Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to We beat Gemini Embedding 2 by training only 16M params (open weights)
We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.
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Google's first natively multimodal embedding model
Mar 2026 · blog.google · its alternatives →
- 2IR
2023 · sagittarius.greg.technology · its alternatives →
- 3

Hey HN, Henry here from Cactus. We open-sourced Needle, a 26M parameter function-calling (tool use) model. It runs at 6000 tok/s prefill and 1200 tok/s decode on consumer devices. We were always frustrated by the little effort made towards building agentic models that run on budget phones, so we conducted investigations that led to an observation: agentic experiences are built upon tool calling, and massive models are overkill for it. Tool calling is fundamentally retrieval-and-assembly (match query to tool name, extract argument values, emit JSON), not reasoning. Cross-attention…
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Claude 2▲248It was quite interesting to vibe code this artifact. I learned some basic ideas about commitment scheme and hash cryptography in the half and hour spent on this. One of the few times vibe coding left me feeling enriched rather than drained. What do you think?
2023 · claude.ai · its alternatives →
- 6

A ranked ladder for small neural networks that play strategy games. Train a model, write an adapter, upload two files, and get measured into a weight class from 8 KiB up.
Sep 2026 · tinybrains.dev · its alternatives →
- 7

Our most intelligent model that’s even better at coding
2025 · its alternatives →
- 8
Ithy AI▲167This is another one of my automate-my-life projects - I'm constantly asking the same question to different AIs since there's always the hope of getting a better answer somewhere else. Maybe ChatGPT's answer is too short, so I ask Perplexity. But I realize that's hallucinated, so I try Gemini. That answer sounds right, but I cross-reference with Claude just to make sure. This doesn't really apply to math/coding (where o1 or Gemini can probably one-shot an excellent response), but more to online search, where information is more fluid and there's no "right" search engine + text…
2025 · ithy.com · its alternatives →
- 9IB
We wanted to do something very challenging to prove to ourselves that we can do anything we put our mind to. The reasoning for why we chose to build a toy TPU specifically is fairly simple: - Building a chip for ML workloads seemed cool - There was no well-documented open source repo for an ML accelerator that performed both inference and training None of us have real professional experience in hardware design, which, in a way, made the TPU even more appealing since we weren't able to estimate exactly how difficult it would be. As we worked on the initial stages of this project, we…
2025 · tinytpu.com · its alternatives →
- 10EA
Hello HN, I'm excited to introduce Emu2, the latest generative multimodal model developed by the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI). Emu2 is an open-source initiative that reflects BAAI's commitment to fostering open, secure, and responsible AI research. It's designed to enhance AI's proficiency in handling tasks across various modalities with minimal examples and straightforward instructions. Emu2 has demonstrated superior performance over other large-scale models like Flamingo-80B in few-shot multimodal understanding tasks. It serves as a versatile base model for developers,…
2023 · its alternatives →
- 11

Last week I benchmarked my open-source Deep Research tool against ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. I caught OpenAI fabricating 4-5 citations that don't exist. Gemini reduced real hazard ratios by 30-40%. So I built ASK Mode: every answer gets automatically verified against a second round of sources. Each claim marked [OK], [??], or [NO]. - ~400 verified answers for $1 - 2-3 minutes per query - No RLHF nannying - it answers what you ask - Full verification report with every response The gap between chat (unverified, stale training data) and deep research (20+ minutes) needed filling.…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12

I have been interested in neural nets since the 90's. I've done quite a bit of reading, but never gotten around to writing code. I used Gemini in place of Wikipedia to fill in the gaps of my knowledge. The coolest part of this was learning about dual numbers. You can see in early commits that I did not yet know about auto-diff; I was thinking I'd have to integrate a CAS library or something. Now, I'm off to play with TensorFlow.
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13IM
Hey HN! Thank you for all the support and feedback on my original submission 2 months ago. I've been improving the backend using a MCTS/AlphaZero approach and it's currently producing much better results. My long term goal is to allow users to manage multiple projects, deployed autonomously, both from scratch and by making continual updates all prompted with natural language. The cost of each project has been lowered to $9 as performance with smaller models has improved (I migrated from Claude-3-Opus to gemini-1.5-flash). Thanks for checking it out!
2024 · saas-quick.com · its alternatives →
- 14W1
Hey HackerNews, I built this project over the last few weeks as a palette cleanser from a failed game launch. I wanted to learn a bit about AI/Neural-Networks and naively thought I could build a tiny maze-solving AI in a weekend with a 100% solve rate. Well - I couldn't, but I got pretty close. 14 Bytes total model size, and a 96.5% solve rate on unseen mazes. Trained across 46 phases experimenting with different ideas to improve the model (better performance, smaller size). Its quite fun to watch the model attempt to solve the maze, when they fail its usually due to getting stuck in a…
Jul 2026 · con-dog.github.io · its alternatives →
- 15AA
I'm a solo dev in Taiwan. I built 4 AI agents that handle content, sales leads, security scanning, and ops for my tech agency — all on Gemini 2.5 Flash free tier (1,500 req/day). I use ~105. Monthly LLM cost: $0. Architecture: 4 agents on OpenClaw (open source), running on WSL2 at home with 25 systemd timers. What they do every day: - Generate 8 social posts across platforms (quality-gated: generate → self-review → rewrite if score < 7/10) - Engage with community posts and auto-reply to comments (context-aware, max 2 rounds) - Research via RSS + HN API + Jina Reader → feed…
Mar 2026 · its alternatives →
- 16

