In May 2024, the generative AI landscape experienced a seismic shift. OpenAI released GPT-4-Turbo, a more efficient and cost-effective variant of GPT-4, while Anthropic launched Claude 3, a family of models known for their transparency and reduced hallucination rates. These releases represented a significant leap in the capabilities of proprietary large language models (LLMs).
Claude 3 impressed users with its clarity, focus on user intent, and safety filters, making it a favourite among enterprise users concerned with alignment and moderation. Meanwhile, GPT-4-Turbo boasted reduced latency and a more affordable API pricing model, enabling broader adoption in SaaS products and internal enterprise tooling.
At the same time, open-weight models such as Meta’s LLaMA2 and Mistral’s Mixtral captured developer attention. These models offered similar capabilities to proprietary alternatives while providing users with complete control over inference, fine-tuning, and privacy. With a surge in interest around on-premise LLMs and self-hosted solutions, developers started deploying models in regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, and defence.
This month was pivotal in catalysing the open vs closed model debate. The tension between proprietary strength and open-source transparency pushed many organisations to evaluate hybrid deployment strategies—using open-weight models for internal tasks and API-driven ones for public interactions.
Moreover, benchmarking tools like LMSYS Chatbot Arena gained popularity, enabling head-to-head comparisons between models on creative writing, coding, summarisation, and reasoning tasks. These transparent, crowd-sourced evaluations helped organisations make more informed decisions.
This explosion of choice changed the AI procurement landscape. No longer were OpenAI or Google the only contenders. Startups like Mistral and Hugging Face started influencing procurement discussions across AI-first companies.
Ultimately, May 2024 will be remembered as the month when GenAI became a multi-polar industry. The rise of strong, usable alternatives to dominant incumbents ensured competition, innovation, and openness would continue to thrive.
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