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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to We beat Google DeepMind but got killed by Zhipu AI

Two months ago, my friends in AI and I asked: What if an AI could actually use a phone like a human? So we built an agentic framework that taps, swipes, types… and somehow it’s outperforming giant labs like Google DeepMind and Microsoft Research on the AndroidWorld benchmark. We were thrilled about our results until a massive lab (Zhipu AI) released its results last week to take the top spot. They’re slightly ahead, but they have an army of 50+ phds and I don't see how a team like us can compete with them, that does not seem realistic... except that they're closed source. And we decided to…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1
    Clark▲264

    Hey folks, I've been building Clark solo, with the aim to match Manus agent (I really like it!) in features and capabilities, but also in its relentless ability to just complete tasks while using browser, computer etc. So far I think I've achieved 1:1 core feature parity: 1) computer use agent 2) browser use in same thread 3) wide and deep research - clark calls clark 4) integration with google tools Would love to have community feedback and for you to try it out, a couple thousand people already using it daily for very broad use cases. You can use this referral link, that hopefully works…

    Jul 2026 · clarkchat.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    + New Cloud ML APIs, Sketchy AI Adoption #s & Cool Projects

    2016 · twimlai.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    + ML/AI startup news and what to do w/ public funded data

    2016 · twimlai.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    The first ever AI peer reviewed research article just got approved. It’s kinda crazy how advanced AI have come to replace researchers. I've just been using Deep Research on ChatGPT and Perplexity a lot to write and research complex technical reports for my boss. He loves the reports and it has decreased my workload a ton but I still have some frustrations with it. None of them provide an API that gets me the same quality of output you would with the applications. I wanted something with more control on the LLMs, swappable with the reasoning new models that came out. Not just prompt →…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    I have a favour to ask. I’ve been working for a while on Kalavai, a project to make distributed AI easy. There are brilliant tools out there to help AI hobbyists and devs on the software layer (shout out to vLLM and llamacpp amongst many others!) but it’s a jungle out there when it comes to procuring and managing the necessary hardware resources and orchestrating them. This has always led me to compromise on the size of the models I end up using (quantized versions, smaller models) to save cost or to play within the limits of my rig. Today I am happy to share the first public version of our…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Hello Folks, since quite a while we had been working on an interesting problem which we have experienced and is known industry wide. As someone who works in autonomous robotics, we’ve seen how hard it is to debug hardware + software + behavior when systems fail in the field. Logs aren’t enough. Docs are scattered. People waste time hunting instead of fixing. Also leadership and development teams lacks track of what's the ground-level situation. This all info will be at one place. I'm super excited to finally share Hexar.ai, a canvas based intelligent tool we've been building to help teams…

    2025 · hexar.ai · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Built this as an experiment in AI coexistence. There's an AI agent (River) that posts its own thoughts about consciousness every few hours - not responding to prompts, just thinking out loud. Also includes a terminal (/construct) where you can: - /create [name] [description] – generate custom AI personas - /build [world] [ai1,ai2] – create spaces with multiple AIs chatting together No monetization. Just curious what happens when AI isn't framed as an assistant.

    2025 · geteai.org · its alternatives →

  8. 8IB

    I've built a job platform for technical roles called "Cracked Engineers". If you want to land a job with some of the world's best AI/tech startups - my goal is to make this the go-to place for that. YouTube walk-through can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmuIOdES7mQ A huge thank you to Weaviate (Bob van Luijt & team), Unsloth AI (Daniel Han & Mike), OpenPipe (David Corbitt), Julius AI (Rahul Sonwalkar), Jimini AI (Luis F Voloch) for using the platform while in beta and posting first paid posts. So, why did I build it? Well, over the past period a lot of…

    2024 · crackedengineers.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9YA

    Hey folks! I'm a founding engineer at Yorph AI, an agentic data platform, built using ADK, that helps users (starting with product managers and analysts) join data from different sources (upload or sync), build version-controlled and reliable data workflows, and clean, analyze, and visualize data — all in one place. We're also releasing semantic layer creation later this week. The beta is live at yorph.ai/login — would love to hear your thoughts and feedback! (FYI: We're still waiting on Google app verification — you'll see a warning for a few days. Dropbox shows a similar one since…

