AI models have surged in popularity, but with frequent updates every few months, how do you determine which one is the best for your specific use case?AI has transformed how we work and play in the past 2 years, allowing almost anyone to write code, create art, and even make investments.

For professional and hobbyist users, generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Mistral and Gemini offer advanced capabilities to produce decent-quality content from a simple user prompt.

Keeping up with all the latest AI tools can get confusing, especially as Microsoft added GPT-4 to Bing Chat and renamed it Copilot, OpenAI added new capabilities to ChatGPT and released GPT-4o, and Google plugged Bard into its ecosystem and rebranded the chatbot as Gemini.

Key Takeaways:

Unsure about where and how to invest in AI technology? By the end, you'll be equipped with all the information you need. Here’s what we’ll cover💡

1. Specialization by Domain:

Different models excel in specific areas such as code writing, text generation, or resume writing. Identifying these specialties is crucial for choosing the right tool.

2. Comprehensive Model Comparison:

The blog includes a detailed analysis of popular AI models, evaluating them on quality, speed, price, and features to help you make an informed decision (please don't miss that) 🥹

3. Tailored to Your Needs:

Choosing the right model should be based on your specific requirements, whether you need advanced deep learning, efficient multitasking, cost-effectiveness, or ease of use.

The best AI chatbots

Let's start with the break down of the the biggest differences of each chatbot so you can choose the one that best meets your needs.

• The original: ChatGPT
• Longest conversation memory: Claude
• Online search, text, and image generation: Merlin AI
• Integration with Google apps: Google Gemini: Merlin AI
• Open license: Meta AI
• For personal use: Merlin AI
• Multiple AI models: Merlin AI
• For internet deep dives: Merlin AI
• For searching the web: Merlin AI
• For content writing: Merlin AI
• For tinkering: OpenAI playground, DeepAI Chat
• For fun: Character.AI
• On social media: Snapchat My AI
• For learning: Chat GPT
• On mobile: ChatGPT, Merlin AI
• For coding auto-complete: GitHub Copilot, Amazon CodeWhisperer, Merlin AI

When looking at AI models, here are some important things to consider:

1. How well it works: Does it give good answers and understand what you're asking?

2. Easy to use: You should be able to start chatting without a complicated setup.

3. Chat-like feel: It should feel like you're talking to someone, not just typing commands.

4. Extra features: Look for helpful extras like language options or internet access.

Although many models share similar technologies, they each have their distinctions. Some excel in specific tasks like coding or boast unique features that set them apart.

To save you both time and money, I've tested all the popular LLMs and compiled a detailed analysis. But before diving into the comparisons, let's first familiarise ourselves with each model briefly.

ChatGPT

The original AI chatbot

Model: OpenAI GPT-3.5, GPT-4, GPT-4o, DALL·E 3 The original AI chatbot that became very popular in 2023.

It's easy to use, you just type your question or request at the bottom of the screen. Each conversation is saved separately, so you can come back to it later. You can also share your chats with others.

While ChatGPT sometimes makes mistakes, it's still a leader in AI chatbots. It remembers what you've said in each conversation, which helps it give better answers.

It can follow text commands and handle many different types of tasks pretty well. Just remember to double-check important information and give detailed prompts.

Guide to give detailed prompt

With the newer GPT-4o version, ChatGPT got even better. Now it can work with images, analyse data, and have voice conversations - and it's very fast.

You can even create your own custom chatbot with special instructions and information. These can do simple tasks, make processes easier, or just be fun to use.

ChatGPT keeps improving and adding new features, making it a versatile tool for many different uses.

Claude

Longest conversation memory

Model: Proprietary

Jumping from the bottom of this list, straight to second position now, meet Claude after its constant updates. Anthropic's chatbot aims to be helpful, harmless, and honest.

The conversation flows naturally, with responses that are straight to the point, without lengthy introductions and conclusions like ChatGPT sometimes prefers using.

What's remarkable about it is the capacity of its context window. This term refers to the conversation memory that AI has, enabling it to track the topic of discussion, previous questions, and their responses. This capability is what allows the bot to answer complex requests like > "can you summarize everything we've discussed into a key takeaway?"

While ChatGPT can retain up to 24,000 words of conversation, Claude 3 extends this limit to 150,000 words. Coupled with a file upload feature, this AI model excels at summarising and answering questions based on lengthy documents. Just ensure the total word count—comprising both questions and answers—stays within the limit.

For a deeper dive into their differences, check out my previous blog here, where I explore the fundamental distinctions between ChatGPT and Claude, including their latest updates.

To gauge how each model performs in daily tasks, I've conducted my own comparisons. If you're looking for a quick overview, below is a table that showcases a head-to-head comparison between the two models.:

Google Gemini

Integrates with Google products

Model: Gemini Google has been in the AI race for a long time, with a set of AI features already implemented across its product lineup. After an epic hiccup during the initial product demo, Gemini (formerly Bard) is really growing on me.

Gemini can connect to the internet to find sources (even offering a handy button that lets you Google it yourself), which is a huge selling point. The search results can even show images directly on the chat window.

It also lets you edit your prompt after you've sent it and offers up to three drafts of each output, so you can pick the best one. It can keep track of your conversation history, and you can share your conversations with others.

But here's what I love, it integrates deeply with your Google account and with other Google products such as Hotels, Flights, and YouTube.

