Okay not 84 years, but it’s been a while since I wrote to you guys. I’m back now, and promise to be more regular with this.

In the next 5 minutes, I’m going to talk about a question which most of you may have had — with so many tools available, which one should I use, and when?

Today, I’ll talk about 3 of them — ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity — and tell you exactly what they’re good at, so that you don’t end up using the wrong tool for the right task.

Let’s begin..

Well, everyone’s favourite cutie — I don’t think anyone reading this has not used ChatGPT (in case you haven’t, please let me know — you deserve a special mention for surviving life without it 🙂)

Anyway..

Yes, ChatGPT is the most common tool used today because it was the first AI chatbot to be launched with a lot of PR and grandeur. But…that doesn’t make it the best.

ChatGPT is good at logic, reasoning, and creativity. It’s like a co-pilot that will answer your questions and apply reasoning to it. So you should ideally use it for such tasks. It’s not always great with things like research or deep analysis (unless you use the deep research mode).

On the techical side, ChatGPT has its own LLM (Large Language Model) called GPT. It is from this model that ChatGPT uses the knowledge and training to answer your queries; it doesn’t always check the internet.

Basically, ChatGPT works well for problem-solving. Not so much for fact/accuracy-based questions — Things like “Help me think this through”, or “what do you think I can do here?”, or “create a script for this video” work best with ChatGPT.

This dude solves the problem that ChatGPT has.

Perplexity is great at finding accurate information. You can see this when you search for something in Perplexity — every time you hit send, Perplexity “searches the internet” for information.

It then also provides accurate citations for everything (sometimes the links are broken, but that’s okay — AI tools are still young toddlers learning how to walk, so let’s cut them some slack 😉)

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What you’ll also see is that Perplexity doesn’t have its own LLM. It uses other LLMs like GPT in the backend.

So yes, when people say “Perplexity is just a ChatGPT wrapper”, it’s not by accident. It’s how it was designed to be.

Perplexity does well for queries like “Tell me the latest guidelines on AI”, or “Where is the stock market today”, or anything that requires fact-checking and accuracy.

Well, you can call it ChatGPT’s cousin. The fundamentals are similar — Claude is also strong with logic and reasoning, but it’s safer than ChatGPT. When I say safer means that it will be more accurate than ChatGPT, and won’t go wild. But at the same time probably less creative.

Think of it this way — Claude emphasizes on getting things right, while ChatGPT focuses on getting things done.

So if you ask Claude and ChatGPT the same question:

Claude will drill down, ask you to look at all aspects, maybe give you a few questions to ask yourself and then lay down a few steps. Whereas ChatGPT will tell you what it thinks you should do. Straight-up.

Nothing wrong with either approach. It’s just that they have different use cases.

Well, here’s a table you can refer to while deciding which AI tool to use. It’ll help you optimise your output at least by 2X.

So I made this quick quiz that gives you 5 scenarios, and you select which LLM you’ll use. At the end, it gives you a score so that you know whether you’ve understood the concept well.

Oh also, let me know in case you didn’t, I’ll try and write it differently next time 🙂

So I made the above quiz page using AI in less than 20 minutes, with zero coding.

Used a tool called Lovable, where you just give it instructions in plain English, and it delivers the web page to you.

I’ll write about it in detail soon :)

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Cheers,

Ankur