From image generation to writing, ranking the best and worst of AI

Vox – no paywall: “Staying on top of AI developments is a full-time job. I would know, because it’s my full-time job. I subscribe to Anthropic’s Pro mode for access to their latest model, Claude 3.7, in “extended thinking” mode; I have a complementary subscription to OpenAI’s Enterprise mode so that I can test out their latest models, o3 and o4-mini-high (more later on OpenAI’s absurd naming scheme!), and make lots of images with OpenAI’s new image generation model 4o, which is so good I have cancelled my subscription to my previous image generation tool Midjourney. I subscribe to Elon Musk’s Grok 3, which has one of my favorite features of any AI, and I’ve tried using the Chinese AI agent platform Manus for shopping and scheduling. And while that exhausts my paid subscription budget, it doesn’t include all the AIs I work with in some form. In just the month I spent writing this piece, Google massively upgraded its best AI offering, Gemini 2.5, and Meta released Llama 4, the biggest open source AI model yet. So what do you do if keeping up with AI developments is not your full-time job, but you still want to know which AI to use when in ways that genuinely improve your life, without wasting time on the models that can’t?That’s what we’re here for. This article is a detailed, Consumer Reports-style dive into which AI is the best for a wide range of cases and how to actually use them, all based on my experience with real-world tasks.

But first, the disclosures: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI, but our reporting remains editorially independent. Future Perfect is funded in part by the BEMC Foundation, whose major funder was also an early investor in Anthropic; they don’t have any editorial input into our content either. My wife works at Google, though not in any area related to their AI offerings; for this reason, I usually don’t cover Google, but in a piece like this, it’d be irresponsible to exclude it. The good thing is that this piece doesn’t require you to trust me about my editorial independence; I show my work. I ran dozens of comparisons, many of which I invented myself, on every major AI out there. I encourage you to compare their answers and decide for yourself if I picked the right one to recommend…”