Top AI Models (as of today)

Written By John Zilly

April 28, 2025 

A few quick notes from the intersection of AI, marketing, branding, and small business.

Best Use Cases for Top AI Companies and Their Leading Models

Here’s a breakdown of the most common use cases for the flagship models from Perplexity, Google (NotebookLM/Gemini), OpenAI, Anthropic, XAI, and other generative AI companies of note as of April 28, 2025. Having watched the pace of change over the past 18 months, however, this list is probably relevant for another week or so. I’ve been using most of these AI tools just about every day in my work, along with MidJourney.

Perplexity (Deep Research)

Best Use Cases

  • Expert-Level Research: Deep Research excels at synthesizing complex topics across domains like finance, marketing, technology, health, and current affairs, producing work artifacts and actionable insights in minutes.

  • Learning & Education: Summarizes dense materials, provides explanations, and helps users master new subjects efficiently.

  • Fact-Checking & News: Real-time, source-cited answers for current events and factual queries.

  • Skill Development: Personalized recommendations for learning new skills or hobbies.

  • Travel Planning: Generates itineraries, suggests destinations, and provides up-to-date travel information.

  • Home Improvement: Offers step-by-step guides and resources for DIY projects.

Distinguishing Feature:

Combines live web search with multi-step reasoning, delivering highly accurate, source-grounded answers and comprehensive research artifacts faster than most competitors.

OpenAI (GPT-4o, O1/O3 Series)

Best Use Cases

  • Content Creation & Copywriting: Generates high-quality articles, marketing copy, and creative writing.

  • Personalized Learning & Tutoring: Adapts explanations and lessons to individual users, supporting education and training.

  • Customer Support & Virtual Assistance: Automates responses, handles FAQs, and escalates complex cases to humans.

  • Automated Code Generation: Writes, debugs, and documents code in multiple programming languages.

  • Medical & Healthcare Support: Assists with symptom interpretation and preliminary triage (not a replacement for professional advice).

  • Business Process Automation: Custom fine-tuning enables industry-specific workflows, decision-making, and data analysis.

Distinguishing Feature:
Versatile, general-purpose models with strong language, reasoning, and coding abilities, and the option for fine-tuning for specific industries or tasks.

Anthropic (Claude Series)

Best Use Cases

  • Web & Mobile App Development: Assists with code, architecture, and troubleshooting for software projects.

  • Content Creation & Communication: Drafts documents, emails, and creative content for business and personal use.

  • Academic Research & Writing: Helps synthesize research, organize findings, and draft academic papers.

  • Career Development: Provides resume feedback, interview prep, and personalized career advice.

  • Business Strategy Optimization: Analyzes business processes and suggests improvements.

Distinguishing Feature:
Strong focus on enterprise-grade reliability, privacy, and safety, with robust tools for business, research, and professional development.

Google Gemini Ecosystem

Flagship Model: Gemini 2.5 Pro

  • Key Features

    • 1M token context (2M coming soon) with native multimodality (text/audio/image/video/code)

    • State-of-the-art reasoning: Leads benchmarks like GPQA (science) and AIME 2025 (math)

    • Agentic coding: Scores 63.8% on SWE-Bench (industry standard for code agents)

    • Interactive creation: Generates executable code for games, simulations, and data visualizations from single prompts

Best Use Cases

  • Enterprise R&D: Analyze code repositories, research papers, and technical documentation

  • Scientific simulation: Create interactive STEM visualizations and agentic code applications

  • Data synthesis: Process multi-source inputs (PDFs/videos/code) for business intelligence

  • Education: Build personalized learning tools with document-grounded explanations

Google (NotebookLM, powered by Gemini)

Best Use Cases

  • Personalized Knowledge Management: Acts as an AI partner that becomes an expert in your uploaded documents, offering summaries, highlights, and context-specific insights.

  • Meeting Intelligence: Extracts decisions, action items, and key points from transcripts and notes, maintaining a searchable archive.

  • Competitive Analysis: Synthesizes market research and competitor data, identifying trends and competitive positioning.

  • Content Development: Organizes research materials, generates outlines, and helps with creative ideation using user-provided sources.

  • Complex Subject Analysis: Breaks down academic or technical subjects, providing clear, contextual explanations.

  • Personal Development & Health: Tracks goals, analyzes health data, and creates personalized wellness plans based on user-uploaded materials.

Distinguishing Feature:

Keeps all analysis strictly grounded in user-uploaded documents, making it ideal for research, writing, and project management where source fidelity is critical.

xAI Grok 3

Technical Breakthroughs

  • Architecture: 10x compute power vs predecessors via Colossus supercluster

  • Reasoning: RL-trained "Think" models with self-correcting, multi-minute reasoning loops

  • Benchmarks: Claims leadership over GPT-4o/Gemini 2.0 Pro in math/science/coding

  • Real-time integration: DeepSearch agent combines web knowledge with conversational AI

Best Use Cases

  • Technical problem-solving: Advanced STEM tutoring and code debugging

  • Truth-seeking Q&A: Real-time fact-checking with source verification

  • Enterprise analytics: Process large datasets with 1M token context

  • Creative exploration: Hybrid text/code generation for rapid prototyping

The AI Cheat Sheet

Other Notable Models

  • Cohere: Specializes in enterprise document search, retrieval, and knowledge management.

  • Mistral: Known for open-source, high-performance models used in coding and research.

Conventional Wisdom Recap

  • Use Perplexity for rapid, accurate research and fact-checked answers.

  • Use Google NotebookLM for projects requiring deep analysis of your own documents.

  • Use OpenAI for general-purpose automation, content, coding, and customer support.

  • Use Anthropic for business, research, and enterprise-grade applications.

John Zilly
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