Ranking 22 Of The Most Popular Ai Tools (Q4 2024 Ai Tier List)

Model Agnostic, Shipfast, Solve a specific problem. When people are making the Ai Startup, they should be looking at Curse and Proplexity. It's pretty damn impressive. Where would you put that one? That's one of the few that we can totally agree. Like, Estir, that's one of our main go-to's. One of the most useful Ai Tools available out there right now in my opinion. Hey, welcome back to The Next Wave Podcast. I'm Matt Wolfe, I'm here with Nathan Lands and today we're going to do a super

comprehensive Ai Tool Breakdown. In fact, we're going to do an Ai Tools Tier List where Nathan and I break down all the Ai tools that we've used in the past are using right now. The most talked about Ai Tools. We're going to put them on a tier list from S to F and really rank where we would put them. Also, talk a little bit about how we're using each one and give a little context as to why we're ranking them that way. So, you're probably going to listen to this.

You're probably going to completely disagree with some of our rankings. You're probably going to be frustrated that we excluded some of those tools. Let us know all that stuff in the comments. We want to hear it. We want to know where you would rank them. We want to know what tools we're missing. And if you like this episode, we'll probably do more like it. So, let us know that as well. But without any further ado, let's go ahead and just break down this tool list here.

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So if you're listening to like the audio version of this podcast, this might be one that you might appreciate the video version. If you actually want to see the tier list, we'll do our best to talk about the tool and tell you where we're putting it on the tier list. But this is sort of a visual episode. I'm going to start all the way on the left. Let's start with with Groc here. Where would you put Groc slash X AI?

Yeah, I hate to not give it like a super high rank because like obviously I'm a family on musk. I think I'm one of the few people that I know who thinks that long term that Groc is in X AI is going to be the main competitor to open AI. Like I think they're going to be bigger than anthropic is my current opinion, which seems to be controversial. But right now I would probably put it as a B. It keeps getting better. Like the version two is a lot better than most people realize.

It's not as good as chat to be tea or or or or Claude, but it is nice that you can you can talk to about pretty much anything you want to it's it is less censored. And the image generation is pretty good. The image generation is a lot more free to like make whatever crazy meme you want, you know, or anything. So I think Groc is like a solid B right now. I think long term it could be yes.

Yeah, so for me just based on like how often I use Groc, I'd probably put it like down in D like that's not me saying it's a bad product. Yeah. But for me, it's saying that like, all right, if I need to go use a chatbot right now to get an answer to something. Groc isn't going to be my first choice. It's not even going to be like my top three right like.

Gatsy Bt Claude perplexity or probably going to be my top three. Groc would probably fall number four for me for actually going and using it to ask questions right now. One thing that I noticed it's kind of surprised me is I thought it would be a little bit better at getting real time data from X somehow.

Yeah. And I don't think they really nailed that yet. So that's one thing that kind of sucks is I went there several times like thinking like, oh, I can ask it some question about an X user about my own profile or whatever. For some kind of insights and it kind of is not that great at it. So I don't know maybe see maybe agree on see.

I don't think I'm going to keep it in D for for myself because I think the like the biggest redeeming factor of Groc for me is that it uses the flux one point one pro model. I think it's flux one point one. But you know, flux has three models right the AI image generator flux. It's got flux. It's got a flux. It's got a flux. It's got a flux. It's got flux. It's got flux.

I believe it's like the free version that you can use flux. Dev is a little bit better model that you can use with like the API. And it it's improved a little bit above the snow model. And then you've got the flux. You can use what it creates really really good AI images and Groc is actually using the flux pro model in there. So by using Groc you actually get access to like one of the better AI image generated models is out there.

So for me. I think I'd probably solidly put it as a C just because it's not my main go to. But it's got a great AI image generator at it. I do see a lot of memes and stuff on X that are definitely being generated with Groc. Oh yeah. Any time you see like an image that has like blood or like an actual like famous person like a lot of the Kamala and Donald Trump and Elon Musk memes that you've seen most likely created with flux most likely done inside of Groc.

All right. So next up let's go chat GPT. Where do you where would you put chat GPT? Yes. Like he put a GPT is like I still use chat to be T more than anything else. So you're going to chat GPT more than cloud more than perplexity. Yes. Yeah. I still am at first. Some of the yeah I feel like cloud was getting better in terms like the projects would better than custom GBT's and it still is slightly but like opening eyes already caught up there too where like there's more like you can

put multiple files into the into the custom GPT and things like that. So that's I use it daily like for translating with my wife I use the voice the voice daily now. So I use it that way I still have a custom GPT that I use that I created for helping me write threads on X.

I've been using that daily and also I have a thing that I use for tracking my the calories I eat in the protein I intake every day for working out. Yeah. I use that every day so like and like I'm sure I could do that stuff in cloud too but I'm just finding like the combination of features that it has it still has just it's my main go to.

For me it's not my it's not my first go to I'll probably agree and leave it in S tier because I do think that chat GPT is like constantly setting the bar for everything else right like I feel like I probably go to cloud and perplexity a little bit more than I go to chat GPT.

But you know they've got their oh one model which is the best reasoning logic model that exists right now according to pretty much any sort of benchmark you look at GPT 40 is kind of leading the pack you know almost any time you see a new model come out you know Google Gemini or cloud model or Lama model or any model really who do they compare it to always like oh it's almost as good as GPT for it's right up there on par with the best.

On par with the benchmarks of GPT for so I almost feel like you gotta leave it in S tier just for the reasons that it is like setting the bar that every other company is trying to get to.

Yeah and you know I mean we're talking specifically about chat GPT here but like if we're talking about opening as a company definitely yes because like it sounds like they have more stuff in the works that you know with the agents I think they're hidden agents and like you said with the reasoning model they're definitely head there.

And I might not use that every day but like I am seeing like tweets from like real scientists saying like I'm using this every day now and holy crap if if oh one is better as people are saying they're super pumped about it and it's like what one scientist said that it's already the oh one preview that a paper he was working on it helped him get it done in two days what normally would have taken him a month.

And so yeah I would definitely put the master cool yeah I'm not going to I'm not going to fight for that one too hard it's not my first go to yeah. Alright so next up is Claude for me I put Claude in S tier because it's probably the one I go to the most I have.

Custom projects that I've built out in Claude you know like I've got a project that helps me write scripts I've got projects that help me with my notes for making YouTube videos I've got all of these various projects that I've made so when I need to make a script I can literally drag and drop an article in there and it's sort of rough draft the script for me or I can.

Pull it all of the URLs from like a YouTube video that I'm putting in and it creates like a list of resource links for me really clean and easy that I use in my description though like Claude is probably my seconds most used tool behind perplexity.

So for me that one test here and I also really really love the artifacts right like I love that I can have it generate code and then it will actually show me what that code looks like over on the right side bar that to me is like really really valuable so for me Claude is an S tier yeah I can agree on this to I guess I if it is my own tierless I'd pipe it a I just I've always felt weird about the fact that it's like basically an employee from opening I who left and try to do his own thing and like and he's just the end for the first year was like basically all copies of a.

It's like this is just a weird feeling there like in this called Claude I don't have I hate the name.

And also I've noticed recently like it it like people said it was better at writing I'm just not seeing that lately like I see it's like pretty much the same as chat's BT maybe on code it's better you know it seems to be I think that I think that'll change quickly artifacts definitely that to them like artifacts is amazing like that's that's that's like the one invention that they've created that's like actually really really cool is artifacts well they all.

Yeah well they also showed off the computer use recently as well where you can basically give it instructions and it will actually click around on your screen and stuff yeah which no one seems to be using that in my understanding from like hearing you know from friends is like that basically open I already had something like that like a for a while and it's just like I think Claude tried to beat them to it but then like they're also probably behind there and so it's like yeah it's just not useful yet so what do you think do you think it should stay in S tier or do you think it should.

Well down to eight here because it's constantly playing catch up. I mean I do think it's a tier really there and the other thing to have noticed is people used to say that you know chat's BT was super woke and it was super left wing and maybe this slightly but I feel like they've gotten a lot better at that like where you can talk to it like I had it edit a newsletter issue that I put out the other day that had some talk about the the Trump election that just happened like Trump winning.

