Have you bought your AI yet?

To start, I’ll briefly sum up who stands behind what. ChatGPT is backed by OpenAI, Claude by Anthropic, and Gemini by Google. Some would also suggest Grok from Elon Musk, but to be honest, it doesn’t seem very confident yet.

The race among individual models and AI tools has no clear winner at all. Everyone is going full speed, and when one introduces a new model, another does the same a month later. The others then try to come up with at least some new tool, which is soon introduced by the other companies as well. It’s an endless battle. Betting on one horse is possible, but it takes a lot of patience.

Google seems tempting because with its AI subscription you get quite a lot within its ecosystem. On the other hand, Google is not consistent in maintaining its apps. Once you start using one of its new tools, you can bet it won’t exist a year later. In addition, most of its projects are more or less experimental, which means Google is basically saying it’s only a temporary tool.

ChatGPT and Claude are the ones that most often come up with new models and new tools, and they most frequently alternate in the top positions of this race.

ChatGPT recently upset users quite a bit when it got into the Pentagon after Claude was removed because Anthropic did not allow its AI to be used in connection with military purposes. OpenAI also prohibited the same thing in its contract with the Pentagon, but they jumped on the post too quickly, and users immediately knew where OpenAI’s ethical priorities stood and where Anthropic’s did. This was followed by an enormous wave of users switching from ChatGPT to Claude.

Anthropic and its Claude of course have their own scandals too, and that only makes the whole scene a perfect spectacle worth watching.

Scandals aside, what should you choose, and whose subscription should you pay for? If money isn’t tight, I’d recommend not buying a yearly subscription, but rather a monthly one and switching gradually as needed. But you’ll probably feel sorry that what “your” AI already remembers about you won’t be remembered by the new one. And if I had to choose just one, I would personally go with Claude; it seems best positioned to win this race. But in my view, we’re still somewhere in the first third of it. There’s still a lot ahead of us.

As for me, I personally use the paid version of Perplexity, which lets me switch between individual models at any time. The downside is that I don’t have access to the new toys that the individual companies release.

When it comes to coding, there are also several options you can use, and it’s the same spectacle as with the classic “chat” models. A race to see who can do more, faster, and better. I’ve tried all kinds of editors with built-in AI, but in the end I still keep coming back to VSCode with paid GitHub Copilot.

Note: I write the texts without AI, the audio recording is generated by AI, and so is the infographic. In both cases, it’s clear that AI still has a lot to learn.