For the past month, I forced myself to use a different AI model for every task. No defaults. No muscle memory. I wanted to actually know what each one was good at instead of just assuming my usual pick was best.
Here's what I found.
Claude: still the best writer
I don't think this is controversial anymore — Claude produces the best prose. Emails, articles, documentation, anything that needs to sound like a human wrote it. The output is cleaner, less generic, and needs fewer edits.
What surprised me: it's also the most honest about what it doesn't know. Ask it something obscure and it will actually say “I'm not sure” rather than inventing an answer. That turned out to matter more than I expected.
GPT-5.2: the best for browsing and current info
If you need something that happened recently, GPT-5.2 with search enabled is the right tool. It can browse the web and cite sources, which puts it in a different category for research that involves current events or recent data.
The writing isn't as good as Claude's, but it's solid. The real differentiator is the tool use — it can actually go get information rather than reasoning from what it was trained on.
Gemini 3 Pro: the context window king
I fed Gemini an entire 200-page report and asked it to summarize specific sections, find contradictions, and extract data points. It handled it without breaking a sweat.
The 1M token context window isn't a marketing number — it's genuinely useful for anyone who works with long documents. For that specific use case, nothing else is close.
Gemini 3 Flash: faster than it has any right to be
This one surprised me most. It's quick — responses feel almost instant — and for everyday tasks it's remarkably capable given how cheap it is to use via API.
It's not the model you'd reach for if you needed a nuanced 2,000-word analysis. But for quick answers, short drafts, or anything where speed matters more than perfection, it's genuinely excellent.
DeepSeek V3: the open-source wild card
I was skeptical. I left less skeptical. For coding tasks especially, DeepSeek V3 is legitimately competitive with the frontier models at a fraction of the price.
The caveat: it's a Chinese company, and if data privacy is a concern for your use case, that matters. But for non-sensitive work? The quality-to-cost ratio is hard to argue with.
Llama 4 Scout: free is not always worse
Running Llama 4 Scout locally via Ollama was an experiment I didn't expect to go this well. No API costs, no data leaving my machine, and performance that I'd call genuinely good for most tasks.
The ceiling is lower than the frontier models. But for someone who just wants a capable AI assistant without any ongoing cost, this is the answer.
What I actually learned
The biggest takeaway: there is no single best model. There's a best model for what you need right now.
Writing goes to Claude. Research with current info goes to GPT with search. Big documents go to Gemini. Speed and cost go to Flash or DeepSeek. Local and private goes to Llama.
The people who get the most out of AI are the ones who know which tool to reach for instead of defaulting to one model for everything.
See how they rank head-to-head: Model comparisons → or check the overall rankings →