In this column, we find out why you should ditch ChatGPT in favour of Gemini, and when and why you should dally with the second-rate alternatives mentioned above (spoiler - it has to do with sex and money).
First though, for serious work, there really are only two choices of AI productivity tool - the US$20-a-month paid-for versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
Loyalists will tell you that Anthropic’s Claude also scores in the same ranges of AI capability, and that it too has voice integration and a good mobile app. Claude has a very large context window – meaning it will stay focussed with 100-page documents. Fans also praise its empathetic character and thoughtful, philosophical mien.
But Claude lacks vital features possessed by its rivals. It does not remember past conversations. This capacity of Gemini and ChatGPT is creepy and intrusive but makes those models much more useful in furthering your projects. Secondly, it does not have image or video generation capabilities.
You may say, “I don’t need video generation capabilities”. Well, you might not now, but you will. For a parallel, consider that, back in the age of dinosaurs, “I don’t need it” is exactly what people said when makers started putting cameras in mobile phones.
This is one respect in which Gemini is ahead of ChatGPT. Both have state of the art native image generation capabilities. But now Gemini also allows you to create video clips too (click the Video button in the prompt window). For now, these are limited to eight seconds, but this is bound to improve.
With Gemini too, you can interrogate your Gmail and Google Drive archives. Granted, you can use Microsoft’s OpenAI-powered Copilot to do the same in Outlook and OneDrive - but do you actually have your data in OneDrive?
Gemini is more reliable at web search, as you might expect from a Google product.
Finally, Gemini is ahead – in Thailand at least – in its multimodal capabilities. What I mean by this is its ability to assist you in real time as you interact with the world. In Gemini’s mobile app, you can press a button called Live, give it access to your camera and microphone and allow it to see and hear what you do. You can point it at a plant, or your dinner or another person and ask, what is this? Can I eat it? Voice mode on your mobile AI is a game changer, opening new realms of productivity, and this feature of Gemini’s is a glimpse of the AI-augmented future.
What about the rest of the field? Something that can grate about frontier models like ChatGPT and Gemini – apart from the cost – is their political correctness.
For a guardrail-free and costless experience, try Grok from Elon Musk’s X. It will talk candidly about things that others won’t – sex, for example. Beware though - recent reports suggest that Musk might be trying to brainwash his own artificial mind into parroting his own unsavoury world views.
Also free and less constrained by Western mores is China’s DeepSeek. Like Facebook’s Llama, this model is open source, and has a loyal nerdy fanbase for that reason. These alternatives are second-or-third tier models, however, and noticeably less smart than the leaders.
The conclusion: Try Live mode in Gemini on the mobile app and see the world through a new lens.
Joe Smith is Founder of the AI consultancy 2Sigma Consultants. He studied AI at Imperial College Business School and is researching AI’s effects on cognition at Chulalongkorn University. He is author of The Optimized Marketer, a book on how to use AI to promote your business and yourself. Contact joe@2Sigmaconsultants.com.