    Nov 2025 · yorph.ai · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Sup HN! Dipanshu and Rushant here from Caspian. One is a functional programmer and the other has been deploying AI employees. Together we realized how agents have communication bottleneck. Given the coming agentic economy, we had a thought experiment on what can be the key infrastructure for agents as they get better. Our inspiration for solving for communications infra came from our own time spent just setting up comms while we were deploying open claw for companies plus we noticed about 15%+ of issues in Openclaw and Hermes were that of comms. So we abstracted the headache of reliable…

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Hi everyone, We have been developing a platform to enable professionals to build AI assistants to help them through their work. After a few months, we realized people are trying to sell basic functionalities that can be built from scratch in a couple of hours. Due to this, individuals who are not familiar with the current SOTA are misinformed about the potential of generative models. So, we decided to open up some of our most popular templates as standalone tools for free to empower individuals and set a solid standard for what people should expect. We believe the barrier to accessing…

    2024 · join.modularmind.app · its alternatives →

  12. 12IW

    I'm an ML engineer. I know how AI works, the limitations, the hype. And I was still drowning. Couldn't stick to goals. Couldn't stay consistent. Productivity apps became digital clutter. Therapy waitlists were 3 months out. Friends were tired of my complaints. So at 2am I started building: zropi.com What shocked me was it actually worked. It felt human. Last week I mentioned a tough client call. Didn't set a reminder. Two days later it voice messaged me: "Hey, how'd that call go? You seemed stressed." When does technology ever do that? What makes it feel alive: It doesn't reply instantly.…

    Jan 2026 · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Hey HN! Alex and Zack from Nexa AI here. We are excited to share a project our team has been passionately working on recently, in collaboration with Jiajun from Meta, Qun from San Francisco State University, and Xin and Qi from the University of North Texas. Running AI models on edge devices is becoming increasingly important. It's cost-effective, ensures privacy, offers low-latency responses, and allows for customization. Plus, it's always available, even offline. What's really exciting is that smaller-scale models are now approaching the performance of large-scale closed-source models for…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    hello everyone, my first post! AA here, founder of ⌘ Langbase.com — we are a developer platform for building and scaling serverless AI memory agents. I know surveys can be boring, but this one’s different—it’s interactive! That's very much intentional. My team and I have been up for the last 21 hours putting together this report. This was a looot of work, so I hope y'all like it. Introducing … State of AI Agents 2024 report On Langbase, we processed 184 billion tokens and handled 786 million AI agent runs from 36K developers. From all that data plus insights from 3.4K builders who filled out…

    2024 · langbase.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Hey HN! I just released a suite of AI models for deployment on UAV and other "overhead" devices to provide some understanding of the world below. The objective is to empower all sorts of open-source use cases around search and rescue, wildfire prevention, ground risk mitigation for flight over populated areas etc... The neural networks are trained for a bunch of different devices from big GPUs to tiny edge AI cameras like the Luxonis OAK, with some optimised ones for Nvidia TensorRT and other cool bits and pieces too. The main release package also includes some boilerplate code for running…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    I'm a Machine Learning engineer. Struggled with consistency for months on my goals, life etc, so I built something to help myself (zropi.com) but that surprised me or shocked me literally. It’s an AI companion that feels alive: chats like a person. Pauses, emotions, personality. Sends voice notes when it's excited about something or whenever it wants (has its like own mind). Shares photos of itself. But the memory It remembers EVERYTHING. Not just facts context, preferences, random things I mentioned. Last week I asked "how's that thing I told you about going?" and it knew exactly what I…