You know and I understand that's controversial people some people hate Trump but I thought that like a white it's good for AI Claude refused to edit the newsletter issue.

Right I was like that sucks and that went to chat's BT and it not only did it but I felt like it did it as good of a job as Claude would have or better and so the fact that it's like that you can't the certain things they just won't help you with like long term but they keep doing that it's like I don't know how I can rely on it is like my main assistant assistant for my life if they if they do that.

So to add to what you're saying and to actually sort of agree with bumping it down to a tier I do use it a lot it is one of my more favorite tools but here's like another argument for pushing it down to a tier they jumps a bump the price on high coup right because they said well it's smarter so we should cost more right so they bump the price on high coup and the other thing about Claude like the biggest complaint I hear the most is getting rate limited I don't really hear people talking about how I can chat GPT they get to a rate limit very

often but in Claude everybody seems to hit the rate limits I don't really find I hit the rate limits very often unless I'm writing code if I'm just like having conversations about like a YouTube script or something like that I never run into rate limits but I do know that's like a big complaint people have is that for whatever reason they run into rate limits a lot with Claude yeah I think I mean they they have to be more cash traps than opening I for sure like no one talks about that but they have to be like like if you're the number two player in a space you're always going to have a way harder to do that.

I'm going to have a way harder time raising capital but they also have the backing of Amazon and Google like Google is a huge investor in Claude and Amazon basically said we're going to use Claude as the future Alexa right so it's like yeah they do have that Amazon backing like Amazon could be to anthropic what Microsoft is to chat GPT you know yeah true so we'll see how that plays out but I think I think you've talked to me into sort of conceding it down to an A.

All right so next up is Gemini the thing about Gemini is we have Gemini and we have notebook LM on the list and notebook LM is powered by Gemini so if we're just looking at like Gemini on its own like ignore the fact that notebook LM is powered by Gemini will rank that one separately. Think about like the Gemini chat and like maybe let's include like Google AI search right like the AI overviews that Google does will consider that part of Gemini as well.

So considering the Gemini chat and considering Google's AI overviews where would you put Gemini. F tier. You put Gemini. I mean I feel bad like Logan is going to hate me for say that and I will concede I have not used it recently I know everyone said it's got a lot better and so I should use it again and I just I feel like I haven't seen a good like notebook LM is a great product.

So like that's actually the first great product I've seen from Google the long time I feel like the Gemini released I feel like it's like a totally botched launch and I don't know anyone who personally uses it so that's that's why I'm in the boat of like I hate to put anything in the F tier like

I actually like a lot of people at Google I think about Gemini there are redeeming factors about Gemini right like Gemini's got the largest context window of any platform right so if you want to upload the entire Lord of the rings book series or the entire Game of Thrones book series and have discussions about it.

Gemini is pretty much the only game in town that's going to let you upload that large of a context window. I think that's sort of a redeeming factor for them as well Gemini I believe also has the ability to sort of read videos now too right so you can put a video in there and it understands what's going on in the video and can tell you about what it sees inside of that video.

So I don't know if any other models can do that Gemini also powers notebook LM which you know we're kind of trying to keep the two separate at the moment but like notebook LM is really really useful so I have a hard time like throwing it as like a solid F but the only reason I would put it sort of lower on the tier list is for the same reasons you mentioned it's not really one of my go to's it's not something where I'm like okay I need to go use AI for this let's go pull up Gemini no I'm usually going to go to cloud chat GPT or perplexity right yeah.

So for me it's just not the top of mine tool yet that I would go and use when I need a eyes help yeah it's got great capabilities like if I was ranking it purely on capabilities I might put it a or B and I'm not a huge fan of the AI overviews yet like you mentioned it like it I didn't know the difference between real news and like memes right like that's what was tell people to put glue on pizza and eat 10 rocks a day or whatever.

Right like it just it didn't know that like this wasn't factual information it was just information it found on the internet right but I think they've improved a lot of that stuff as well. But it's gotten to a point now where I don't really use Google or C.A.I. overviews too often because I go to perplexity for that kind of stuff now.

So I don't know personally I have a hard time throwing it as an F because it is a capable model it's just not one of the models it's like my go to I think I'd probably maybe put it like a C or a B. This is the same let's do this something has to be lower like it otherwise we're gonna have like all a B's and that's true that's true. If I'm looking at the two I probably still would go to rock before Gemini as well yeah I would yeah.

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You're going to want to check out the podcast listen to science of scaling wherever you get your podcasts. Let's do perplexity next so perplexity for me solid S tier I use it every single day. S tier.

Yeah yeah like right now I'm like chat's beauty and perplexity that's like daily for me and and they just you know I'm a Arabin was one of our first guests who came on like you know I've talked with them personally he's like he's a great guy and they they ship so fast you know and like and coming from like Silicon Valley and doing startups I know like how fast you ship things is so important. I would say they're shipping faster than anyone like they're doing better than open AI in that regard.

Well you're more like Nostek right so like what you can like. Perplexity powers part of future tools right and on future tools it uses the uses llama with perplexity so it does a search in the web five just the information uses llama to sort of like right the summeries and stuff when I use perplexity like on my desktop not within the API but just like I'm going to use it to look up some information I'm using it with clod 3.5 son it they even added a new

feature where you can use the GPT a one model or the open AI a one model and actually have it do more like logical thinking through with what it found in its search results right so like it actually allows you to use like whatever model is your favorite loss the web search results you know.

Yeah I think that's awesome that's one of the few that we can totally agree like S tier that's one of our main go to's one of the most useful AI tools available out there right now in my opinion that is interesting so it kind of has replaced not only Google but Wikipedia as well in a way which we probably use Wikipedia is a source but that is interesting.

Yeah yeah yeah and a lot I've done a lot of like research like the other day I was looking for a new like headset with a microphone on it right like headphones with a microphone and I asked it to basically like look for the most recommended headset microphones by

YouTubers and ranked them like top 10 and it went and looked for all of this and it linked me up to the YouTube videos and it ranked them for me and it gave me the source and then and then I went okay cool this is how it ranked them now I'm going to start watching some of these YouTube videos and I started clicking into the videos to see what the people were actually saying about them what the sound quality was like and all that kind of stuff.

So I was actually starting to like click into all the resources after it did all the research for me and like manage just it's it for me it's been really really helpful. It's probably the most useful AI tool. Cool let's do let's do llama next I'm curious your thoughts because I don't think you probably use llama very often but yeah that's what say I have a hard time ranking I'm like trust your rank a little bit better than mine I've used it one time.

So llama like I mentioned llama is actually what the AI that powers what's going on at future tools saw the like descriptions and things like that that are on the website are combination of perplexity and then llama right because llama is really kind of the cheapest model that you can use right now. Okay. Because it's open source right yeah.

So like I think the fact that it's open source you get it's got to have some like brownie points for that right like that they you know gives it some cred because so many of the open source models that people are using now. They they started with llama and then sort of modified them forked them whatever you want to call it and like built their own models but we're based on llama originally right.

So I think that's like an important factor I would probably put it into like be here like I would use llama probably before I would use. Grock or like getting a text response just because it is that open source model and it is insanely inexpensive to use as a large language model when I use my meta Ray band glasses they've got llama built into them so if I I rarely ask my Ray band glasses questions but when I do it's answering with llama.

For me it's gotten to a point where like most of the large language models are like as good as each other or my use cases right like a lot of people that use these large language models that need them for like the logic reasons or more like really in depth.

So I think that's a very scientific complex topics there probably a little bit more sensitive to which model they use for me if I'm just like asking questions that's like general knowledge that's out in the world or if I'm trying to get it to help me like write a story or if I'm getting it to try to summarize something for me.

So I think that's a very important thing to do is use cases like all of the models do pretty well at this point and so the fact that we've got an open source version that does. What chat GPT and what claw does and you know what all these other models do really decently for most people's use cases that's why I think there's value there right like.

So I think that's a very important thing to do is write their emails better or to cheat on their you know social studies homework or you know to do fairly simple things that pretty much all the large language models are are pretty profession at now and so you know llama is the open source version of that right.

