Sora. Supports face model training, and consistently generates high-quality scenes showing a major versatility in terms of styles, realism, and camera movement.

Best contender: Runway Gen 3

Pioneering generative video app with solid environmental understanding, but struggles with fast-paced scenes.

Best for storytelling: ShowRunner

We can’t reveal much about this one to you. &nbsp, However, in confidential testing, it has shown immense potential.

Best open-source: Genmo Mochi 1

It’s a fantastic release that surpasses frames and realism in competition with Rhymes Allegro and Stable Video Diffusion.

Biggest letdown: OpenAI Sora

It was first announced with high expectations as a groundbreaking “world model” beyond any previous video generation, but it is still unreleased today with underwhelming leaked outputs.

Honorable mention: Google Veo

Google’s Veo was released on December 3. Although we haven’t tested it, Google’s generations appear to be similar. Of course, we’re on the waiting list to test the model, and you’ll be the first to know our thoughts as soon as we get access.

Music generators

Just like video generators, music generators create songs. It’s different from audio generators, however, since the outputs are more specialized to melodic outputs that are not noise, plain voices, or audio effects.

Users can rely on a separate LLM to generate the lyrics for a song, input the lyrics manually, set some parameters, such as the song’s style, and the model will then produce relevant music from scratch.

These are the best two—plus an open-source alternative.

Best generalist: Suno v4

Excels in vocals and lyrics, style diversity, and long-form consistency. &nbsp, Its predecessor, &nbsp, Suno v3.5, is not free but remains a strong alternative.

Best contender: Udio

Suno’s biggest rival. It delivers impressive composition accuracy, nearly rivaling Suno v4 in vocals. In terms of subjective perception, some generations surpass Suno v3.

Best open-source: Stable Audio 2

The open-source movement does not do much in this regard. Stable Audio 2 seems to be the best model, but lags behind closed-source competitors in every field. Meta’s AudioCraft and MusicGen are alternatives, but far from industry-leading. Fine-tuners have not paid attention, and usually, they are the people behind the cherry on top that makes open-source models so great.