Artificial intelligence woes, which is the real one?

General Discussion
1

Yesterday got a call from a client, his printer stopped working and he could not login into his AI app chat gpt. Normally now I get them to come to me, but printer issues could be network problems so I went to him.

Sadly he is still on windows 7 but considering linux, each time we have the same conversation, whilst it still works he does nothing !

First issue, could not print as the system showed none installed, but I know i did it a few years back, ran virus check, spotted the error and removed them, reinstalled the printer everything fine (for now till next virus)

Thought the issue may be the same for the chat application, it gave a 404 error page not found. So into windows store and asked for chat apps, was amazed just how many different ones there are, pages and pages of them, how do you choose ?

I dont use AI so just chose the one my wife uses. Installed and working.

Then my client says But I pay 10 euros a month, my reaction was Its free !

On checking he had been using a different one, same name but instead of .com it was .net address. So tried to log into tge site direct, did not exist, bit of research found they had closed the site and sold to another, tried them and they had also closed up shop, more research and found it was taken over by stripe chat. Contacted their support and got a chat bot, eventually got to a very hidden place to cancel the payments.

Thought cracked it now, use the free one. But my client also has a apple, so into apple store search, completly different icons different chatgpt productsā€¦

Finally found the web site of the one on the windows machine and created a link in safari to go to it and bookmarked it.

Job done 2 hours what a wasteā€¦

So discussion points

Why so many different Artificial sites ?

Which one should he use ?

Should he pay ?

Which do you use and why

Is one better than another

do they have specialist market areas

Its the local catholic priest and he uses it for his talks at mass on Sunday.

Nice guy everytime I go he tries to convert me not to religion but always brings out a bottle of very fine spirit, trouble is when driving I dont drink, but no problem he always fininshes mine, shame to waste it.

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2

I always start with Copilot for my needs outside of work. Iā€™m sure Gemini and others would work just as well. They have free options for both, I believe. I do have a MS Office subscription, and they added Copilot to it, so I could have extra access someone else may not.

If itā€™s to do research and help write a sermon, I would think either Copilot or Gemini would work. He may use it enough that he would run out of free credits. Maybe he should spread his queries around to other free AI portals and see which work best. That way he would have options if he did run out of credits.

:ten: Major, Wellā€‘Known AI Chat Websites (Free to Use)

1. Microsoft Copilot

https://copilot.microsoft.com
Fast, polished, and tied into Microsoftā€™s ecosystem.

2. Google Gemini

https://gemini.google.com
Googleā€™s flagship AI chat with a strong free tier.

3. Yahoo Scout

https://scout.yahoo.com
Yahooā€™s new AI assistant with searchā€‘integrated answers.

4. OpenAI ChatGPT

https://chatgpt.com
Free tier uses GPTā€‘4o mini ā€” still very capable.

5. Anthropic Claude

https://claude.ai
Free access to Claude 3.5 Haiku ā€” excellent writing and reasoning.

6. Meta AI

https://www.meta.ai
Runs Llama 3.1 models; free and fast.

7. Perplexity AI

https://www.perplexity.ai
Researchā€‘focused AI with strong free capabilities.

8. Groq Chat

https://groq.com/chat
Extremely fast responses using Llama and Mixtral models.

9. HuggingFace Chat

https://huggingface.co/chat
Openā€‘model playground ā€” no subscription needed.

10. DeepSeek

https://chat.deepseek.com
Free access to DeepSeekā€‘R1 and V3 ā€” strong reasoning model.

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3

Itā€™s a bandwagon, and everyone wants on it. There are so many API wrappers of the same three or four models under various skins, all hoping to sell you their subscription model.

Iā€™d suspect that for his use case, heā€™d likely be fine on most of the well-known sites (or even rotating through as pdecker suggests above) like OpenAI.com, grok.com, gemini.google.com, www.copilot.comā€¦

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4

Mostly duck.ai. Occasionally ChatGPT.
I find search summaries answer most questions, especially the ones where you can refine the response with a second ask.

All of them will extrapolate when they are not given sufficient detail and that is often why they get the answer wrong. You have to pin them down with a series of more refined questions.

ā€œReality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent oneā€ Albert Einstein

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5

Thatbis a massive amount of technology in place just to look something up. When you consider just a few weeks back they closed ask jeeves as it was no longer used. For my own use i am happy to stick to google.

I do wonder if i gave this list to my client I would get more calls as he tries to use more than one for information especially if they dont agree

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6

I use both ChatGPT and Co-Pilot. Both have free options.

As I use AI more, I found that I can customize the AI to fix the way I want it to respond to my inquires.

  • Donā€™t dump all the info at one time
  • One step at a time
  • Donā€™t tell me what is not the problem
  • Short direct replies
  • More details when I ask for ā€œmoreā€

I use AL mostly for problem solving followed by research. Truth be told, AI can research faster than I can do it on a google search. And I like how AI is now starting to note where the information is coming from and the disclaimer at the bottom of the page that goes something like ā€˜AI can make mistakes. Verify important infoā€™.

Reminds me of an old proverb; ā€œBelieve nothing you hear, and only half of what you see.ā€

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7

True.
The advantages seem to be

  • it does lookups faster
  • it finds info I could never find by handā€¦ more in depth searching
  • it is way better acces than going to the library
  • the language model seems to communicate better with humans
8

That sounds great. I should have Copilot ā€œnip it in the budā€.

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