You have probably heard about names like ChatGPT, DALL-E 2, and GPT-4—they are all incredible products from OpenAI. OpenAI has been at the forefront of generative artificial intelligence, making it accessible to everyone for free and creating massive hype in the past year. However, reaching the top of the mountain and staying there are two different things. The landscape is filled with other generative artificial intelligence companies offering similar products. OpenAi has many competitors who aim to reach that level of traction and number of users that OpenAI possesses.
In this article, I have compiled a list of the top 12 OpenAI competitors, exploring the alternatives and whether they can be competitive against OpenAI.
Generative AI applications
Even though generative AI technology is still fairly new, the current AI models can fulfill many personal and business needs. Here are some examples:
AI-generated content
Creating new content is a time-consuming process. Many people use generative AI for generating text, audio, video, or image.
Coding
AI systems are particularly useful for generating code. It helps automate specific tasks, predict code sequences, and support problem-solving.
Voice and audio synthesis
This is one of the latest trends that many companies started to use. AI-generated voices accelerate the video-making process, which can be particularly useful in a marketing campaign.
Cybersecurity
AI learns faster by using machine learning and deep learning techniques so it can be a good answer to cybersecurity attacks. Nevertheless, AI safety has just started its journey, and it has many challenges to overcome.
AI assistants
AI assistants utilize technologies like natural language processing to understand and respond to voice and text commands. These assistants are designed to perform numerous tasks, from AI note-taking, summarizing online meetings, or providing conversation insights on the call.
AI chatbots
Chatbots can create efficient customer interactions using machine learning and natural language processing. It can significantly save time for humans by reducing the first response and handling time. Besides time-saving, AI chatbots are an excellent way to cut costs for many companies.
Personal use and entertainment
Many people use generative AI for conversation, research, or just for fun. The reason why artificial intelligence captured worldwide attention is primarily thanks to these functions.
Related post: 9 Tips For What AI Can Do For Your Business
OpenAI’s strongest competitors
Here are some of the most significant companies competing with OpenAI:
Anthropic

Foundation date: 2021
Valuation: $4.1b
Latest deal type: Series C
Latest deal amount: $450M
Number of investors: 23
Employees: 51 -200
Founders: Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish
How does Anthropic compete with OpenAI?
The San Francisco-based company was established by former OpenAI research executives in 2021. One of the biggest investors in Anthropic is the tech giant Google, which invested around $300 million in the latest funding round. Anthropic, valued at $4.1 billion, Google’s equity stake is approximately 10% in the generative artificial intelligence startup.
The venture capital came just at the right time for Anthropic. It helped to debut its new artificial intelligence chatbot called Claude 2. The AI chatbot is publicly available in the US and the UK.
OpenAI rival Anthropip has a mission to prioritize safety in the field of generative artificial intelligence. They even introduced a unique safety approach called “Constitutional AI.” This approach ensures that Claude 2 has a set of principles designed to guarantee user safety and reliability.
DeepMind

Foundation date: 2010
Valuation: No updated data is available
Latest deal type: M&A
Latest deal amount: $650M
Number of investors: N/A
Employees: 1001-5000
Founders: Demis Hassabis, Mustafa Suleyman
How does DeepMind compete with OpenAI?
Google is one of the biggest competitors of OpenAI. DeepMind is based in London, and its parent company is Google. DeepMind has mission is to utilize AI technology that uses machine learning to solve problems that computers could not previously tackle.
Since 2010, DeepMind has launched many artificial intelligence products like AlphaGo, AlphaStar, AlphaFold, and WaveNet. Their products focus on many areas, from helping to fight cancer to optimizing recommendations in Google Play.
DeepMind plans to launch their chatbot called Gemini, which also uses AI technologies that leverage artificial intelligence from their previous products.
“At a high level, you can think of Gemini as combining some of the strengths of AlphaGo-type systems with the amazing language capabilities of the large models, We also have some new innovations that are going to be pretty interesting.”
Demis Hassabis
Reinforcement learning is one of the crucial parts of developing chatbots like Gemini or ChatGPT. It is a feedback-based machine learning technique where the chatbots get positive feedback for each good action and negative for each bad action.
DeepMind acquired a massive reinforcement learning experience due to their previous technologies like AlphaGo. It is going to be interesting to see how DeepMind and Google will be able to keep up in the race with OpenAi.
Cohere

Foundation date: 2019
Valuation: $2.2b
Latest deal type: Series C
Latest deal amount: $270M
Number of investors: 22
Employees: 200-500
Founders: Ivan Zhang, Aidan Gomez
How does Cohere compete with OpenAI?
The Toronto-based company just recently announced $270M venture capital funding. Salesforce, Nvidia, and Oracle lead the Series C round.
The main difference between OpenAI and Cohere AI is the target audience. While OpenAi develops large-language models that can carry out conversations with consumers, Cohere’s model focuses on business customers. They trained Command Models to follow user commands in order to be instantly valuable in practical business applications.
“What we’re really focused on is bringing this technology to enterprises, developers, and startup founders.”
Aidan Gomez
As OpenAI launched ChatGPT for businesses, we expect a good Openai vs Cohere matchup capture to corporate customers.
Stability AI

