AI Resources

An up to date comparison of the best AI models

Last updated August 15, 2025.

Models

The current top models are Claude Opus 4.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and ChatGPT 5 Thinking. Grok 4 is also good, as is Mistral. I don’t include the models you have to pay significantly more than $20/month for.

General Tools

ChatGPT is probably still the best choice for most people who will only pay for one AI tool. It is just not #1 at anything. I still prefer Claude, it finally has web search, and it is always a joy to work with. It even has connectors to for example my Asana and Zapier now!

The tool with the most unique capabilities is Google’s NotebookLM. If you haven’t tried it yet, you really should! Google in general is on a roll: Even free users can now use both the deep research tool and Gemini 2.5 at gemini.google.com.

The biggest WOW moments I’ve had with AI lately were all with the new real-time streaming AI Google offers at aistudio.google.com/live and now also through the official Gemini App.

Specialized Tools

Perplexity.ai is still best for search and adding functions all the time. Even free users get 3 daily pro searches and deep research reports! $20/month users now get access to their agentic browser, Comet, which I’m currently testing as a complete replacement of Chrome.

I still use Otter.ai for transcribing and summarizing meetings, but it isn’t improving at the same rate as other tools.

I still use Ideogram.ai to generate images (especially when I want text in the images or want to specify exact formats/ratios), but the best image generator now is Google’s Imagen 4 at labs.google/fx/tools/whisk