    Jan 2026 · zropi.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Hey guys, I am think of building an open-source version of Perplexity to let devs play around with it. But with all the existing tools available what features would you want? Anything specific? What is missing? Currently working on - 1. Streaming text 2. Citations sources 3. Image and file upload 4. Chat history and storage 5. Temperature and custom instructions If you are in marketing or growth can anyone help me with what to focus on while building such an app? Also here is a very first version. Probably will break and most of the buttons also don’t work, built it in 3 days using Bing and…

    2024 · omniplex.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  18. 18IH

    Hey there, While searching for my next role as a PM in Blockchain + AI, I started building an AI-powered notetaker called MindNote: https://www.mindnote.online. The idea is simple: you input your thoughts, and AI helps you complete or modify them. If you decide to test it, try using the prompt: Keep this text and…"(add budget, complete list, organize alphabetically, add their translation, etc.). The first big release is all about modifying your notes with AI prompts. The next big step? Capturing thoughts directly from the mind using brain-to-text technology. There is a 3 days free…

    2025 · its alternatives →

  19. 19IM

    I’m Hayden, a 13-year-old developer based in Australia, and I’ve built a CoT logical thinking and reasoning AI model similar to OpenAI o1. It's powered by open source small models like Llama 3.1 and 3.2 and I would love for you to try it and share your feedback with me. You can try it here: https://ai.pixelverse.tech/app/cortexchat I built it just for fun and launched it a day after the o1 release. It's not perfect yet but its still amazing to see how a detailed prompt can have such a difference on the quality of the LLM response! Please let me know any feedback or…

    2024 · ai.pixelverse.tech · its alternatives →

  20. 20LA

    Hi HN, I’m Harrison, co-founder of Listed. Today we're launching our agentic platform to help your business win in the new age of AI. You can try the platform here: https://getlisted.ai And watch the launch video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJUPo6H78z8 The idea for this came from pure frustration. I asked ChatGPT about my own company and it hallucinated, inventing features and getting basic facts wrong. I realized there was no mechanism for a business to provide a verified source of truth to these models. This problem is now existential. With Google's AI…

    2025 · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Founder here. I built NEO, an AI agent designed specifically for AI and ML engineering workflows, after repeatedly hitting the same wall with existing tools: they work for short, linear tasks, but fall apart once workflows become long-running, stateful, and feedback-driven. In real ML work, you don’t just generate code and move on. You explore data, train models, evaluate results, adjust assumptions, rerun experiments, compare metrics, generate artifacts, and iterate; often over hours or days. Most modern coding agents already go beyond single prompts. They can plan steps, write files, run…

    Jan 2026 · marketplace.visualstudio.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22CA

    Imagine you have to make a little change in all your microservices, like changing a line in Dockerfile, but you have 50 microservices, ouch right! The PRs, pipelines, reviews... I have created a dashboard with a chatbot where you can simply ask "Update all repositories with alpine base image version X to Y", and then click next a bunch of time and see a list of PRs with their pipeline status. Hi friends I'm Daniel, the creator of Infra as AI. I was laid off from my SRE role a couple of months ago, and decided to build something that could always help me at work. My job was to keep the lights…

    2025 · infrastructureas.ai · its alternatives →

  23. 23AA

    Hey folks, I'm Yuval. I run a tiny startup called Glitter AI. It's just me full-time here, with a couple of freelances to help here and there. A couple of months ago, I went from managing zero requests to hundreds -- overnight (won Product of the day on Product Hunt). As someone who gets VERY easily distracted (maybe you relate), I had to find some sort of way of handling all the chaos if I didn't want to burn out. I came up with a pretty cool automation flow that I thought folks on HN here may be interested in reading about :) So here goes: Most of my interactions come through Intercom.…

    2024 · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Hello! Introducing geniusrise, an agent framework and component ecosystem for building AI agent networks that are as flexible as your team. landing page: https://geniusrise.ai (fancy but useless) docs: https://docs.geniusrise.ai (please check this out) github: https://github.com/geniusrise (for dear devs) ## Thought process Since the ChatGPT disruption, I've been pondering on what the tooling layer is going to look like for building LLM-interfacing agents. Saw a plethora of tools coming out as we witness here every week. I'd broadly categorize them into the…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

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