AI, Which AI???

 With all the new artificial intelligence apps that have been released, which ones are do we need and how much should we expect to have to pay?

ChatGPT was the leader of the pack, mostly because it was first, but also because it rolled out mostly flawlessly. It gave enough away free to hook most people and was pretty transparent about what information it was sharing. It helped that the other leaders like Google released apps that weren't ready for primetime (like Bard). Google finally got it right when they released Gemini in late 2023. It has continued to get better and better and is now just as good as ChatGPT. Some other large language models worth mentioning are:

Grok - is a chatbot developed by Twix (Twitter - X) that can release real-time information users can use to verify information posted by other users. 

DeepSeek - this was developed by the Chinese company HedgeFund. It is a powerful app that executes with great efficiency. It was been the subject of many debates concerning national security and data collection. 

Poe - is an AI aggragator for multiple LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc). It makes it easy to compare different AI models, create custom bots, and use them for research. 

Claude - developed by Anthropic and can perform a variety of tasks like answering questions, writing code, analyzing text and creating content. It has a reputation for being safe and ethical.

Perplexity - is an AI powered search engine that provides conversational answers to queries by synthesizing information from the web. Perplexity is one of the few AI models that can cite sources.

Qwen - this is Apple's entry into the AI app field. It works with Apple devices and requires a subscription. 

Nova - is an Mobile AI assistant developed on both GPT-4 and Gemini backbones. It is available for both iOS and android devices.

Kimi - this was released by the Chinese company called Moonshot. It is good for tasks involving long documents, complex reasoning and coding. 

GLM - this is yet another Chinese company called Zhipu. It uses GLM 4.5 and 4.6 which are great for complex reasoning tasks that use a dual-mode system. It excels and coding and agentic applications. 

So which one should I use?  That depends on the task you need it to do for you. The bigger question is, do you know how to write prompts?  That is far more important than which app you use. Using AI is not the same as a Google search. Many people who are using LLMs are getting incorrect information or none at all because they don't know what they are doing. 

How much do I need to spend? Here I stick with a subscription to ChatGPT ($20/month) or Gemini ($20/month for Pro version of Gemini plus 2TB of storage space). Do you need both?  That's up to you. I quickly figured out they are different enough and have different strengths, so I pay for both.