How to Get the Most from AI This Summer

Today on the AI Daily Brief, we're talking about your AI summer adventure. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Alright, friends. Quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, robots and pencils, Rackspace, Blitsy, and Airtable. To get an ad free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. To learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors@aidailybrief.ai. Alright. It is a weekend, a summer weekend no less, and we are gonna go action oriented today. For this week's big things slash long reads episode, we're actually gonna do two things, both of which are focused on the very practical. The first is that professor Ethan Malek has published the latest version of a blog post which he's done a number of times that's all about which tools he recommends for different tasks. He called it an opinionated guide to which AI to use to do stuff, and so we're gonna look at all his recommendations in case they might influence the way that you want to experiment and change your workflows. Secondly, though, we're going to be introducing the latest training program from AI DB. This one is at summeradventure.ai and is a choose your own adventure to expanding your AI skills. We'll talk about how it works and give you a preview of some of the projects. But let's start over with Ethan. The first thing that he notes in this new opinionated guide is that a lot has changed since the last time he did this. In fact, he writes, what it means to use AI to do stuff encompasses so much more stuff than it used to. Until recently, using AI meant talking to a model through a chatbot in a constant back and forth conversation. Now it means using an agentic system where the AI is capable of doing the equivalent of many hours of plan and act for you. Basically, an agentic system gives an AI a computer to use. So Redditor Top even divides his advice into these two categories, And effectively, he says, if you are just looking for some low stakes answer, such as asking a chatbot for a recipe or even asking it to help you write a letter or something, pretty much any model that you might use, including any of the free models, is gonna do well enough. On the other hand, for anything where you really care about the answer, you're going to wanna be using one of the premier models like Fable or 5.6 Soul set to a reasonably high thinking level. And when it comes to doing real intensive work, Ethan argues that there are effectively only two choices right now, which is ChatJiBT or Claude. Now it is worth noting that that means that Gemini is officially out of the rankings at least at this …