as of dec 13, 2024

…this is probably out of date by the time anyone else is reading this, given how fast things move. some of these tools didn’t exist a few months ago, and most of them weren’t nearly central to my workflow a few months ago as they are now.

these are in extremely rough order of how much i use them.

• claude — general-purpose default tool
  • the “projects” feature is particularly good for stuff that will require a huge context window (e.g. asking questions about a whole book)
  • sonnet 3.5 (new) is just a ridiculously smart model
• chatgpt — i basically only use o1, for math & programming
  • i find 4o pretty bad, though it’s okay at quick image generation that i need to get the point across
• perplexity — replaces google for searching for general sources on basic questions, e.g. “why is it bad to eat things that spike your blood sugar?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​“
• deepseek — only used it a bit, the “deepsearch” mode seems about as good as o1 for math & programming stuff
• elicit — useful for finding research papers, doing very cursory lit reviews of a field in a few minutes
• gemini advanced — have only barely used it, the “deep research” mode seems pretty fantastic for doing research that’d normally require you to search through a bunch of websites — it just figures out a research plan, then does it in a minute or two (vs your taking 30mins-3hrs)
• midjourney — incredibly useful for generating images for a variety of things that look better with images, e.g. websites, advertisements, etc. midjourney in particular is sensitive to prompt quality (see some intuitions i’ve built about prompting), and is particularly difficult to understand how to prompt well without an existing base of knowledge on how to prompt models well and how art works. if you just type in regular prompts, the stuff it pumps out is pretty bad, but there is so much incredibly beautiful stuff hidden in the latent space — see e.g. their magazine, or this guy’s twitter.
  • example: most of the abstract art on my website was generated with midjourney
• summarize.tech — useful for quickly summarizing long youtube videos