What are you using AI for and which ones perform best at which tasks?

Keruge

I saw the sticky on AI but I think we are past which one do people use, I use all but not in the mad way we see people on YouTube (from "shall I have a snack" to "will you marry me"

What is more interesting is what are you using them for and which ones do you find are better at what tasks than others?

Neil_Jones

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6656784/what-are-you-using-ai-for-and-which-ones-perform-best-at-which-tasks

None of it. It was all uninstalled / turned off at first sight, and it'll never be seen again on anything I regularly use.

Indeed it was documented on one of the technology sites that AI isn't the driving force of computer sales the manufactures (and indeed) Microsoft thought it was going to be. Apparently Microsoft have had to scale back their AI goals/plans because nobody gives a monkeys about Co-Pilot. Its basically Cortana all over again…

elsien

I use copilot for searches and basic gathering information before I go away and look sites and information up properly myself.

I sometimes use ChatGPT for work, for non-confidential information more to help structure things. I don’t log in.

I don’t trust the information any of them give me because they can be wrong and they do certainly make things up or misinterpret or misunderstand nuance. They are sometimes a starting point, nothing more. Lost track of the number of times I’ve asked them to clarify information, or give me a specific link to their source and they can’t do so.

Keruge

Interesting, I would have thought you would be all for it, albeit by choice, perhaps installed in a sandbox or remote server somewhere.

If you are against it you might like some of Vanessa Wingårdh's recent videos on the dark side of tech, particularly AI.

The behaviour in this one deserved the legal action it led to

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTstOq4w9RM

victor2

I have a friend who swears by co-pilot, where I just swear at it.

Said friend put some PHP code I had written for him through it to see if it could improve it. It came back with some alternative code which did exactly the same job, although might have coped with circumstances that can never happen in this case.

Have resisted the temptation thus far to tell friend to get co-pilot to build the entire system for him, as I've only done it for a few beers!

saveallmymoney

Gemini is very good for car shopping, its not great at finding links to cars as it seems a little out of date but if you put a screenshot of your saved auto trader car list it can think about depreciation, running costs and which to avoid. It knows common faults, valuable options etc.

I use Cursor for work coding, it's very effective with the correct instructions (spec driven development).

MyRealNameToo

Claude is fairly good at summarising meetings and producing actions. Seems fairly good at dealing with things like where someone says something then 4 minutes later corrects themselves.

Copilot is ok at looking at diary, emails and teams to summarise where I've spent my time working on when I have to do timesheets

MattMattMattUK

I have a few projects currently running, Llama 3.3 and 4.0 and GPT-OSS running locally on Ryzen AI Max+ 395 128GB mini PC and and RTX 5090 in a desktop for different model parameter sizes. Most of those projects are getting it to build quotes based on natural language text inputs, it is accurate so far and I never plan to let it loose on the public (e.g. all would be reviewed before sending), but it seems to be a useful timesaving process. The next step on that will be building in a web agent so it can take data and pricing from supplier websites that do not include APIs for it to draw data from.

I am also using Qwen3-coder in 7b and 30b versions (using LM Studio), I plan on trying the 35b and 122b options on the mini PC for my next UE5 project, it will be slow generating code, but speed is not really of the essence for that project and I can have it code whilst working on other parts of the project.

I have done testing on Chat-GPT and Gemini and I find both have fundamental flaws with a lot of subjects, although the premium versions of Gemini can be good for formulas and some coding. In general use their guardrails seem to conflict with a lot of research (for non-controversial subjects).

alanwsg

I use perplexity as a search engine, happy with it but I do make a point of checking it's sources (Which perplexity makes easy).

I used ChatGPT to write a Python script to login to my 4G broadband modem and extract some usage data, I was well impressed with it. I just couldn't get my script to login, ChatGPT's first attempt failed the same way. Then it told me to open the debug console in Chrome, login to the modem and then cut&paste the debug info into ChatGPT.

The next attempt it provided worked straight away (It was the way the password was hashed we both got wrong). Was impressed that it could give me instructions on how to get the info it needed.

Frozen_up_north

Like alanwsg, I've used AI for coding with mixed results… Firstly I tried ChatGPT to produce Python code for a web page controlled relay program to run on a Raspberry Pi, yes I know it isn't particularly difficult but was worth a try. The output from ChatGPT looked nice but plain did not work, even after much alteration to the input text. Next I tried Claude and was surprised that it produced working code first go! It only needed a minor tweak and I have been using the Python code ever since and it has been 100%.

ChatGPT is "OK" for looking up basic information that you could find with an ordinary web search, things like "how to bake a cake", or "when was Price William born", etc. If the search involves looking up a PDF user manual that is public information and available on the internet, then ChatGPT can produce a perfect looking reply that is completely wrong.

Trying to "short circuit" writing Excel spreadsheets by using either ChatGPT or Claude, produced non working output. I should try Copilot as that is by Microsoft. Maybe one to try next time I am writing a spreadsheet.

forgotmyname

The only time I use AI is to show how bad AI really is.

Watched a video yesterday that showed how flawed Lammy is for thinking they can do away with a jury trials and use AI
to work out if your guilty or guilty.

The creator asked various AI's about taking a car to a carwash and as it was sunny should he walk instead and the AI
said yes walk to the carwash to get the car washed.