Foundation date: 2019
Valuation: $1.0b
Latest deal type: Series A
Latest deal amount: $101M
Number of investors: 16
Employees: 51-200
Founders: Emad Mostaque
How does Stability AI compete with OpenAI?
Last year, OpenAI gained much attention by releasing an impressive artificial intelligence-based image generator called Dall-E. Not long after, Stability AI also introduced its own powerful tool known as Stable Diffusion, which quickly became Dall-E’s primary competitor.
While both companies offer similar products, there is a significant differentiator. Stability AI has taken an open-source approach, allowing companies to analyze, fine-tune and build upon its models. This approach provides a considerable advantage, encouraging collaboration and innovation within the artificial intelligence community.
On the other hand, OpenAI maintains a proprietary and confidential stance regarding the data and technology behind Dall-E. However, OpenAI allows companies to integrate Dall-E into their own products.
Inflection AI

Foundation date: 2022
Valuation: $4b
Latest deal type: Series B
Latest deal amount: $1.3b
Number of investors: 6
Employees: 11-50
Founders: Reid Hoffman, Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan
How does Inflection AI compete with OpenAI?
Inflection AI is a software company behind the PI chatbot, which was built to understand natural language and provide responses based on your unique interests and needs. This company recently launched its large language model called Inflection-2, one of the closest ChatGPT rivals. Inflection AI aims to develop artificial intelligence software for people that is kind and supportive and provides fast, relevant, and helpful information on a wide range of topics.
In 2023, Inflection AI announced that it had raised $1.3 billion in a new round of funding led by Microsoft Corp, Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, and NVIDIA. With the support of such investors, it will be interesting to see how Inflection AI will secure its place in the AI race.
Aleph Alpha

Foundation date: 2019
Valuation: $495m
Latest deal type: Early Stage VC
Latest deal amount: $109M
Number of investors: 10
Employees: 11-50
Founders: Jonas Andrulis, Samuel Weinbach
How does Aleph Alpha compete with OpenAI?
The Germany-based AI startup has built its own chatbot called Lumi based on a large language model named Luminous. Similarly to Cohere, Aleph Alpha plans to compete with OpenAI for enterprise customers and not consider targeting hundreds of millions of consumers.
One of the main differences between Aleph Alpha and OpenAI’s data approach is that Aleph Alpha does not gather user data. At the same time, OpenAI collects users’ data for better performance.
Moreover, Aleph Alpha’s target audience differs from OpenAI’s. Aleph Alpha targets “critical enterprises,” which include businesses such as law firms, healthcare providers, and banks.
These industries rely heavily on trusted and accurate information, making Aleph Alpha’s offerings particularly attractive to them. Contrary, OpenAI has a wider target audience, from consumers to businesses, and already has some privacy issues.
“We are able to deploy in any environment. It’s our independence and the fact that we allow an on-premises installation that we allow installation in any cloud environment. We are basically the only team that can give you that.”
Jonas Andrulis
It will be exciting to see how Aleph Alpha will be able to carve out his place in the race for corporate customers.
AI21 Labs

Foundation date: 2017
Valuation: $664m (estimation)
Latest deal type: Series B
Latest deal amount: $64M
Number of investors: 7
Employees: 201-500
Founders: Ori Goshen, Yoav Shoham, Amnon Shashua
How does AI21 Labs compete with OpenAI?
AI21 Labs released its first large language model called Jurassic-1 Jumbo in 2021, which was trained on 178 billion parameters. In March, they announced the release of Jurassic-2, which has updated training data, high-quality responses, and accelerated response times.
The plan is that AI 21 Labs will incorporate Jurassic-2 into its natural language processing into its service platform. So, AI21 Labs will be able to provide API access to Jurassic-2 and task-specific large language models through its service platform known as AI21 Studio.
The focus for AI21 Labs was to select only the right data for training Jurassic-2. In this way, AI21 Labs’ generative AI can provide more accurate answers that will cite the information source. The company clearly has a chance to become one of the strongest among OpenAI’s competitors.
Reka

Foundation date: 2023
Valuation: $273m
Latest deal type: Series A
Latest deal amount: $58M
Number of investors: 3
Employees: 2-10
Founders: Dani Yogatama, Cyprien de Masson d’Autume, Qi Liu Head, Yi Tay
How does Reka compete with OpenAI?
It is still early to say anything about the San Francisco-based Reka, but it definitely looks promising. Reka was founded by former researchers from Google, DeepMind, Baidu, Meta, and Microsoft and recently acquired $58M.
Reka’s first product is Yasa which just closed its beta stage. Yasa can be personalized, and it has the ability to understand images, videos, and tabular data in addition to text. You can use Yasa to generate ideas for creative tasks, answer basic questions, or derive insights from your own data.
Even though Reka is in the early phases, the goal is to become one of the OpenAI alternatives in the future.
EleutherAI

