18
Lesson 18 · 2 min
Choosing a model
There is no single best AI; pick the tool by the job, your budget and what your workplace allows.
Popular chat assistants include ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Meta AI, and others like DeepSeek, Mistral and Qwen. They leapfrog each other every few months, so rankings go out of date fast.
Most offer a fast everyday model and a slower reasoning model for harder problems. Use fast for emails and quick questions, reasoning for maths, planning and analysis.
Other things that matter: does it read images, PDFs and audio (multimodal)? Can it search the web? Does it work in your language? Is there an open-source model you can run on your own computer for privacy?
At work, the first rule is policy. Use the tool your company approved, because it usually comes with better data protection.
Do it now
Run a fair test
- 1.Pick one real task from your week.
- 2.Paste the exact same prompt into two different free assistants.
- 3.Score both answers from 1 to 5 for accuracy, usefulness and tone. Keep the winner for that kind of task.
[YOUR REAL TASK, WRITTEN WITH ROLE, TASK, CONTEXT AND FORMAT]
Words from this lesson
- Model
- The trained file of learned patterns that does the actual work inside an AI product. One model can power many apps.
- Reasoning model
- A model that spends extra time working through a problem internally before replying, which helps with maths, logic and planning.
- Multimodal
- Able to work with more than one kind of input or output, such as text, images, sound and video together.
- Open-source model
- A model whose trained weights are published so anyone can download, run and adapt it, often on their own hardware.
- Benchmark
- A standard set of test questions used to score and compare AI models. High scores do not guarantee good results on your task.