AI Tools

7 hand-reviewed tools covering language models, image generation, speech recognition, and model hosting. Each one evaluated for real-world usability, not just feature lists.

ChatGPT

AI Tools

OpenAI's conversational AI that handles everything from code review to writing drafts. The GPT-4 model is particularly strong at reasoning through multi-step problems, though it can still hallucinate facts confidently.

Claude

AI Tools

Anthropic's AI assistant with a notably large context window and a more cautious, nuanced tone than most competitors. Particularly good at long-document analysis and tasks requiring careful reasoning rather than speed.

Perplexity AI

AI Tools

An AI-powered search engine that cites its sources inline. More useful than a standard search for research tasks because it synthesizes answers rather than just listing links — though source quality still varies.

Midjourney

AI Tools

The image generation tool that most consistently produces aesthetically polished results. Operates via Discord, which is awkward, but the output quality for concept art and visual ideation is hard to match at this price point.

Runway ML

AI Tools

A creative AI platform focused on video generation and editing. Gen-2 produces short video clips from text or images. Still early-stage for production use, but genuinely useful for prototyping visual concepts quickly.

Whisper

AI Tools

OpenAI's open-source speech recognition model. Runs locally, handles multiple languages, and produces transcriptions that are noticeably more accurate than most commercial alternatives — especially for technical vocabulary.

Hugging Face

AI Tools

The central hub for open-source machine learning models and datasets. If you need to find, compare, or deploy a pre-trained model without building from scratch, this is the first place to look — the community is active and the tooling is solid.