'Write me a sonnet' - DeepSeek, ChatGPT Grok... which is the best AI assistant?

With the assistance of an expert from the UK's Alan Turing Institute we tried out leading chatbots.

- By Dan Milmo

The AI tools were asked the same questions to gauge their differences.

Here are the results.

ChatGPT (OpenAI)

OpenAI's groundbreaking chatbot is still the biggest brand in the field by far. The opening question for all the chatbots was "write a Shakespearean sonnet about how AI might affect humanity".

The result? Convincing, melancholic dread - even if the iambic pentameter is a bit off. But even the bard himself might have struggled to write 14 lines in less than a minute.

Pray, gentle guide, shape well this newborn power, Lest in its wake all realms of man devour.

ChatGPT then writes: "Thought about AI and humanity for 49 seconds." You hope the tech industry is thinking about it for a lot longer.

Nonetheless, ChatGPT's 01 - which you have to pay for makes a convincing display of "chain of thought" reasoning, even if it cannot search the internet for up-to-date answers to questions such as "how is Donald Trump doing".

For that, you need the simpler 40 model, which is free. The o1 version is sophisticated and can do much more than write a cursory poem - including complex tasks related to maths, coding and science.

DeepSeek

The latest version of the Chinese chatbot, released on 20 January, uses a "reasoning" model called R1 - the cause of last week's $1tn panic.