Hacks to Make you a GenAI Pro Today

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5 Hacks To Make You a Pro Today

Over the years of interacting with frontier AI models, I’ve learned much about using this technology… and also how not to use it.

Because when talking about stochastic models with randomness inserted into them by default, it’s really about when you shouldn’t be using them.

For that, I’ve assembled a set of pro hacks. And no, I’m not referring to arduous coding workflows or tips that require $100k implementations. Today, you’ll learn things you can apply immediately (both as a desktop user and API user) with no previous knowledge required.

From choosing your ideal model to true unlockers that have been a real game changer for me, such as distribution adaptation or explanatory search, every new hack discussed here today builds on the foundation of the one before.

And by the end of this read, I guarantee you will be able to confidently state you’re an AI expert to 99% of the population.

Let’s go!

Hack nº1. Choose Your Model Wisely

The first step is to choose your base model. Although there are certainly benefits to using more than one product combined (pro hack that we’ll see in the future), let’s be accurate; you will end up using one most of the time.

If you aren’t willing to run your own cloud space (you can rent them on Hugging Face Spaces among many other providers), or even run your base models locally with tools like Ollama, you will have to settle between four options:

ChatGPT

Gemini

Claude

Grok

When choosing between all these options, price isn’t a differentiator because they are all in the same range ($20/month). Therefore, how do I choose?

Private Models

ChatGPT offers the best all-around service. It’s good at almost any task. And once they fully roll out Advance Voice Mode, it will become the default product if you prefer speaking more than writing.

Claude is good at most things, too, but particularly for coding. They also have artifacts, an impeccable capability that runs the code in real-time. On the flip side, it has the highest refusal rate, meaning the model tends to deny answering your prompt much more than the other providers.

Gemini boasts the largest context window, up to 2 million tokens in length (or 1.5 million words, more or less). That’s almost ten times what OpenAI offers with ChatGPT, so it’s your best bet when you send extensive content to the model, even though a recently published benchmark suggests the long-context window claims are heavily overestimated (in all cases)… and it also struggles with refusal rates.

Grok is more like a question mark today. Benchmark-wise, Grok-2 is on par (even beating Claude's 3.5 Sonnet), but we must see a wider use to confirm. That said, the model has the lowest refusal rate; it’s much more keen to answer almost any question than the others, so it offers by far the most no-strings-attached experience.

Open-source

Regarding open-source, the Llama 3.1 ecosystem (base models and awesome…

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