The best language models for digital products in may 2024

Based on real benchmark data from our own software products, we evaluated the performance of different LLM models in addressing specific challenges. We examined specific categories such as document processing, CRM integration, external integration, marketing support, and code generation.  

Highlights:

• New Google Gemini 1.5 version - better than the previous ones

• GPT-4o - best in this benchmark, but has caveats

• Qwen1.5 Chat - one of the best downloadable models

• IBM Granite Code Instruct - decent coding results with clean data provenance

Our benchmarks evaluate the models in terms of their suitability for digital product development. The higher the score, the better.

☁️ - Cloud models with proprietary license
✅ - Open source models that can be run locally without restrictions
🦙 - Local models with Llama2 license

A more detailed explanation of the respective categories can be found below the table.

Google Gemini 1.5 - Pro and Flash

The recent Google IO announcement was all about AI and Gemini Pro. Although Google managed to forget about Gemini Ultra (it was supposed to come out early this year), they did update a few models.

GEMINI PRO 1.5 0514: UPDATED CAPABILITIES

Gemini Pro 1.5 0514 trades off some document comprehension capabilities in favour of better reasoning. It comes out as a slightly better version than the previous Gemini Pro version.

In our experience it was also a bit buggy at this point. We’ve encountered a bunch of server errors and even managed to get “HARM_CATEGORY_DANGEROUS_CONTENT” flag on one of the business benchmarks.

EXCELLENT "INTEGRATE" SKILLS

Gemini Pro 1.5 scored a perfect "Integrate" score, where we measure LLM's ability to reliably follow instructions and work with external systems, plugins and data formats.

GEMINI 1.5 FLASH AS AN INTERESTING ALTERNATIVE TO GPT-3.5

Gemini 1.5 Flash is an interesting new addition to the family. It works well in document tasks and has decent reasoning capability. Combine that with a very low price, and you get a good alternative to GPT-3.5.

Just note Google Gemini's peculiar pricing model - they don't charge text by tokens, but by billable symbols(Unicode code points minus spaces). We have seen several developers and even SaaS systems make mistakes when estimating costs.

GPT-4o - Clearly in the lead, but with a caveat

GPT-4o looks perfect at first glance. It is faster and cheaper than GPT-4 turbo. It also has 128K context, scores higher, has native multi-modality and understands languages better.

Under the hood it has a new tokeniser with a bigger dictionary. It leads to reduced token counts.

Overall the model scores didn’t jump much higher, because we are already operating at the limit of our LLM Benchmark. There is just one gotcha. Our “Reason” category (ability of models to handle complex logical and reasoning tasks) was made inherently difficult. GPT-4o managed to increase score from 62 (GPT-4 Turbo v3/1106-preview) to 75.

What is the caveat?

You see, OpenAI seems to operate in cycles. They switch between: “let’s make a better model” and “let’s make a cheaper model without sacrificing quality too much”.

While the LLM Benchmarks don’t catch it, it feels like the GPT-4o model belongs to the cost reduction models. It works amazingly well on small prompts, however other benchmarks demonstrate that it is not as good in dealing with larger contexts, like the other GPT-4 models. It also feels lacking in reasoning, even though current benchmarks are not capable of catching this regression.

Qwen 1.5 Chat

HIGHLY DEMANDED BENCHMARK

Due to the high demand and good ratings in the LMSYS Arena, we decided to benchmark some flavours of Alibaba Cloud's Qwen Chat model.

EVALUATION OF QWEN 1.5 32B CHAT

Qwen 1.5 32B Chat is quite good. It is within the range of GPT-3.5 models and Gemini Pro 1.0. It comes with a non-standard license, though.

We have also tested Qwen 1.5 7B and 14B - they are quite good for their relative size. Nothing peculiar, just a decent performance.

The license of Qwen1.5 Chat is a Chinese equivalent of Llama 3: you can use it freely for commercial purposes, if you have less than 100M MAU. This might make model adoption tricky in the USA and EU.

IBM Granite 34B Code Instruct

That is the only peculiar thing about their models, though. While the previous versions of IBM Granite models were available only within the IBM Cloud, the model under test was published directly to Hugging Face.

However, that is the only special thing about their models. While the previous versions of the IBM Granite models were only available within the IBM Cloud, the tested model was published directly on Hugging Face.

Long story short, IBM Granite 34B Code Instruct has a decent code capability (for a 7B model) and bad results in pretty much everything else. If you need a local coding model at a fraction of compute cost, just pick Llama3 or one of its derivatives.