Last week, 7 new AI models were released.
Seven. In 7 days.
OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Meta all shipped something in the same window. Some of them on the same day. The Chinese labs shipped too. Four of the biggest technology companies on earth, all announcing inside 72 hours, and none of them willing to be the one standing still.
If you have been feeling confused about which AI to use, now you know why.
You are not slow. You are not behind. The ground is moving under everybody, including the people who do this professionally. The business press has started calling it model fatigue, and the companies complaining are not small operations in Arima. They are enterprises with budgets and staff, and they are saying the same thing you are saying: we cannot keep up with the scoreboard.
So let me save you the trouble.
You are asking the wrong question
Almost everyone comes to me with the same one. Which AI is the best?
That question has no answer. Not because I am dodging it, but because there is no single best. There is only best at something. And once you understand that, the whole thing gets simple.
A carpenter does not own one tool. He owns the right one for each cut. Nobody stands in the hardware store asking which is the best tool. That is not a question a working man asks. He asks what he is cutting.
The people getting real value out of AI are not loyal to one. They run a small stack. Two or three tools, each with a job.
Why this quietly costs you
Here is what makes this different from most mistakes.
When you use the wrong model for a task, nothing tells you. There is no error message. You get a mediocre result, you accept it, and you move on, because you have nothing to compare it against.
So you write a caption in a tool that is average at writing, and you conclude that AI writing is average. You research something in a tool that does not show you sources, and you end up repeating something that was never true. You never find out it could have been better.
Three things tend to happen from there.
Some people give up early. They decide AI is hype, based on one weak experience with the wrong tool.
Some people overspend. Four subscriptions, none of them used properly, money leaving the account every month.
Most people just keep hopping. A friend praises something, they switch. They hear about another one, they switch again. They never get fluent in anything.
All 3 of those are losing.
The story that proves it
Last Wednesday, OpenAI released a new model. GPT-6. They are calling it Astra.
It made every newspaper for 3 reasons.
The company’s own president said publicly that this might be the arrival of what they call artificial general intelligence. Plenty of serious people disagree with that claim, and there is no agreed definition of the term anyway. But it was said, and it travelled.
They called it the most capable thing they have ever released broadly. Strong at computer work, at coding, at science, at complicated professional tasks.
And they released it with warnings attached. It is the first model they have ever put out that hit what they describe as a critical level on security capability, meaning it is good enough at finding weaknesses in computer systems that they built extra protection around it before letting it out.
Now here is the part nobody puts in the headline.
It went out to a handful of organisations on the Wednesday. By Friday evening it reached all the paying ChatGPT customers. The 20 US a month plan and above. Not the free plan. Not the cheaper 8 dollar plan either, that one does not get it at all.
So the newest AI in the world costs at least 20 US a month.
And for the work most of us are doing, writing captions, answering customers, planning out a week, checking a fact, you do not need it. The free versions already handle that work well. Astra is built for heavy technical and professional work. Software. Science. Long complicated projects.
Newest is not the same as best for you. Four days old, most advanced thing they have ever built, and it is still not the right answer for the work in front of most of us.
The 5 you should actually know
I am giving you families, not version numbers. The version numbers change every few weeks and would be wrong by the time you read this twice. The family names are stable.
ChatGPT. The all rounder. Biggest, most familiar, most people start here. General work, writing, and it makes images in the same place. If you only ever open one thing, this is the safest single choice.
Claude. The one for words. Strongest reputation for writing that sounds like a person wrote it, and for working through long documents. When what you are writing will actually be read carefully by a customer, reach for this.
Gemini. Google’s one. Strong at research, handles very large amounts of material at once, and it lives right inside Gmail and Google Docs. If your work is already sitting in Google, this one is already sitting there with you.
Perplexity. Built for looking things up, and it shows you where the answer came from. Sources, right there on the screen. That matters. If you are going to say something publicly about your business or your industry, you want to see the source before you say it.
Grok. Tied into X, formerly Twitter. Strong on what is happening right this minute and what people are talking about. Fewest restrictions of the group, which cuts both ways.
There is a whole other group beyond these, DeepSeek and the open ones, strong and much cheaper, but they lean technical. Worth knowing they exist. Not where you start.
What this looks like from here
Let me speak plainly about our situation.
You do not need to pay for all of these. Most people reading this can build a strong setup entirely on free versions. The free tiers of these tools are already good enough for captions, customer replies, planning and research. I know paying for these things from Trinidad is awkward, the card issues, the currency, the declined transactions. That is real, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It is also not a reason to sit out.
Pick 2, maybe 3. Not 5. Not 7. Give each one a job. Writing goes here. Research goes there. Then stop shopping and get good at them.
And then ignore the announcements for a while. There will be another release this month. There will be another one next month. None of them are going to change what your business needs from you.
The one move for this week
Take a task you always do in your usual tool, and run it once in a different one. Same task. Look at both.
That single comparison will teach you more than this entire article. You will see the difference in 2 minutes, and you will never again wonder in the abstract which tool is better at what.
You do not need to know everything about every model. You need to know your own work well enough to know what you are asking the tool to do.
If this is the kind of thing you want walked through properly, with the tools open on screen and your own questions answered, come inside the community. It is free to join, and we go deeper every Monday morning.
Join here: https://www.skool.com/school-of-ai-for-business-5390
Selling is serving.
