A Comparative Analysis of the Best Language Models: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Llama

The generative AI market is growing at a rapid pace, attracting tens of billions of dollars in investment and hundreds of millions of users. ChatGPT remains the most popular chatbot, but it is far from the only one. In this article, we will consider what alternatives to ChatGPT exist.

What are the most popular chatbots?

There are more and more different chatbots every day, but not all of them are worth paying attention to. There are four most popular options that stand out due to their characteristics, performance and quality:

• ChatGPT by OpenAI
• Gemini by Google
• Claude by Anthropic
• Llama by Meta

Let's take a closer look at each of them.

ChatGPT

By far, the most popular and successful chatbot to date. Initially released by OpenAI in November 2022. By January 2023, ChatGPT had become the fastest-growing consumer software application in history, gaining over 100 million users in just two months.

The latest foundation model, which is GPT-4o, was released on May 13, 2024. A couple of months later, on July 18, 2024, OpenAI released a smaller and cheaper version, GPT-4o mini.

Parameters are like neural links in a brain, the more the better. The same goes for the context window size, it serves as the chatbot’s memory, helping it to keep track of the conversation. The knowledge cutoff date shows the date up to which the training data and information were used to create the artificial intelligence model. The model has no knowledge of world events after the cutoff date.

Notable features: high processing speed and efficiency in repetitive tasks such as coding; advanced contextual awareness to better understand the user’s intent and provide responses that are more tailored and appropriate to the specific conversation.

Use cases: 

• real-time communication and language translation,
• interactive language learning,
• customer service in banking and healthcare,
• content personalization for digital marketing campaigns.

ChatGPT provides helpful medical advice (e.g., what to do for a headache or rash), but always emphasizes the importance of consulting a professional. It's crucial to remember that the chatbot cannot fully replace a human doctor.

Gemini

Gemini, formerly known as Bard, was introduced in February 2023 as Google’s response to the rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Gemini 1.5 Flash and 1.5 Pro became generally available on May 23, 2024, and have been receiving numerous updates since then.

Notable features: models 1.5 Pro and 1.5 Flash both have a default context window of up to 1 million tokens, which is the longest context window of any large-scale model; this unlocks the ability to process long documents, thousands of lines of code, etc.

Use cases:

• analyzing financial data alongside visual market trends,
• interpreting complex scientific datasets,
• creating multimedia marketing materials that combine text and visuals,
• rapid data interpretation and summarization.

Thanks to the integration with the Google search service, the model can check its answers against search results so that the information always remains up-to-date.

Claude

Claude is a family of large language models developed by Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup, founded in 2021 by seven former employees of OpenAI (the company that created ChatGPT), including Dario Amodei, the former OpenAI’s Vice President of Research.

The first model of Claude was released in March 2021, and the latest model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, was released on June 20, 2024.

Notable features: Claude is an exceptional writer capable of creating truly emotional stories; the chatbot is also known for being as harmless and safe as possible, it was trained not to choose responses that are toxic, racist, or sexist, or that encourage or support illegal, violent, or unethical behavior. You can learn more about it here.

Use cases: 

• analyzing medical literature and supporting evidence-based decision-making,
• financial report analysis and risk assessment,
• intelligent tutoring, providing personalized explanations and feedback,
• generating high-quality, SEO-optimized content.

It took Claude only 4 minutes to solve a technically complex problem that would typically take an average developer 2-8 hours to complete.

Llama

Llama is a family of autoregressive large language models developed by Meta AI, a division of Meta (the owner of Facebook). The first version of Llama was released in 2023.

The two most current models are Llama 3.1 (released July 23, 2024) and Llama 3.2 (released September 25, 2024).

Notable features: Llama comes in different sizes, hence the variable parameter count; Llama 3.1 405B is the largest open-source artificial intelligence model with state-of-the-art capabilities that rival the best closed source models.

Use cases:

• financial modeling and prediction,
• knowledge retrieval and summarization,
• text and code writing assistance,
• scientific computing, research projects and data analysis.

Llama is free for commercial and research use; it is meant to serve everyone, and to work for a wide range of use cases. Meta believes that making artificial intelligence openly available is good for the world.

Benchmarks

Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) is one of the most popular and versatile benchmarks. MMLU covers 57 tasks across various subjects, including law, philosophy, history medicine and math. With a score of 90.0%, Gemini Ultra is the first model to outperform human experts on MMLU.

Here are the benchmark results provided by the Gemini developers:

Another major benchmark is Code Generation (HumanEval). By giving a large language model multiple programming problems, you can measure how often it produces the correct code. Claude is traditionally good at Code Generation. Here are the benchmark results provided by the Claude developers:

Note that in almost all categories except math (where GPT-4o excels), Claude outperforms its competitors.

Finally, let's look at the benchmark results provided by the Llama developers:

Claude is also at the top of his game here, but Llama is not lagging behind. It turns out that if you want, you can show any language model in a favorable light. After all, they are all quite close in terms of numbers.

Key Strengths

Based on the test results, we saw that the Claude 3.5 Sonnet model is the best at generating code. The GPT-4o model is a bit behind, but it is also great for generating and explaining code, finding and fixing errors in it.

Besides, Claude consistently produces some of the highest-quality written content out there. Many people remark on how natural and human-like the language feels - it's almost as if a person, not a machine, had written it. And Claude excels across the board, whether tackling creative, literary pieces like short stories or more practical, utilitarian content like product descriptions. In fact, the text Claude generates is often publication-ready, requiring little to no editing.

Another strong point of Claude is proofreading texts. The chatbot finds and explains both factual and grammatical errors. Other bots can do this too, of course, but Claude does it better: it misses fewer errors and explains them more thoroughly.

Gemini has the widest context window, which allows the chatbot to generate and analyze longer texts, and to keep track of the conversation longer without forgetting the context.

Thanks to integration with Google services, including the search engine, Gemini has access to the most up-to-date information.

GPT-4o excels at analyzing and understanding text. This includes the ability to find relationships, draw logical conclusions, make analogies, and draw valid conclusions.

Llama leads in math tests, shows high output speed (Llama models are among the fastest at displaying responses on the screen), and is the only open-source language model under consideration.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the four chatbots discussed in this article all have their own unique strengths and capabilities. While each model may excel in certain areas, they are generally quite similar in overall performance and functionality.

We encourage you to explore and experiment with all these models directly to determine which one suits your specific needs and preferences the best. Each model has its own nuances and can perform differently depending on the task at hand.

We believe that the choice ultimately comes down to your personal experience and which chatbot resonates most with you and your requirements. Try out the models for yourself, and decide which one emerges as the optimal fit.