Retired programmer Dave’s Garage decided to look into all the major LLM AI models and gives his feedback on using them for the last few months.

Which should you use? It depends on what you’re trying to do. It also depends on how you’re testing it – because others come up with different ratings.

Coding

• Claude 3.7/4 is great for serious/production oriented code (after a code review). Probably the winner here.
• ChatGPT 4.1 is a good copilot for prototyping and exploration
• Grok 3 – responds quickly/good speed
• Gemini 2.5 Pro – does what you ask but not much more

Research

• Claude 3.7/4 for carefully explained reasoning and good for references
• ChatGPT 4.1for clear overviews
• Grok 3 for current event
• Gemini 2.5 Profor large, structured input and extraction

Storytelling

• Claude 3.7/4 – literary and reflective
• ChatGPT 4.1- most emotionally resonate
• Grok 3 – flexible and imaginative
• Gemini 2.5 Pro- informative and expandable

News

• Grock 3 wins this easily – gives news and what people are saying about it
• ChatGPT 4.1- Can handle current events decently but slower to pick up news
• Claude 3.7/4- largely sits out news and doesn’t comment unless widely verified
• Gemini 2.5 Pro- factual, accurate, but rarely first

He also discusses the different context sizes when it relates to the tasks. Bigger windows cost more but can allow you to summarize huge codebases or 60 page complex legal documents.

ChatGPT can handle 128,000 tokens or about 96,000 words (1 token roughly equals 4 characters). Claude has 200,000 tokens or about 150,000 words. Gemini 2.5 Pro and Grock 3 claim to have 1 million tokens.

If all you’re doing is summarizing emails, ChatGPT could be just fine. But if you need to make sense of large codebases or summarize large legal briefs, Gemini or Grock will be better at avoiding hallucinations or leaving gaps. There are some that believe that these windows might actually shrink if the systems are under heavy load (Grock in particular).