Yeah I mean since I haven't used it much I'm not going to like argue on another I probably would have put it the same as Grog if it was just my own ranking but since the fact that you're actually using it and like neither one of us daily use Grog you use Grog on a daily. basis like yeah it should be a be then let's move on now to let's talk about some of these like coding platforms so we got get hub co pilot we got.

I'm not going to be a good player. Replay agent would be another one yes we got rep. There's another one that people are probably angry that we put on here I can't remember the name of it is a bolt or you talk about bolt I was that yeah it is ball isn't it.

Yeah bolt is pretty good I've only tried it for a couple minutes so I don't think we should put on this tier list because like I haven't played with it enough myself yeah but it was impressive like I really told it like I was watching a video earlier today from

Tiff and tech who's a youtuber who does tech videos and she actually asked it to make me a clone of Spotify and it did and I was like literally that was the prompt go make me a clone of Spotify and when I was using it I was I asked it to make me like an ever note type tool where I can sort of save bookmarks around the web in it and it made it pretty quickly like it's not like cursor where it looks like a IDE where you're you know you can see the code and

that kind of stuff it looks like a chatbot you ask you to do something and it just sort of runs through the code and it's like all right here's your app I don't do a lot of code so I'm going to have to lean on you a little bit for these code ones and disclaimer I don't code every day like you know I've done three tech startups I've coded on and off most of my life I you know get up copilot originally I love it's actually how I got involved in in AI or

at least more in like the current wave AI I've actually been doing some stuff with AI in my previous startup we'd actually had a computer vision department in this current way to tell I got interested it was like trying out GitHub copilot and seeing how amazing it was I was like I was actually going back in like just for fun I was like oh I

should like pick up C++ again and maybe I can make like a cool little game demo like something I was I was doing like a Zelda kind of game but it was kind of like dark souls theme just like messing around and it was amazing how fast I was able to like learn C++ again just using GitHub copilot I was like oh basic like coding logic and stuff and it was like it was just like helping teach me things so fast but I haven't used it recently and it seems like less people are using it

it feels like maybe they fell behind a little bit compared to cursor and other ones so I think I probably put it like in a solid on a beat here would be you know where I put it yeah okay yeah I mean I've never used copilot like not even once so like I really don't have any sort of

rebuttal argument to that so be tear it is yeah I miss it's mainly really good for like in line suggestions of like oh you're writing you're writing something and this is what I think you're wanting to write and give you a great suggestion you pressed tab to complete it it's like it's like that's how they got started I think they have some other more advanced features I haven't heard of anyone actually using them so yeah yeah and then we have cursor right and cursor we actually did an

episode with Riley Brown where we used cursor and built a whole app like within the course of that episode it's pretty damn impressive where where would you put that one so I mean I would put cursor at S tier because I think it's actually having a major impact on software development like it's like there's lots of AI stuff that we talk about where it's like oh promise in the future I'm hearing from lots of friends it's like on ballet they're like lots of teams are using cursor now

and it's the fact of yeah it can give you the in line suggestions like it have copilot does but also it can like look at your entire code base and and it can have context of the entire code base it can go it can it can it's helping people a lot for like debugging issues you know because like debugging issues like one of the things when you're doing software development it's like the thing where you're like damn why am I doing this job like you feel like

the job is amazing when you're like you're having a concept and you start you know you're putting it together and you get to see a demo of it work but as soon as you start debugging it's just like I hate this

job yeah yeah I'll keep it up there and S tier I agree I you know my sort of main experience using cursor has been watching Riley go back and forth with us on an episode and within what the course of 25 minutes we went from like we didn't idea like we use a idea come up with the idea on that

episode and then by the end of the episode we had a working app and I was like this is a 45 hour long episode and we have software now like yeah that is blowing my mind yeah something else something else it can do that's amazing that I haven't heard a lot of people talk about is you can like a lot

of times when you're coding might be working with a certain API or some kind of you know some kind of library that you're using that you don't fully know how to use it and you you end up having to go back and back to the docs over and over and over like how do you do this how do you do that

you can like just like linked to docs and you can like I like I kind of like upload it to a cursor and like you could say here's whatever API and then you can just like at tag that and talking to cursor and it knows all the docs and then you can just ask it any question and get the answer

to how you do that so much better than like go like opening up another window and like trying to have to search through like oh how do you do this and like learn it all again they even have stuff to like the command line where it'll help you like doing command line stuff it gets really tedious

especially if you don't do it every day if you do it every day you learn the command is not bad but like if you do it like once a month like me like you kind of forget some stuff for sure fact it can just like oh here's what you're trying to do and here's the command every tool out there

has like an API and every API is sort of slightly different from every other API yet somehow when you use cursor it seems to know how to implement the API for the tool you're trying to implement right like if I'm trying to implement the whisper speech to text feature

in an app right it knows how to just use the open AI API when I was trying to get it to do like like a wizzy wig editor right where I can like you know make fonts bold and stuff in my text it just automatically knew how to pull in the proper APIs for that kind of stuff right

so that to me is also really really impressive it's like you don't need to go to whatever tool you're trying to integrate with and learn all about how that API works it seems like cursor will go and do that work for you to figure out how that API works yeah and I think this is an example

too of like when people are making the AI startup they should be looking at cursor and perplexity like model agnostic ship fast solve a specific problem yeah then we got replete which I have used replete a little bit but to me

replete was more of just like that IDE right it was more of like a replacement for visual studio code for me but it was saving it all to the cloud and stuff saving it all to my computer well yeah on that side is like it's like it's for like deployment right look they're kind of

a competitor with like a verse sale and some of these other startups they help you easily deploy websites but I'm specifically wanting to rank the replete AI agent which is like is a newer thing that they have so I probably put it in like a seat here right now with

a potential to be an S tier like I tried it it's cool I mean at least you go from like start to finish like you can literally I sat down with my son and he had a ton of fun so to sat down we gave it some ideas of what we wanted to build like a website he wanted to do

something that was minecraft and legal legends and it was like a is like a guide for these two or something you know and it went from beginning to end and show and shows you the code to and so you can dive in more and see the actual code it's generating

as well if you want it takes a long time like a lot of times it was taking like three to five minutes to generate the stuff but it helps you create the entire website and then deploy it so it's like from beginning to end the quality was not as good as if I wouldn't I if I were to just use my own template and then probably use cursor to help me and stuff I probably got something better out but you could see long term where there will be a class of people who if you have an idea for a start

up probably the best way in like a year from now will be to go to something like the replete AI agent and say make me this landing page is going to make you a beautiful landing page you'll deploy it for you the whole thing will be done in ten minutes. Yeah, yeah, right. That's that that's going to be probably possible in the next year or just get something out on a piece of paper like scribble out like a rough layout of what you want and then upload that image and say make me a landing page.

Here's a sort of quick template and then it'll make a beautiful version of what you know you sketched out something that we saw you know back at the GPT for demo but it's never really panned out to be like what we've seen in the demos yet. Right. Okay, I'll put it there because I can't do otherwise. Yeah. So let's let's let's do like the AI image generators now. Let's start with probably the most well known with mid journey. Where would you rank mid journey after here? Yes, yeah, yeah.

Some of our friends are going to kill me if I do that. Kind of have a hard time ranking it like there's like part of me that wants to say yes and there's part of me that wants to say a I guess that's like. Honestly, I'll be honest with you. I'm going to struggle with the AI art tools because like I actually use them all for different reasons.

Yeah, I mean I used to you know when I first started dabble with AI art I used stable diffusion because I could run it locally on my machine and I just thought that was so cool. And then I started using mid journey and I was like oh yeah you get you know it's easier to create beautiful things with it. I hated that you had to use on discord. It took them forever to get the web version. I thought that was so dumb.

Well I would think mid journey I think mid journey kind of argued that like they were more of like a research company building up a really good art tool and they didn't they were less concerned about the user experience at that point. Right. They were just concerned with making the best image model they could. This is our user experience live with it or go somewhere else. We don't really care. We're going to make the best image generator there is.

