🤓 This Week in AI
PLUS: Which AI Chatbot is Best for You? A Comprehensive Review
Happy Friday!
With so many AI chatbots on the market, how do you know which one is best for you? This week we dive into the results from a detailed, independent review of top contenders like ChatGPT, Claude, Meta AI, and Gemini across various use cases to help you find the right fit.
But first, here’s what you need to know about AI this week (clickable links appear in orange in emails and underlined in the Substack app)::
OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has launched its highly anticipated "o1" model family (also known as strawberry🍓).
These new “reasoning” models are designed to “think hard about problems before answering” and handle more complex tasks, achieving PhD-level performance in fields like science, healthcare, and technology.
This also means that the AI will get a lot better at following your instructions and the quality of outputs will improve in many use cases.
The "o1" models are available to ChatGPT Plus and Team users, with usage limited to 30-50 messages per week. However, OpenAI notes that these models currently lack some key features of ChatGPT, such as web browsing and file or image uploads, and that GPT-4o may still be better suited for many common use cases.
Professional writers are using ChatGPT as a sounding board, story consultant, research assistant, and editor—to brainstorm ideas, find the right words, clarify their thinking, and get feedback on structure and flow. For specific examples, check out OpenAI’s full blog post. It’s pretty helpful.
Meta has confirmed that it has used all public posts and photos on Facebook and Instagram since 2007 to train its AI models. While users in the EU can opt out due to strict privacy laws, users in other regions, including the U.S., do not have this option, raising concerns about privacy and the ethical use of publicly shared data.
AI companies have increased their lobbying in Washington, D.C. by 190%, pushing Congress to avoid adopting Europe's strict AI rules that demand careful risk assessments and transparency.
This has sidelined academia and nonprofits, giving tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon the upper hand in shaping AI policy.
Americans are turning to AI chatbots like ChatGPT for health advice, with one in six using them to understand symptoms or explore treatment options. While these tools can provide detailed insights, experts warn that the confident tone of chatbots can sometimes make incorrect or incomplete information seem reliable.
Brands are turning to AI influencers for cost savings and diverse representation to engage wider audiences.
But virtual influencers can be manipulated to spread misinformation or biased content without accountability. As they become more realistic, distinguishing between genuine and synthetic voices will become harder, leading to a loss of trust in online content.
Amazon is testing AI-generated voice clones with a small group of Audible narrators to speed up audiobook production. Narrators will have control over how their AI voices are used and will be paid per title, but some worry this could lead to fewer jobs for human narrators.
Oscar-Nominated Film and TV Studio XTR Acquires AI Animation Studio Late Night Labs to form a new company focused on producing both animated and live-action content. The new company will use Late Night Labs’ AI technology, designed to give artists more control over the creative process.
YouTube is developing tools to help creators detect AI-generated content that mimics their voices or likeness to protect them against rising AI misuse and unauthorized data scraping.
AI INSIGHTS
Which AI chatbot is best for you? 🤔
Here are the results from a comprehensive comparison of leading AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, Meta AI and Gemini. They were evaluated across several key characteristics including intelligence, features, rate limit, context window and privacy policies.
Below are winners for the six highlight categories with more details in the images 👇:
Best Overall: ChatGPT Plus ($20/month)
Best Free: ChatGPT Free
Best for Images: Poe Pro ($20/month)
Best for Coding: Claude Pro ($20/month)
Best for Long Context (Longer Active Memory): Claude Pro ($20/month)
Best for Data Analysis: ChatGPT Plus ($20/month)
⭐ My Take ⭐
ChatGPT Plus is the best all-around choice. It provides access to the web/real-time data, the ability to create your own GPTs, and can generate images using DALL-E 3. While DALL-E isn’t the most advanced model for image creation, ChatGPT Plus’s range of advanced capabilities and features (too many to list out here) makes the $20/month subscription a great value for most users.
One of my favorite features is the voice input on the mobile app. Instead of typing, you can simply speak to ChatGPT, making it a lot easier to interact with on the go
Claude Pro is another strong contender, especially for writing and analyzing longer documents. Its larger context window (short-term/active memory) can handle an entire book or multiple long PDFs, allowing for in-depth analysis across various sources.
But, its lack of internet access means you must provide all the necessary information upfront, making Claude less ideal for tasks needing real-time information. There is a free tier with some usage caps, so try it out!
Both ChatGPT and Claude have very advanced reasoning and vision capabilities, so you can’t go wrong with either.
That's all for this week.
I’ll see you next Friday. Thoughts, feedback and questions are welcome and much appreciated. Shoot me a note at avi@joinsavvyavi.com.
Stay curious,
Avi
💙💙💙 P.S. A huge thank you to my paid subscribers and those of you who share this newsletter with curious friends. It takes me about 6+ hours each week to curate, simplify the complex, and write this newsletter. So, your support means the world to me, as it helps me make this process sustainable.