models

Choosing an AI model

Claude, GPT, and Gemini all handle most jobs well. How to pick one, when switching is worth it, and why chasing the benchmark leader wastes time.

Claude

Claude is Anthropic's family of AI models, reached through the Claude apps, the API, or Claude Code. What it is known for and how people use it.

DeepSeek

DeepSeek is a family of open-weight models released under an MIT license, known for matching pricier closed models on reasoning and coding.

Gemini

Gemini is Google's family of AI models, known for very large context windows and strong handling of long documents, images, and audio.

GPT

GPT is OpenAI's family of models and the engine behind ChatGPT. What separates the two, and how people reach each of them.

Grok

Grok is the model family from xAI, used through the Grok app and inside X, where it can draw on real-time posts.

Hermes

Hermes is a family of open-weight models from Nous Research, fine-tuned from open bases like Llama to follow instructions closely.

Kimi

Kimi is Moonshot AI's open-weight model family, built for agent work and competing with the closed frontier on coding and reasoning.

Llama

Llama is Meta's family of open-weight models, and the one that did most to make open models mainstream. Download it and run it yourself.

Model routing

Model routing sends each task to the cheapest model that can still do it, instead of defaulting to your most expensive model for everything.

Open, open-weight, and proprietary models

Proprietary models stay on the company's servers. Open-weight models you download and run yourself. What each label actually means.

Qwen

Qwen is Alibaba's large family of open-weight models, with many sizes and versions specialized for coding and vision, mostly on Hugging Face.