Occasionally friends and colleagues ask me what AI tools they use and how to use them, so I thought I'd share will all of you my current list of favorites.

First place starts with a two-way tie between Perplexity and ChatGPT4o:

Perplexity - They call themselves an "answer engine" to differentiate their service from Google (a "search engine"). Start using it instead of Google and you'll see how cool it is not to get a list of links, but rather the actual answer to your question. Get the paid plan for the best possible results, and then only use Google when you are looking for something very specific like the phone number of a restaurant.

Here's a recent example of how I used it for our younger son entering college: Give me a list of the best rated classes that fulfill general education requirements for an incoming freshman at San Francisco State University, favoring those available between 10am and 3pm. It nailed it!

ChatGPT4o - With their updated release last month, it's still the best Large Language Model (LLM) available. And while I'm not a fan of their naming, this latest release 4o (the "o" stands for "omni" because it is great at writing, voice, images, video, etc) is even better. Make sure to sign in and choose GPT4o from the menu at the top. Better yet, upgrade to the paid plan for higher usage limits and other features.

It's pretty good at search too, but I tend to use it to help compose prose, generate images and charts, analyze long documents and more.

Other LLMs I use are Anthropic's Claude 3 (paid to use their best version, Opus) and Google Gemini which has an insane "context window" of 2 million tokens, so it's particularly good at very long documents.

For realistic "avatar" videos, like the two you'll find on this website, I use Synthesia. For a low monthly fee you get a very easy to use tool for creating  videos of human-like avatars saying whatever you want them too.

And of course for the coders out there like me, Github Copilot is insanely great.

I'm constantly exploring, learning and dabbling with a multitude of other tools but these are the ones that float to the top of my list.

PS: Yes, I used AI to enhance my headshot on this article. There are many but I used HeadshotPro. It probably makes me look 10 years younger!