Separate from image, video, or music creation, AI chat bots are generally not trying to make things up, but should be seen as text-analysis and reasoning tools. They don't get things right all the time, and sometimes need to be corrected multiple times.
However, this is no worse than - and in many cases much better than - dealing with mistaken and misleading blogs and other websites that are the standard fare for search engine results.
I would suggest that anyone who doesn't see the advantages (as well as disadvantages) in AI chat bots is not paying attention or hasn't actually spent time with them.
Useful features in AI chat bots
- The history of chats are useful, and indeed being able to search through them to find information is much better than standard web page bookmarks.
- The use of footnotes in responses is quite helplful for follow-up as well as citation.
- The ability to refer to previous elements of an ongoing conversation rather than the isolated single search at-a-time.
- The ability to correct the chat bot so that it can go ahead and correct itself, adjust information, and rebuild tabular data.
- Web and app support (except Qwen whose app is localation-locked).
- Open source versions (Deepseek, Qwen) have versions that can run on shared memory GPUs and CPUs.
- Gemini notebook, though as a standalone product, this is likely killed within 5 years as Google loses its focus on it.
- Gemini gems basically AI apps
Not useful features in AI chat bots
- The distilled open source versions don't have access to the Internet and their knowledge is a bit stale, have to install plugins and edit files to get better functionality.
- If you really want to extend or improve these, then a whole lot of knowledge needs to be acquired.
Deepseek, Qwen, Gemini
- Deepseek seems the best of the bunch. Quite fast and generally good, though often it forgets to respond in English - an ongoing annoyance.
- That said, Deepseek seems better than Qwen at analyzing documents and being able to extract relevant elements and reason about them.
- Gemini seems the slowest and also loses track or confuses information more often. That said, it seems to be able to watch / listen to video / music and actually make sense of it, as well as guide through websites.
Coding assistants and agentic AI
The above discussion about AI chat bots is not meant to tread in the area of coding assistants or agentic AI, which other models have optimized for.