Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing:
The four most advanced AI systems are Claude from Anthropic, Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Grok by Elon Musk’s xAI. Then there are the open weights AI families, which are almost (but not quite) as good: Deepseek, Kimi, Z and Qwen from China, and Mistral from France. Together, variations on these AI models take up the first 35 spots in almost any rating system of AI. Any other AI service you use that offers a cutting-edge AI from Microsoft Copilot to Perplexity (both of which offer some free use) is powered by one or more of these nine AIs as its base.
How should you pick among them? Some free systems (like Gemini and Perplexity) do a good job with web search, while others cannot search the web at all. If you want free image creation, the best option is Gemini, with ChatGPT and Grok as runners-up. But, ultimately, these AIs differ in many small ways, including privacy policies, levels of access, capabilities, the approach they take to ethical issues, and “personality.” And all of these things fluctuate over time. So pick a model you like based on these factors and use it. However, if you are considering potentially upgrading to a paid account, I would suggest starting with the free accounts from Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI.
More here.
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