And only recently have they started putting like effort into user experience. Yeah, I'm kind of convinced that the image generation parts going to become a commodity and the user experience is a thing. So I think I would put them into a I think a lot of people would put them into S but I think I put them into a just because I think I think I think I'm not using it as much as I used to. There's great alternatives.

I think they ship the website and the new user experience way too slow which makes me more pessimistic on them long term. Yeah, I think you know if I'm going back to how I was sort of ranking things earlier on in this episode, I was kind of ranking them by like how often I would go to that tool opposed to the other tools, right? Mid journey isn't really one that I go to is like one of my top two or three anymore. Maybe it's top three, but it's not top two.

Right top two for me would be Leonardo and stable diffusion are the two that I use the most. I don't know I would probably put mid journey as B tier. Oh really? Yeah. Yeah, but I could probably be convinced otherwise. The thing about mid journey is it's like it's the most well known. It's the one that I feel like at least for a long time like chat GPT was setting the bar with AI image generation like everybody was going, oh, yeah, this one's almost mid-journey tier.

Oh, have you seen the new version of stable diffusion? It's almost as good as mid-journey. Have you seen the new 80-oogram? It's almost as good as mid-journey, right? Like to me, it gave some points as being that one that sort of bent everybody's benchmark of like trying to reach, but I don't really find myself using it as often anymore. And I think it's just because not because I don't think mid-journey is very good.

It's just because I think some of the other models have gotten better than mid-journey at this point. Yeah, and people are saying that they're going to move into like AI video and that's what's going on. Also, they're going to move into like you've created some kind of character persona on mid-journey and that can be consistent across different things.

So I guess you can make like comics and stuff. So maybe they will, maybe they are ahead in that area and we don't know, but also recently Sam Altman kind of like had this grin on his face when he was talking about how much better AI art in video is going to get soon. So I have a feeling that behind the scenes too, like all the other stuff that OpenAI is building is probably going to give them some edge there too that people are not going to expect.

Just like when we first saw it, it's like, holy crap, that's amazing. They probably have other things that are amazing that have not been revealed yet if I had to guess. The other sort of like negative against mid-journey is all of the image generators. It's probably the most expensive to use as well. Yeah, I keep canceling it and then re-subscribing. I'm like, I am not using it and I'm like, it's expensive and I cancel it. I'm like, oh, I want to use it again. I subscribe.

But this happens so many times now. Yeah, yeah. So for me, because it's on the more expensive end of the AI image generator models, I personally don't find myself going to it as much anymore. That's why I put it there. I feel like blocks might have passed it or at least caught up with it as terms of realism. And when it comes to artoutini, colorful, high contrast, aesthetically pleasing images, for me, I tend to go to Leonardo a little bit more now. I will say that I am an advisor for Leonardo.

So, as tier, of course, Leonardo is as tier. I need to just claim that. I do have equity in Leonardo. But I legitimately do go and use it more than I use mid-journey. I don't think I'm going to put it in S tier. I'll probably put it in A tier just because it's the one that I use the most. Are we finishing up mid-journey though? So let's talk about it. So I agree with, I had said S or A, but I think you kind of convinced me of B, honestly.

I think that's like a good spot because they were S tier for a while. Now they're B. Yeah, that makes sense to me. Yeah, and then, you know, so I was sort of sort of rolling into Leonardo just because I was referencing it in comparison to mid-journey. For me, Leonardo is like, it still has some of the issues you might get with stable diffusion where you get some of the seven finger hands or that bird flying up there looks a little weird. Why doesn't it have three eyes or whatever?

You get some of that weird stuff that you get with stable diffusion. But aesthetically, the Leonardo Phoenix model, which is their proprietary model, it's not one of the stable diffusion models, I think it's gotten really, really good.

If you look at my YouTube thumbnails, the way I make those thumbnails is I usually generate an image in Leonardo first, and then I take that image and then I pull it into stable diffusion that I have locally installed on my computer, and I do a face swap with local with stable diffusion. So it's like the image was made in Leonardo and then stable diffusion is what I use to sort of mask out my face and then put my real face on the image that was generated.

So I'm using that one constantly because it's what all the thumbnails are made with. But I don't know, have you have you usually in Leonardo before? I have like twice. Honestly, it's been a while. So I definitely haven't tried the Phoenix model. My impression was like when I tried it, I was surprised how good it was to be honest with you because I felt like I hadn't heard much about it except from you honestly.

Like I heard about it a little bit on the X, but like I was like nowhere near as much as mid-journey. And when I tried it, and this was probably a year ago now. So it's probably way better since then. I felt like it was 95% as good mid-journey in terms of quality, which surprised me. I was like, oh, this is pretty close to mid-journey. And I liked the interface a lot better. I thought it was a cooler app to use, honestly.

I think I just had the mid-journey subscription, so I just ended up not going back to Leonardo. That's honestly like kind of what happened. When it comes to realism, I think mid-journey still has Leonardo beat. I think flux and mid-journey are better at realism than Leonardo. But when it, like, do you remember back when like mid-journey was on like version three? And they had these like really like vibrant like contrasting colors. And every image you looked had like this mid-journey aesthetic.

It just had like a cool look to it. Right? That's how I feel about the Leonardo Phoenix model. Is it's like, it's got this high contrast HDR sort of like really, you know, the colors really pop. It's got like that aesthetic to it, which to me is really, really pleasing. I feel like with mid-journey, like each version that's come out of mid-journey, they've sort of moved away from that like mid-journey aesthetic.

And now they just kind of look like, you know, whatever you're prompting, like whatever style you're prompting. Leonardo to me still has like a style, I guess. Yeah. So you are using it for your thumbnails on a daily basis, is that right? Well, I don't put out a new video. And I'm using it daily, yeah, but yeah, every video I put out, yeah, I use Leonardo for the thumbnail. Yeah. Yeah, I'm kind of like, I feel like I could see a, but also like people are going to freak out about that.

So you can lean out over mid-journey. And also since you're an advisor, like, damn, I should probably put it as a B. But I'll put it as a B, just as a precautionary measure. I, you know, don't hear it. Just kind of thinking it through here. Right. I think mid-journey and Leonardo should be kind of on the same level. Maybe like if we're wrecking them like this way too, so like this is a higher B, maybe. But like, they're probably about as good as each other.

Like I would go to mid-journey if I need something a little bit more realistic. I would go to Leonardo if I'm looking for that sort of like aesthetic. The color's going to pop. It's going to make a good thumbnail kind of thing. Yeah. But they're probably on par with each other. Okay. I could say that. Alright, so I put stability AI here. But this is meant to be for stable diffusion. Stable diffusion itself doesn't really have a logo.

And everybody kind of like associates stability AI with stable diffusion. I mean, so for me stable diffusion, I'm probably just going to put it right alongside these other ones. Because I use it just as much as I use Leonardo, right? Like that's what I use for like my face swapping. Maybe I put it as a C tier actually. Just because like I don't use it to generate images like almost ever. I use it to do like in painting.

So I generate the image with a mid-journey or Leonardo or like one of those tools first. And then the only thing that I'm using stable diffusion for at this point is to go in, mask out my face and then like superimpose my face using AI. So I can't, I don't know, I don't think I can put it on the same level as these other ones. But I was going to say F, which is like probably give me a kill by like everybody who. I feel like they dropped the ball so much.

Like really offering to stability AI the company. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Yeah, the state of diffusion is like an open source image generation model. The ability AI has made a handful of the weights that have been made available like SD XL, SD 2.0, SD 3.0. Like those were made by stability AI, but stable diffusion itself was an open source model that was built before stability AI even existed. Right, which was super like I felt like there wasn't a whole lot of transparency on that.

Yeah, I'm probably judging the company not the model itself. Because like I have a lot of feelings about the company in terms of the, you know, stable, made to be a bit of an other things. When SD was at 3.0 came out and everybody was generally the images of people like laying in the grass and it would have like these mutated people that had like only legs and no head and you know random stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess I was also like early on I was using stable diffusion a lot.

And I just, I personally don't use any more, but it sounds like you do actually have a friend who has a company as well. And I know he, like he hits like a discord bot or something like that. I know he uses it. So it sounds like people are using it. So probably, yeah, it's probably not a F. Yeah, well, I guess if we're looking at that as a whole, right? Like most of the models that people are going to use for stable diffusion today are the models that were generated by stability AI.

So I guess like he can't get it lumped in, you know. Well, just as we've been talking about this, I've already knocked it down to tears. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. D thing. I think D seems good. Like it's going to be controversial. Some people are going to say it should be like an A. I don't think anyone's going to say S. Well, again, my logic on it is like how often do I find myself going to it when I need to generate stuff? And I do use it often, but I don't use it to generate the images.

Like the only value I'm getting from stable diffusion right now is that face swapping feature. Okay. D. Let's leave it. D. We have something that's lower. I mean, like. Yeah, but looking at what's left, what would go lower? Yeah. Yeah. That's true. That's true. I mean, we may not get anything. Yeah. That's like well, there's like people who make it. Yeah. We don't want to burn any bridges with any companies completely. So it's like hard to throw anything below a D.

All right. But stable diffusion itself. Let's leave it in D. Because it is open source. You can literally generate anything. If you're running into like road blocks with censorship or whatever with any other AI models. All right. So this next one here. This is playground AI. Quite honestly, I haven't used it a ton, but I did use it recently. They've sort of rebranded a little bit to being like the AI generation tool for like graphic designers.

Right. Like they've made it really good at creating almost like vector style art. Like it's not actually generating vectors, but it's generating like vector style art, like logo type stuff and stuff that would be good on like t-shirts and mugs and stuff like that. It seems like they've kind of gone more that direction and sort of niched into it. Right. Like you've got like scenario dot GG, right. They've really, really like leaned into like game assets where playground.

They've really seemed to lean into like where what you go to if you want to create logos or graphics for like your, you know, your company assets and icons and things like that. And for that use case, it seems pretty dang good, but I haven't used it a ton. Like that was me playing around with it for like 30 minutes or so. I haven't a hard time ranking this one for like multiple reasons. I haven't tried it recently. I tried it before. I haven't tried it recently.

Next time we do this, I probably should try everything before we do this. And you know, the founder, Sue Hill, I have a lot of mutual friends with him. It's like on Valley. He created Mixed Penal back in the day, which was like, yeah, was for a while considered like the coolest analytics tool. Like instead of using Google Analytics, you use Mixed Penal. If you wanted more details and the instant that mattered to you. So, you know, he's definitely a great founder.

But when I did try it, like the the user experience and interface was like really good. It was like that in that and Leonardo were like two of the ones I thought were pretty cool. You're just kind of going back on my sort of fall back. Like, after a trick with how I've ranked everything else. I don't really go to that one very often. I mean, I use stable diffusion more than I use play around. Yeah. But I also think that this should probably still rank above stable diffusion.

Because as far as like people listening to this episode. It's a lot more user friendly than stable diffusion. Like you're probably more likely to go like unless you're using it for a very niche use case. Like I am with stable diffusion where I'm going in face swapping for YouTube thumbnails. You're probably not going to use stable diffusion, right? You probably going to prefer something like playground, which has stable diffusion models built into it.

So you can just select the model and get playground to generate the image with stable diffusion for you. Right? Also, it's similar to like the AI version or the art AI art version of like a perplexity or a cursor where you can go into playground. You can use playground model V3. But you can also choose dolly 3 or you can also choose stable diffusion SDXL or SD3.5. Like you could go and pick whatever model you want to use or you can use their own proprietary built in model.

So I think that gives it more value than stable diffusion right off the back. Because it does what stable diffusion does. Plus, you know? Yeah. And anyone could listen to this and just go instantly try it and get the gist of it in like a few minutes. But as far as like the images that it generates, I don't think I'd put them on the same level as Leonardo and mid journey.

I don't think it's up to par with those quite like it's close, but it's not quite as good as those like with the quality of image. Yeah, the last time I saw images from it, it seemed like kind of closer to like stable diffusion level. Yeah, yeah. And then we've got just moving on. We've got Adobe Firefly. This might be my first e-tier. Here's my problem with Adobe Firefly. Out of all the image generation models, it is the absolute hands down most censored. Right?

Like I tried to get it to generate an image of the Eiffel Tower and it said no, we can't generate that for you. And I wouldn't look it up. And apparently images of the Eiffel Tower are technically trademarked or copyrighted or something like that. Like it wouldn't generate an image of the Eiffel Tower. When I get it to generate images of actual people, it's not great.

Like the realism isn't quite there. When it comes to like aesthetics and generating images that like I just think are aesthetically pleasing with like the color palette and the contrast and stuff like that. Never very impressed. Like every time I've gone to Adobe Firefly to go try it to see if like, okay, has this one gotten better than it used to be? It doesn't really, like the UI has gotten a lot better. Like the UI, I have no beef with the UI. I think it's a decent UI.

I just really, really don't like the images it generates and it is so insanely censored that like I'm sitting here banging on my desk. I was so frustrated that some of the images it wouldn't generate. Yeah, so I only saw examples of it then I haven't tried it. I used generated fill and some of the other Photoshop features they rolled out which are pretty cool. But yeah, it sounds pretty bad. I didn't see any examples. They looked great either like on Twitter or anything.

There was nothing that was like, oh, that's awesome. And to think about Photoshop for a creative tool, how can you put such a restriction on a tool that creators use on a daily basis? There's no logic there for that because maybe they're doing it for legal reasons. But it's like saying that you've got a hammer and you can't use a hammer certain way. It's like, well, why would I buy that hammer? You know, it's like you can use Photoshop to draw anything.

You bring up some points here that I actually want to touch on. Adobe claims to be the only AI ethical image model because they've only trained on images that are inside of Adobe stock and public domain photos. So they claim that you're not generating on a model that was trained on everybody else's artwork because they had the license to use all of the images in their training data.

So the people that are really, really concerned about the ethics of how the models were trained would probably go to Adobe over the others because of that sort of ethical piece that they put on there. Also, you mentioned that Firefly in Photoshop, that has actually been useful. I kind of forgot about the fact that it's actually using Firefly when you're using Photoshop. And I do every once in a while use Firefly to fix stuff.

I'll generate an image with Leonardo or mid-journey or something like that. And there'll be a weird artifact in it and I'll pull it into Photoshop, circle that little weird artifact, click the Generate, Generative Fill button, and it'll remove that for me. The censorship is so bizarre sometimes. I honestly think this should be our first F tier because a creative tool that doesn't allow you to create things you want to create. And also, I haven't seen anyone sharing good examples of using it.

Everybody uses it in Generative Fill though. That's where you're most likely going to use it. It's time to time, but even there, I've had times where it would be my face and an image. I would circle my eyes and say, put sunglasses on me. And it would say, our guidelines don't allow that. Sometimes the guidelines just present false positives or false negatives or whatever direction that should go. It thinks you're trying to generate something that you're not actually trying to generate.

Sometimes it's just really weird like that. Or like I've had issues where I had like six fingers on one of the hands that it generated. And I was like, circle one of the fingers and it'll be like, oh, sorry, this is against our guidelines. We can't change this image because it obviously thinks the finger is like a different appendage or something. And so you run into that kind of issue with it. But I have a hard time putting in F tier because I do find it useful.

But we should treat it as like it's stand alone versus the Generative Fill. Like if we had Generative Fill, maybe we're talking like a B tier or something like that feature in Photoshop. But for like a stand alone image generator, I think we have to judge it that way to get like an accurate judgment on it. And I do think that would be an F. Yeah. You know, and another negative for Adobe too is like their icing model has always felt a little predatory, right?

Like where they do the whole thing where it's like it's this much per month, but you have to agree to a year long contract to get that at this much per month. And then people don't use the tool anymore and they can't get out of there. It's just that to me feels very icky and I've always hated that about Adobe. Yeah, I there's been once or twice were like unintentionally I end up paying them like a 500 bucks or something. Yeah. It's like that sucks. All right. So next up is Magnific.

I haven't actually used Magnific to generate images, but I've used their upscaler quite a bit. And I think it's pretty cool. But I think the big complain about Magnific is the cost, right? A lot of people say it's like for an upscaler, it's like kind of pricey for that. But what are your thoughts on it? Yeah. Well, I got free credit. That's a problem as well as they they did give me some credits so I can play around with it.

But whenever I've talked about it on a YouTube video or something like that, people are always like Magnific. It's prices is crazy, you know? Right. I haven't used it recently. So I'm going to have a hard time giving it like a really high ranking. But when I used it, it seemed great. Like upscaling was always one of the issues. Like you'd use different AI art tools and then like there was it was crazy that there was no good upscalers. It was like, why is it how is this still an issue?

And then the fact that and then it was kind of cool. I would actually make them look better. Like some stuff you put in there at all of a sudden look look nicer. Which sometimes that was bad too, because sometimes it would actually change the essence of the image as well. Yeah. So I had a hard time kind of like playing with the tweaks on that and stuff like how do you get that right? It upscales, but it also hallucinates like it hallucinates on purpose, right?

Like it will add extra stuff that wasn't in the original image. But it creates this like cool effect. Like I've always thought it looked really cool. Like we've seen those things that circle on Twitter and stuff where it's like Laura Croft from like the original Tomb Raider game and somebody upscaled it with Magnific. And then it looks like a like you know a AAA game graphics. It looks like ultra realistic, but it looks like modern day game graphics with the upscale done to it.

Like some of that kind of stuff is really, really cool. But to me it falls into the category of like novelty. Like I don't use it a ton. Yeah, I thought you were going to say like the the new Laura Croft and it changed it to more like the original Laura cough that I will. Well, I'm treating that direction to you as well. But yeah, I don't know. I'm feeling like like probably, geez, where would we put it? Should we put it like C or B or see I'm going B or C?

I'm probably leaning more towards C because if I'm looking at like the value of the tools and B. I don't think I would Magnific it like the same level of value of these tools. Yeah, yeah. And it's like disclose we probably both have talked what's his name? Havi. Havi, yeah, yeah. Havi. Yeah, we've talked to him several times on Twitter. Nice guy. I was kind of shocked that he built this because like I just knew this like this guy on Twitter.

And it was like awesome that he built this amazing startup. So it's like props to him, but he's already know. He got free pick right now to buy free pick which free pick is an AI image generator that also has Magnific built into it. Yeah, so we can talk more crap about it since he's already sold it. No, sorry, sorry, I would say C because it's expensive and I don't and just long term I don't see.

I don't see the value long term just because it seems like you know, and I think I may have even said this to him. Yeah, you should sell it like if you can because like it took off like crazy fast and it's like like a long term. How does that become its own company or own product like it's an upscaler like a cool upscaler. Yeah, that should be part of mid-Journey early in our door. We've kind of covered the AI art. Now we're sort of shifting into AI video here.

Yeah, we've got runway, Peeka, Kling and Luma. Because Luma's got dream machine and dream machine was pretty damn groundbreaking when they showed it off. But let's start with like let's start with runway for me runway. For me runway is an S tier and my reasoning for that is like runway just ships man like in the last couple of weeks. We saw runway ship act one, which was like the sort of lip sync.

You can and it follows the emotions of a character so I can make a video where I'm talking and I'm moving my eyes around. Every time I blink the animation on the video blinks it does all that and then they released the multiple camera angles where you can make a video from like any angle of an image that you upload in there. And they and that's really cool.

And then they've got like frame interpolation for like images where you can take one image and another image and have it like frame interpolate between them and do this like morphing effect. And they've got the ability to go and like remove the background of any video and turn it into like a green screen video and like to me when it comes to AI video.

Like every week runways got some sort of cool new feature they just they just ship and they ship and they ship in the generated videos that come out of runway are really impressive to me. When I'm going to generate an AI generated video I'm either using runway or Luma most of the time. And for me I put it in S tier. Yeah, I get the S tier. I just don't think it's on the same level as those other three companies in terms of like actual value that can be created with it like as of right now.

That makes sense and I'm biased because I do a lot with video right so like I'm playing with video tools a lot. I'm sure a lot of people that listen or watch this you know this podcast don't do AI video as much as I do but when it comes to the AI video platforms that are out there to me runway always seems to be like one step ahead. Again, we don't know where open AI is with video like they haven't released it to the public.

You know, we talked to Don Allen students in the third on our podcast who is somebody who actually got to use Sora and basically he was like I can't give you more details but it's better than you think right. So yeah, yeah. So there's good stuff coming out of open AI in that video front at some point. But yeah, as far as tools we actually have access to and can play with right now, I think runway sort of leading the pack with AI video at the moment but they make sense. So next up you got pica.

There's no way I'm putting pica in the same like realm as runway. Pica generates AI generated videos as well. The videos are not great like I don't really feel like they've got great realism but.

The new sort of thing is like you know you see the videos where like there's a giant like compressor that compresses somebody or like that is it cake kind of thing where a knife comes in and like slices whatever you're looking at it makes it look like it's cake or like they got that like balloon feature will blow up really big and then like float away and. It's got like all those kind of like gimmicky like like yeah effects that you can put on videos and that's kind of fun to play with.

There's not a whole lot of use out of it out of like outside like means but right kind of fun yeah yeah when they first came out I got like a demo i'm not sure if you did like a few like AI influencers got a demo before the people it was at that at that moment like.

Like for every reason like cartoon kind of characters seem pretty good seem like better than some of the other models for like that kind of art that kind of style but then it seems like there's been so many other things that all these models from China clean and others they're like probably better looking for that kind of stuff.

The special effects look cool maybe that's what they'll keep doing me like the special effects viral memes kind of company seems like that's expensive like a people are really pay for that. You know i'm like a little bit of struggle with like ranking some of this stuff is it's like i think it's really cool and it's fun to play with. But i don't know if i see the real world use case where like.

If you're paying for it you're gonna get ROI on it you know what i mean yeah it doesn't like that kind of puts it in like the see though. I think i agree with see i think i think it's kind of like a novelty and you know like realistically most tools should fall under a sea right like that should be like our average if it's like a bell curve right so yeah it's cool it's it's cool it's fun to use it's not the best one out there but it's not bad.

I am skeptical about the company long term just because i don't know how they build business around that because like with runway i can see it like if you get baked into Hollywood and stuff obviously like like i like i told you i dealt with Hollywood a little bit like they spend so much money on special effects like some of these films is like a hundred million dollars on special effects it's like. Well if you could get that down to a million dollars or whatever you know that's that's huge.

And run with you're founded by like legit like AI pioneers like one of the founders i don't remember exactly like names here but like one of the founders of runway was one of the original developers of stable diffusion yeah yeah so i think see makes sense and then you've got cling which. I haven't really used that much it's one of the few AI video tools that i personally haven't played with a ton.

I played with it a little bit i have noticed like you know i used to do those AI video threads and i have noticed it it seems like right now though most of the videos people are putting out on X a lot of them are cling actually yeah so it seems like in terms of visual quality they are in the

realm of runway is what it seems like it seems like they're in the room of runway but with like the editing tools not being as good as runway so beat here it seems like a big because it seems like they're putting out better videos than.

The pica what also seems to me like cling is a lot more uncensored right like like if you went to runway and said generate a video of will smith eating spaghetti right like the very classic meme that's been given around for years now it'll say we can't do that because we're not going to make videos of will Smith i believe cling will i think cling is like we'll make whatever you want.

Yeah that is one thing i've seen people kind of talking about online recently like like why is and there's another there's one or two other Chinese models too we probably should be listing them but they're also pretty good in a i video and it's like why are they so. Why are they so good. Why do i or something i didn't know.

Exactly that's why it's so hard to say that's like i shouldn't really say it but those are all pretty good like those are all probably better than pica right now or in the ballpark of it. Yeah pica's got the cool special effects but like they're in the ballpark of being you know somewhere in between runway and pica which is pretty impressive they may end up being like having some of the best models out there long term.

Yeah i agree i think i think b is the right place for them i think i think they live a little bit above pica but not quite runway level so then you've got luma and luma has their dream machine which is.

Probably about on par with what runway does as far as like the video generation not nearly as many features is runway has but luma's what the cool thing about luma dream machine that i really like is that you can give it two images you can give it a starting frame and an ending frame and then it figures out how to make a video that goes.

Between those two frames so for example if i put an image of myself as the starting image and image of like a wolf howling at the moon as like the other image and i want to like animate as me morphing into a wolf howling at the moon. It can do that and like that's where i feel like luma really stands out is the start frame and frame. Create an animation between the two frames feature i really really think that feature is cool it doesn't put it on par with runway but i think it.

Put to the step ahead of pica maybe. Yeah probably a b then they get yeah i play with a one time i liked it better than pica when the thing about luma is luma was really one of the companies that led the way with nurse and gauze and splatting and stuff like that right like if you have the luma app on your phone.

You can go like take an object in your room and like scan it in with your phone and create a 3d version with the luma app so not only does it have a video generator it also can scan in real world objects and convert them into nerfs and gauze and splats and stuff like that which.

I know is getting really technical in the weeds but if you really into like creating 3d assets and stuff luma is also capable of that right yeah i think i think be make sense because it seems like in a way they're going to be competing probably directly with pica then to look on special effects and things like. That seemed like they're probably already ahead of them yeah yeah.

All right so next we got descript and I know you haven't really played with this one so i'll just talk about this real quick. But descript is a tool where you can upload any audio or any video file it will automatically use a i to transcribe that whole file and then you can edit the audio or video file by editing the text right so if there's like a sentence that i want to remove from an audio or a sentence that i want to remove from a video.

I just delete that sentence in the transcript and it automatically edits the audio file or the video file to you know make that edit for me and i found it really handy for. I use it as my main transcription tool so like whenever i release a short form video on youtube shorts or instagram reels replace like that i always record the video.

Pull it into descript get the transcription and then use that transcription for the subtitles on the video there might be better ways to do it i'm in fact i'm sure there are better ways to do it but for me it's just like it's become a really really simple way to transcribe every video that i make and then make captions on that video and it uses a i to do that all. Is it like something that's life changing.

I don't know i think it's really really helpful if you make a lot of video or audio content but i'd probably put it like middle of the pack. You can you edit the video with it as well or no okay but you just don't use that feature.

I don't use that feature no no i mean because i have editors that i hire like yeah and i use it i use a tool called time bolt which isn't technically an AI tool to do like a lot of the like cutting out the gaps in the audio but I use a script will do that as well to cut out us and umbs i also use time bolt for that but descript will do that as well i use descript a lot for just like getting transcriptions another thing descriptors like even before 11 labs came out.

Descript was the first tool that i ever saw that can clone your voice though like if you had a podcast and you miss spoke during the podcast and you wanted to go and change like one sentence.

You know when you were trying to trade it on your voice go and type in the new sentence you wanted it to say and it would replace the original sentence in the audio version of that with you saying it now 11 labs does it so much better the fairly mechanical AI sounding when you do it but it was the first tool i ever remember seeing that had like voice cloning built into it yeah it's uh i guess i can't argue with you i guess see.

I can imagine even you two probably just have all that will you two does have transcription built into but it's like you got to upload the video first and I need the transcription before the videos uploaded you know right got. But yeah i mean i think i think like transcription is going to be very commoditized you know like you got the whisper API from open AI it's really cheap to use does really easy for tools to build in transcription but it's somewhat useful for you today so like seed mix.

For me today but i also think like if i was if i didn't already have like workflows in place and systems in place for creating and adding my videos i would probably use the script a lot more for editing the videos it's just like.

I haven't really wanted to change the workflows that I have so i think anybody that's trying to get into podcasting and they're going to edit their own stuff or anybody that's trying to get into like creating video content and they want to edit their own stuff i really think that's why i'll for like speeding up the editing process as well. All right we got three more now we're getting into like the audio apps yeah so we got sooner first i love sooner like do know is so much fun to me yeah.

I can't put my love it though it's too much of a novelty yeah yeah i love it i will use it twice so i think you i think you use it more than me right. I'm playing music or used to right so yeah i'm a musician i'll use songs that i make in sooner instead of YouTube videos like. If you want background music and you don't want to worry about copyright you can make do know make you a song without any lyrics and use that as your background music so you can say i need some like.

I'm emotional music for this part of the video and then I need upbeat exciting music for this part of the video and you can tell it to not generate lyrics and it will generate like a sound bed for you for your videos i've also made like montages where i have like a whole bunch of clips from an event that i went to and then. I actually typed in the lyrics that i wanted like oh now i'm looking at.

Now i'm looking at the insta 360 cameras on the wall over here those are pretty cool look over here it's a really cool futuristic car and look at that it's a flying car and like i would put all these like random things that i was like.

Basically what i'm seeing in the video i would put that as the song lyrics make a song and then make the montage video like sync up to the song where the lyrics of the song or actually what i was looking at in the video and you can do like really fun stuff like that that makes for really engaging videos.

So it's fun and i use it and most of the time i'm using it i'm using it just to screw around and just like play with it it's so much fun i used it to make a song to my wife when she was my fiance and it was just like a love song to her and like i even like i wrote in like our like story of like meeting in Kyoto and stuff and it made this awesome song you know.

So it seems like it's like it's amazing technology it's it is a novelty it's kind of fun to use but you do get some real use out of it so seems like that's probably like what a or b something like that yeah i. I'd probably have to put it in a b just like going back to like how often i use it for like actionable practical use cases yeah not very often i'm using it for fun and screwing around more often than anything.

So would i put it on the same par with claw that would be tough right if we're saying clouds and a like i don't think i can put sooner with the same. Here they make sense as clawed. All right and then you got 11 labs so anybody who doesn't know what 11 labs is it's a voice cloning tool you can trade on your own voice you can trade on anybody's voice you type in words and it will speak out in a very realistic tone.

It's pretty valuable in the keep on adding like features right like they've got the 11 labs reader now where you can load and blog post or PDFs and it will like read it in your voice or read it in whatever voice you choose. And so you could go out for a walk and turn like a PDF for news article or something like that into almost like a podcast that you listen to but it sounds like a real human and not like an AI robot talking to you.

So that's you know that's useful it also creates sound effects now too so you can say like i need a clang sound effect or i need like a dog barking sound effect or a car crash sound effect or whatever right and it will create that sound effect for you so it'll create talking audio and it'll create sound effect audio it can be used to like make audio from from text files it like there's a lot that you can do with it.

Where they don't want to create the whole person thing or was that so no i feel like there was one word that you can like create like a personality now and like you can like save that personality that's you know just created that. I did it so no speech yeah i was getting confused okay i like that's great with 11 labs you can train your own voice into it and then they even have a marketplace where you can sell access to your voice if you want in fact Matt vid pro.

He actually put his voice in the marketplace and then started seeing ads online with his own voice promoting a product and he's like to take my voice off the marketplace right is probably worth more money than that to like long term but yeah especially if it's like promoting the wrong thing right here these pills that help you you know i'm

Matt vid pro you're right should buy bluetooth yeah rhino pills or whatever yeah here's my gut feeling and we can debate it a little bit for me 11 lives is eight here i was going to say hey it's what i was going to say because like it's actually being used by people like there's there's people in certain industries are actually using it right now yes like a lot a lot like people are using it for doing voiceovers on like sales videos people are using it for the faceless channels like it it's really good.

It's really really popular among like the face faceless youtubers right that just put out content you can create voices that never existed before you can say i want it to sound like a you know an 80 year old grandpa who you know stepped on attack or whatever like it's like random prompt. We want to reorder these at all like do we want to say like oh it should be ahead of runway because people are actually using it or is that not matter do we know don't you.

Yeah maybe it does go ahead of runway and also when it comes to like voice AI so I actually interviewed one of the founders of 11 labs for like an Nvidia panel that we did a while ago and when it comes to like the voice the speech AI like 11 labs is leading the way right like there's a lot of other companies out there that are like voice clone like AI.

Voice tools but like 11 labs is the chat GPT of voice tools right it's the one that everybody's trying to catch up with it's the one that everybody says we're almost as good as 11 labs right like there they're like they're they're they're the one everybody's they set the bar right. Right I mean the fact that some people are using it in faceless channels that's like awesome that's like an AI tool that's actually being used that changed an industry right so definitely.

Next up say and then the last one I'm not sure if this is the proper icon or not but it'll have to do the trick is a notebook LM which as we talked about at the beginning of this uses Gemini underneath but we're more specifically talking about like the feature where you can upload a whole bunch of documents or YouTube transcripts or links to articles and then you can ask the questions and like actually have a chat with all those documents and it will also create like an audio narrated podcast where it actually sounds like.

To host talking back and forth about the topic which I think is really cool as well I have mixed feelings so I know this is a tough I think I think it's an awesome technology all it's it's a great product. I can see so much potential for especially like in like learning and things like that like you know you want to learn a subject you can make a little podcast you can listen to it that's awesome yeah it's entertaining my my son was like.

I don't think I've ever seen laugh as much as like when we create a podcast talking about oh by the way the earth has just been invaded like you know one of you is actually probably an alien.

My son just like thought this was so hilarious listening to them kind of talk that out like by the way maybe it's you you know kind of thing or like this is weird I'm just really skeptical about Google's ability to make it mainstream or like to produce release new products in general and have them become popular I'm skeptical of that because I haven't seen it. So I don't know if it's probably a year be though I guess some something like that yeah.

It's one of the amazing like things I've seen in the last in the last six months definitely I think it's the most impressive thing that has come out of like Google in a while right like yeah like Gemini's always felt like it was playing catch up with chat GPT right.

It has the bigger context window but other than that it's kind of felt like it's playing catch up but then when notebook LM came out it was like using Gemini underneath and everybody went this is like this is this is a cool use case this is a really really cool way to like consume information and I'm I'm using it quite a bit right like I'll pull in a whole bunch of like news articles to try to understand what's going on with something and have them explain it to me.

Saying that I do know it has some issues like it will get confused about things sometimes where if you give it like two different news articles it will say like I'm having a hard time thinking of an example but it will like say something happened in one of the news articles that didn't actually happen because it got confused with the wording between the two news articles.

The sometimes I know it can get confused and the speakers on the podcast actually give the wrong information because of its confusion between all the documents you uploaded. Yeah I do I do wonder there was some recent research. I think it came from what's his name that guy eat the no the professor award and I think he's showing that the more that there's new data out showing that the more restricted a model is like the more restrictions they put on it in terms of.

Being more censored things like that the less intelligent the model is but because you had all these different layers of complexity there that just makes it less intelligent. So I do wonder if that's like one of the problems they're having like Google's having behind the scenes in general like just because of the culture of Google or whatever. Is that it's all more restricted so it's in the being less intelligent even though it's got great technology in the huge context window and all that.

And I do wonder like it feels like you know the last great product that Google released that I can think of is like. Gmail right and then you got Google and Google analytics which they killed basically yeah are you talking about come like products that Google built because I mean they've acquired some good companies.

Oh YouTube yeah of course they acquired yeah I mean YouTube you've got Google you know the whole Google drive Google docs Google sheets of that like whole suite of tools I use those constantly. Man Jim and I just feels like Google plus millions like I just feel like you know that where they just copied another company and that no book L.M. is not that it's like it's unique so I wanted like good a decent ranking.

I just feel like they it's not there yet like it's like has some potential they've shown the potential and I'm not sure they're I'm not sure they're going to want to actually capture the value from that potential. Yeah I also ran into some issues when I was trying to create some content like they just added a new feature that I was really excited about where you can give some additional context and sort of steer the conversation right like there's a new like customized button.

And I press the customize button and I said hey you're a podcast called I don't remember what I called it but you know you're the a podcast called the next wave. When when your episode starts say hey welcome to the next wave and then move into the rest of the conversation right that wasn't what I was calling it that just for an example purposes.

And it ignored my instructions completely right I also gave it instructions one time where I gave it like transcripts from like three different videos that were interviews with Casey nice that right and I said in the custom instructions pull out what Casey nice that does different than other YouTubers and make a podcast about what makes him different. And you know so much more successful than so many other YouTubers.

Totally ignored my instructions and just like talked about Casey without specifically honing in on the things I asked it to hone in on I almost felt like the customized button that they put into notebook LM. Is pointless like right now like for me I couldn't get it to work it like it didn't follow my extra instructions so that was interesting to me as well.

Yeah it does make me wonder that that's like I'm like I'm possibly a bad product decision so that can and again that's like my criticism of Google in general so like maybe this is like some great research that turned into like a really simple product but can they take it to anything beyond that.

Yeah there's not well I was a project tailwind right and project tailwind was designed to like allow you to chat with all of your documents that you put inside of like a specific folder inside of Google driver whatever right and that's what this became the podcast thing was I think just like an extra fun little like. novelty feature that they're like this is kind of cool let's put that on top of it and it turned out to be the feature that people like the most from it.

So I think that's kind of how that played out. Yeah so in terms of like it's like one of the most impressive things I've seen the last six months there was like part of me that wanted to put it like is a I do feel like maybe it's B or C just because of. I just don't know what they're going to do with it like I don't know if it'll actually become a big thing or not like it.

It feels like maybe it's already like it's get to get that novelty has been cool like especially some of the videos were like they were surprised were people told it like oh you are a I by the way and it actually freaked out about it like that was an amazing viral clip but what they do with it beyond that I'm not sure like I'm not sure if they'll actually improve it make it a big.

Yeah I'm leaning towards B I think I have a hard time putting it in a tier like it's not on the same level as cloud 11 labs and runway for me.

You see things to mean good is a pretty cool yeah I'm definitely using it more than rock or replete or you know the tools that we've got down there so I don't know be fit feels right to me be with potential for S. Like if they actually like make it better like do a good job with the product they should like now it's kind of hidden on the side is like so hard to even find like they need to like launch it is like a standalone.

Product yeah like really nail some kind of use case maybe education or something like this like you know knowledge base hit your company now make some stuff that explain stuff about your company to be something they need to nail some kind of use case and launch a product.

Here's what I can see and I'm just sort of shooting from the hip here but like a combination of what perplexity does and what notebook LM does like in like a conversational format right like let's say I want to go for a walk with my dog or something.

It would be really cool is to open up a tool that's like this notebook LM perplexity hybrid and just say hey today I want to learn about quantum physics give me a podcast about quantum physics it goes and does the like sort of perplexity thing of hunting down all the articles and information you need and then

pulls them into the notebook LM side of things and turn it into that podcast so now all I'm doing is giving it an audio command of like here's what I want to learn about and then it gives me a whole podcast after doing the research for me. Yeah that seems like it should exist but that's why I proplexities S tier because they're more likely to do that then yes.

I agree. I agree. I mean you know all right so this is like that's all the tools we came up with I know there's tools that we're missing I know like there's probably a lot of people that disagree like I'm actually looking forward to seeing the comments on this episode because I want to see people go I can't blame put that in D tier or whatever I think that's going to be really fun to see and debate but at the end of the day I think every single

tool that we put on this list has the potential to jump to S tier at some point also has the potential to fall to F tier at some point I think you know like this isn't anything personal about the companies like I actually for the most part like all of these companies and have messed with the tools and think what they're doing is really

really cool so there's like you know I'm trying to save face here a little bit and be like I don't hate us put a deal in this tier but you know I do think all of these tools have the ability to like move up and down this is sort of more of a ranking of like how useful they are to us in our lives which is obviously very subjective right now.

So you know just want to kind of just claim that before we wrap this one up but I don't know this was kind of fun I think this is going to be our longest episode we've ever put out but it was really fun to sort of like we're talking about all these tools.

Yeah it was more fun than expected I think if you if you like it I think we should like go into like different categories because obviously with the AI video there was like two other companies we could have listed like with the I or there's one or two others we could do like a different categories and like actually spend time to like make sure

we've tried the latest version of them to because some of these you know haven't tried them recently for sure well cool I think on that note we should probably go ahead and wrap this one up thanks everybody for tuning in if you enjoyed this type of content and you want to learn the latest AI news and tools and keep your finger on the pulse and learn actionable strategies to use AI make sure you subscribe to us on YouTube or follow us wherever you follow

podcasts and thank you so much for tuning in really really appreciate you and hopefully we'll see you in the next episode. Music