Consumer frontier chatbots
The frontier chatbots — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity
Consumer frontier chatbots — hosted end-user apps you just open and prompt, no setup: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. → Unlike the builder tools (app builders, agent frameworks, coding assistants) which you use to construct custom software, these are general-purpose assistants for direct everyday use: ask questions, analyse documents, draft text, search with sources. This chapter helps you pick the right one for a given task.
After this chapter you can
→ Pick the right assistant for a given task (writing, research, data, images)
→ Know which give live web answers with citations vs which reason best
→ Use file upload and long context to analyse your own documents
0/4 courses done — a course counts as done once you've finished all its lessons
| Feature | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Videos tutorials on YouTube | ▶ 2 | ▶ 2 | ▶ 3 | ▶ 3 |
| Detailed course hands-on lessons & templates | Open → | Open → | Open → | Open → |
| Animated walkthrough watch each lesson play out | ▶ | ▶ | ▶ | ▶ |
| Usable free tier good enough without paying | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Web search + live citations answers with sources you can click | ◐ | ◐ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reads your files upload a PDF / dataset and ask | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ◐ |
| Handles very long documents big context window | ◐ | ✓ | ✓ | ◐ |
| Generates images make figures / illustrations | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Strong careful reasoning long, nuanced analysis | ✓ | ✓ | ◐ | ◐ |
| Best for the one-line verdict | all-rounder | writing & analysis | Google + multimodal | research & sources |
✓ strong · ◐ partial · ✗ no · scores are qualitative