Beyond ChatGPT: 5 other AIs worth trying

Ask a friend to name an AI and you’ll hear the same answer almost every time: ChatGPT. Maybe Gemini or Claude if they’re a little more plugged in. And that’s fair. Those three are the household names. But stop there and you’re peeking at AI through a keyhole.

There’s a whole bench of other models out there, and a few of them are genuinely brilliant at things the big names aren’t. One reads the internet in real time. One stunned Silicon Valley by being shockingly cheap. One can swallow a small library of documents in a single gulp. Best part? You can try all of them for free, no extra apps required.

Here are five AI models you’ve probably never opened, and exactly what each is good for.

First, a quick map

If you only want the famous ones, we already broke those down in our guide to ChatGPT vs Gemini vs Claude. This piece is about the other contenders, the ones that don’t get the headlines but absolutely earn a spot in your rotation. Think of them less as “alternatives” and more as specialists you call in for specific jobs.

Let’s meet them, one superpower at a time.

Grok: the AI that knows what’s trending right now

Most chatbots are a bit like a very smart friend who’s been on a long flight: brilliant, but a little behind on the news. Grok is the opposite. Built by Elon Musk’s company xAI, it’s wired directly into X (the app formerly known as Twitter), so it can tell you what people are actually posting about this minute.

That makes it the natural pick for anything live: a breaking story, a sport result, a meme that’s blowing up, the general mood around a new product. Ask the others “what’s everyone saying about X today?” and they’ll often shrug. Grok will just tell you.

It also has a personality. Grok is deliberately blunt and a bit cheeky. It cracks jokes and doesn’t hide behind corporate politeness. Some people love it, some find it a bit much; either way, it’s the most opinionated-feeling chatbot of the bunch.

DeepSeek: the cheap one that shook Silicon Valley

If one of these models deserves a movie, it’s DeepSeek. This is the Chinese startup that, in early 2025, did something everyone assumed was impossible: it built an AI that could go toe-to-toe with the most expensive models on earth, and reportedly trained it for a tiny sliver of the cost.

The reaction was dramatic. When DeepSeek’s app shot to the top of the charts, the realization that frontier AI might not need billions of dollars in chips knocked hundreds of billions off US tech stocks in a single day, one of the largest one-day wipeouts in stock-market history. Not bad for a free app.

For you, the payoff is simple: DeepSeek gives you smart, careful, “show its working” answers without the premium price tag. It’s also open, meaning anyone can download and run it, a big deal for transparency. If you want a thoughtful problem-solver and don’t care about a famous logo, it’s a fantastic everyday brain.

Qwen: the multilingual workhorse

Qwen is Alibaba’s family of open models, and its quiet superpower is languages. If you regularly bounce between English and another language (translating, drafting, or just chatting), Qwen is unusually fluent and natural across a wide range of them.

Because it’s open-weight (free for anyone to use and build on), Qwen also shows up inside a lot of other products you might not realize. It’s one of those models doing important work in the background of the AI world, not just in a chat box.

Llama: the open model the internet quietly runs on

You may never have typed a word into Llama directly, but you’ve almost certainly used something built on it. Llama is Meta’s open-source model, and it’s the foundation a huge slice of the AI industry stands on. Countless apps, tools and startups are quietly powered by a Llama under the hood.

Why does that matter to you? Because “open” means free, inspectable, and not locked to one company. Llama proved that a top-tier model could be given away rather than rented out, and that decision reshaped the entire field. When you chat with it, you’re talking to the model that made open AI mainstream.

Kimi: the marathon reader

Ever wanted to paste an entire report, a long contract, or a textbook chapter into an AI and ask questions about the whole thing? That’s exactly what Kimi was built for. Made by the Chinese startup Moonshot AI, its claim to fame is an enormous memory: it can hold hundreds of pages in mind at once without losing the plot.

Most chatbots start to forget the beginning of a very long document by the time they reach the end. Kimi doesn’t. So if your job involves wading through long PDFs, research papers, or sprawling threads, it’s the specialist you want on the case.

The cheat sheet

David vs Goliath, in your own browser

The fun part of having all these models in one place is putting them head to head. Pit the scrappy, super-cheap challenger against the reigning flagship and see if you can even tell the difference:

Spoiler: for a lot of everyday questions, you genuinely can’t. Which is the whole point. The “best” AI is often just the one that fits the moment.

So which should you try first?

No need to overthink it. A rough starting guide:

• Curious about the news or trends? Start with Grok.
• Want great answers without paying a premium? Try DeepSeek.
• Juggling multiple languages? Reach for Qwen.
• Like the idea of free and open? Play with Llama.
• Drowning in long documents? Hand them to Kimi.

The smartest habit isn’t loyalty to one model. It’s reaching for the right one per task. Try a few back to back and the differences click fast:

Bottom line

ChatGPT is a brilliant place to start, but it was never meant to be the finish line. Grok keeps you current, DeepSeek proves smart doesn’t have to mean expensive, Qwen and Llama fly the flag for open AI, and Kimi never gets tired of long reading. Each one is a different tool for a different moment.

The only catch used to be tracking down five different apps. Not anymore. You can meet all of them, plus the famous three, in a single chat and switch whenever the task changes.