Foundation date: 2020
Valuation: N/A
Latest deal type: N/A
Latest deal amount: N/A
Number of investors: N/A
Employees: 11-50
Founders: Connor Leahy, Sid Black, Leo Gao
How does EleutherAI compete with OpenAI?
Eleuthera is one of the few non-profit AI research labs which have already launched significant open-source datasets and machine-learning models. EleutherAI operates primarily through a public Discord server for artificial intelligence for researchers and enthusiasts. They involve volunteers and external collaborators in their projects.
In the early days, EleutherAI relied on donations from contributions to build their products, and they finally transformed into a non-profit research institute. EleutherAI’s mission is to increase transparency and reduce potential harm from emerging AI technologies.
Hugging Face

Foundation date: 2016
Valuation: $2.0b
Latest deal type: Series C
Latest deal amount: $100M
Number of investors: 30
Employees: 51-200
Founders: Julien Chaumond, Clément Delangue, Thomas Wolf
How does Hugging Face compete with OpenAI?
Hugging Face is primarily a community and data science platform. It helps users to build, train and deploy machine learning models based on open-source code.
Recently, HuggingFace just released HuggingChat, an AI chat interface. It has similar features to ChatGPT, but there is one significant difference between HuggingChat and ChatGPT. While HuggingChat is an open-sourced AI model, ChatGPT is not open-source, as OpenAI owns the source code.
Hugging Face announced a strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS). The partnership aims to accelerate the availability of next-generation machine learning models by making them more accessible.
Hugging Face is clearly in a better position compared to most of OpenAI’s competitors, as there is a community behind the company, and AWS is backing them.
Character.AI

Foundation date: 2021
Valuation: $1.0b
Latest deal type: Series A1
Latest deal amount: $150M
Number of investors: 6
Employees: 1-50
Founders: Noam Shazeer, Daniel Adiwardana
How does Character.AI compete with OpenAI?
The Silicon Valley-based Character AI was established in 2021 by two former Google researchers. At first glance, Character. AI seems like just a funny platform where users can chat with anyone, including historical figures or fictional characters.
However, Character.AI offers a range of conversational AI chatbots tailored to represent the views and attributes of different characters. Character. AI uses models that give you the feeling that you are talking with a genuine person behind the screen.
While ChatGPT is used for personal and commercial purposes as well, Character. AI focuses more on entertainment. And let’s be honest, we all love using ChatGPT for entertainment too.
Entertainment is a business segment where Character.AI can be among the best OpenAI alternatives.
Tencent

Foundation date: 1998
Valuation: $388.0b
Latest deal type: N/A
Latest deal amount: N/A
Number of investors: N/A
Employees: 10000+
Founders: Huateng Ma
How does Tencent compete with OpenAI?
Tencent may sound familiar to those who have an interest in gaming. The company is the world’s largest video game vendor and owns the world’s top-grossing mobile game, Honor of Kings.
Tencent confirmed in March that they are working on HunyuanAide, one of the possible ChatGPT rivals in Asia. There is big competition in the Asian market regarding AI technology involving Alibaba, Baidu, and Bytedance.
However, Tencent’s language models are particularly good at understanding the Chinese language, which will be essential in creating a natural language chatbot for the Chinese market.
Because OpenAI is banned in China, Tencent won some time to develop their language models, giving it a real shot at gaining widespread attention.
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Artificial intelligence race
You see, OpenAI is not the single company in the generative AI landscape.
Even though the generative AI technology sector is still fairly new, the current AI models can fulfill many personal and business needs. For example, more and more AI-powered tools are deployed in sales, task, and project management.
In general, most of OpenAI’s alternatives do not compete with OpenAI’s products but focus on a specific field. It will be interesting to see how this competition will evolve in the future.
Frequently asked questions
Who is the competitor for OpenAI?
OpenAI has several competitors in the field of artificial intelligence, including:
- Anthropic
- DeepMind
- Cohere
- Stability AI
- Inflection AI
- Aleph Alpha
- AI21 Labs
- Reka
- EleutherAI
- Hugging Face
- Character.AI
- Tencent
Each of these companies has its own unique approach to AI research, development and large language models. They compete with OpenAI in various sectors of the AI industry such as natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics.
Has Google lost the AI war?
It would not be accurate to say that Google has lost the AI war, as artificial intelligence is a rapidly evolving field, and many companies and organizations are developing AI technologies. While some may argue that Google has fallen behind in certain areas, it still has a strong presence in the AI industry and invests in AI research and development.
Ultimately, the AI industry is still in its early stages, and it’s difficult to say which company or organization will come out on top in the long run.
What is the difference between OpenAI and Stability AI?
While both companies are significant competitors in the artificial intelligence industry, they have different approaches to AI systems.
Stability AI has adopted an open-source approach, allowing other companies to analyze, fine-tune, and build upon its models. This approach provides a significant advantage by promoting collaboration and innovation within the artificial intelligence community.
On the other hand, OpenAI maintains a proprietary and confidential stance regarding the data and technology it uses to develop its language models.

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