Want to search your Gmail file jungle with one prompt? Do it. Summarise files inside your Google Drive? Yes, please. Check real-time flight and hotel prices as the AI builds your trip? Schedule that time off: it even gives you a packing list.

When compared with ChatGPT, Gemini feels more conversational and less oriented toward text commands. To read more about their differences, here's a direct comparison: ChatGPT vs. Google Gemini.

Gemini vs. ChatGPT: A Comparative Overview

To provide a clearer picture, let's discuss the feature break down the pros and cons of each AI model, as discussed above too, This is basically to help you decide which might be better suited for your needs.

It's important to note that the choice between Gemini and ChatGPT ultimately depends on your specific requirements and how you plan to manage the limitations associated with each tool.

Mistral

Versatile Data Mastery

Model Mistral Large; Mixtral

Mistral Large is ideal for complex tasks that require large reasoning capabilities or are highly specialized - like Synthetic Text Generation, Code Generation, RAG, or Agents. Mistral AI continues its mission to deliver the best open models to the developer community.

Moving forward in AI requires taking new technological turns beyond reusing well-known architectures and training paradigms. Most importantly, it requires making the community benefit from original models to foster new inventions and usages.

Today, the team is proud to release Mixtral 8x7B, a high-quality sparse mixture of experts model (SMoE) with open weights. Licensed under Apache 2.0. Mixtral outperforms Llama 2 70B on most benchmarks with 6x faster inference.

It is the strongest open-weight model with a permissive license and the best model overall regarding cost/performance trade-offs. In particular, it matches or outperforms GPT3.5 on most standard benchmarks.

Mixtral has the following capabilities.

1. It gracefully handles a context of 32k tokens.
2. It handles English, French, Italian, German and Spanish.
3. It shows strong performance in code generation.
4. It can be finetuned into an instruction-following model that achieves a score of 8.3 on MT-Bench.

Best Use Case

1. Complex reasoning Mistral Large outperforms our other four models in commonsense and reasoning benchmarks, making it the best choice for complex reasoning tasks.

2. Coding Mistral Large, the top performer in coding tasks, is the ideal choice for users who priortize coding capabilities in their model selection.

prompt: Write a function to find the maximum number of segments of lengths a, b and c that can be formed from n.

Output

How is each model evaluated?

To compare the performance of one LLM to another, AI firms use benchmarks like standardized tests. OpenAI's benchmarking of GPT-4 shows impressive performances on standard exams like the Uniform Bar Exam, LSAT, GRE, and AP Macroeconomics exam.

Meanwhile, Anthropic has published a head-to-head comparison of Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini that shows its Claude 3 Opus model dominating.

Although these benchmarks are clearly valuable, some experts in machine learning suggest that they may exaggerate the advancements of large language models (LLMs). As new models emerge, they might inadvertently be trained on the datasets used for their evaluation. Consequently, they improve at acing standardized tests, but often falter when faced with new twists on those questions.

Now that you're familiar with the various LLM families and their capabilities, there's more to explore in this blog. We'll dive into a detailed comparison of each model based on critical metrics such as speed, quality, and price.

Choosing the Right AI Chatbot: When and Why to Use Each Model

Next, we'll guide you through selecting the best AI chatbot for your needs, helping you understand when and why to choose one over the others.

As ChatGPT itself would tell you, "The answer to this question really depends on what you want to use the chatbot for. There are many different AI chatbots available, and each one has its own strengths and weaknesses." Nailed it.

Comparing the best of LLMs:

Let's start by evaluating top LLMs including ChatGPT 4, ChatGPT 4o, Gemini 1.5 Pro, Gemini 1.5 Flash, Gemini 1.0 Pro, Mistral Large, Mixtral, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Claude 3 Opus, Claude 3 Sonnet, and Claude 3 Haiku on the given basis:

1. Quality

Different use-cases warrant considering different evaluation tests. Chatbot Arena is a good evaluation of communication abilities while MMLU tests reasoning and knowledge more comprehensively.

2. Output Speed

Output Speed: Tokens per second received while the model is generating tokens (ie. after first chunk has been received from the API).

3. Price

Prices vary considerably, including between input and output token price. Prices can vary by orders of magnitude (>10X) between the more expensive and cheapest models.

4. Latency

Latency: Time to first token of tokens received, in seconds, after API request sent.

5. Total Response Time

Seconds to Output 100 Tokens; Lower is better

The speed difference between the fastest and slowest models is >3X. There is not always a correlation between parameter size and speed, or between price and speed.

Then comes the most important metrix

Quality vs. Price

While higher quality models are typically more expensive, they do not all follow the same price-quality curve.

Now you know which one to buy

Still wondering if we've found the best one in the market? Relax, the wait is over. It's finally time to reveal the star product in the AI world that integrates all the models discussed above. So there you have it—a deep dive into the best AI models available today, and how Merlin AI uniquely positions itself as the all-in-one solution for your AI needs. By integrating leading models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, Merlin AI not only maximizes functionality but also offers unmatched value.

Whether you're a professional looking to streamline complex tasks or a researcher eager to explore AI's creative potential, Merlin AI equips you with the right tools at a fraction of the cost. It's about getting more for less—more capability, more versatility, and more innovation, all while keeping your expenses in check.

As you consider your options in the AI, remember that with Merlin AI, you're not just choosing a tool; you're investing in a platform that grows with your needs and supports your goals with state-of-the-art technology. Give Merlin AI a try and experience firsthand how it can transform your approach to work and creativity.