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.
Jun 2026 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →
- 17

I’m 15 and self-taught. I'm learning ML from scratch because I want to really understand how things work. I’m not into frameworks. I prefer math, logic, and C++. I implemented a basic MLP that supports different activation and loss functions. It was trained via mini-batch gradient descent. I wrote it from scratch, using no external libraries except Eigen (for linear algebra). I learned how a Neural Network learns (all the math) -- how the forward pass works, and how learning via backpropagation works. How to convert all that math into code. I’ll write a blog soon explaining how MLPs work in…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18UA
Hello hackernews, I am looking for feedback for Labophase.com which is a app that focuses on returning results from multiple ai models at the same time. I currently support: GPT4-Turbo, Claude-2, Google PaLM2, Llama2, Mistral, and OpenOrca. Working on supporting Gemini soonTM. I built it to solve a couple of personal pains I experienced. After reaching out to a couple of users in r/localllama, seems that people would have similar approach to address hallucination, availability, and comparing ai models. Initial feedback came in with some surprises that I'm hoping to get feedback from the…
2023 · labophase.com · its alternatives →
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TensorFlow▲17An Open Source Library for Machine Intelligence (by Google)
2015 · tensorflow.org · its alternatives →
- 20GV
Hey HN, I just updated my project that compares some LLMs. It uses your prompt for all the models and runs at the same time. You can see the results being generated in real-time and decide what's the best for your use case. I'm open to any suggestions and feedback. Thanks!
2024 · geminivsgpt.com · its alternatives →
- 21HT
Fun little project, had Gemini 2.5 Pro summarize HN's top 30 each hour, both the stories and comment sections. Pretty impressed with Gemini 2.5. It's probably the first model other than Claude 3.7 Sonnet where I actually find the output readable. I normally use 3.7 Sonnet for coding, but used Gemini for the codegen on this one as well. Was pretty impressed! Using Cursor, it seemed to instruction-follow better than Claude generally does, and remain lucid during very long agent sessions. Thanks for your feedback!
2025 · tinysums.ai · its alternatives →
- 22IC
I spent the past week implementing a 1 Layer Neural Net and training it on MNIST within the visual scripting language provided by scratch.mit.edu. It was tedious, but ultimately not too difficult. The code runs incredibly slowly, so much so that 64 samples of MNIST takes 5+ hours to train on my machine. There were a lot of little mini challenges that were fun to overcome (implementing softmax was very tricky). If you're interested, I encourage you to try and improve on it! More details in the linked blog post.
2024 · bell-boy.github.io · its alternatives →
- 23AB
Hello HN, new user here, so please let me know if I break some rules. Currently I've been working on training reinforcement learning agents, and OpenAI gym, while is great, runs only one agent at a time. Hence I decided to extend it. I built a wrapper around OpenAI gym, such that it now runs several environments concurrently. All while (mostly) having the same call signature as OpenAI gym. And it is published to PyPI for anyone interested. For more details, please visit: https://github.com/Chimpan-Z/agymc Feedback really appreciated! Have a good day everyone!
2020 · its alternatives →
- 24

Hey hackers, the world needs more AI researchers with good taste, and hardcore software folks have some of the best. Many software friends mentioned they learn better from implementations than from papers, but existing open-source examples rarely go beyond basic nanoGPT-level demos. To help bridge that gap, I spent the last two months full-time reimplementing and open-sourcing a self-contained implementation of every major modern deep learning technique from scratch. The result is beyond-nanoGPT, containing 20k+ lines of handcrafted, minimal, and extensively annotated PyTorch code. I'd love…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →