Which AI Models To Use Part 2

This data was originally featured in the July 23rd, 2025 newsletter found here: INBOX INSIGHTS, July 23, 2025: Using AI for KPIs, Which AI Models to Use Part 2

In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s continue on with our recommended basic AI tech stack. There are a lot of tools to choose from, and a lot of vendors with their hand out, ready and waiting to take your money for things you might or might not need.

As a reminder from last week’s issue, probably 80% of the things you want to do in AI, you can do right inside a tool like Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT.

From the remainder, there are a few different ways to think about what the best tools are, but we’re going to approach it very simply, from a modality perspective.

For example, in the category of audio, there are a few options:

• For voice cloning of a real person’s voice, Eleven Labs is hands down the winner
• For synthetic voices that sound real, Google TTS is the best and cheapest choice
• For music, Suno currently holds the top spot for making songs
• For transcription, NVIDIA Parakeet and Voxstral are the current best models; Fireflies.ai is the general best transcription service

In video, there are also some specific options:

• For cloning a person, HeyGen is still the gold standard
• For general video production, Google Veo 3 is the winner by a long shot, OpenAI Sora as a distant second

For image generation, different options for different purposes:

• For images with text, ChatGPT is by far the best
• For realism, Google Imagen 4 and Midjourney are excellent
• For low cost, Flux 1 Dev that you run on your own hardware is still near state of the art

For coding, each LLM ecosystem has a great coding tool, plus some other tools:

• OpenAI customers should use Codex
• Claude customers should use Claude Code
• Gemini customers should use Gemini CLI
• Inside your IDE, Cline is the best coding agent

And finally, for local AI on high end laptops, these are the current best:

• For writing fluency, Mistral Small
• For execution speed and tool calling, Qwen 3 30B AA3B
• For more complex instructions, Gemma 3

As we write this, it’s late July 2025, so there’s a good chance that in no time at all, this list will be out of date, but for the many, many, MANY people who ask, “What should I be using?” this is a good starting point. And we want to emphasize that this is a STARTING point. With 1.9 million models and tools to choose from, chances are there’s something out there that satisfies your specific needs – but this is a great starting point.

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