Here Are My Go-To AI Tools

My preferred LLMs, image and video models, music makers, research tools, and more.

LATEST UPDATE: February 9, 2026

I first published this round-up on October 17, 2024. But things in AI move fast, so I now release regular updates. Check out this archive page with all the past versions—fun for tracing how AI and my preferences evolved.

I often get asked about AI tools that I personally use.

While I regularly test and review all sorts of AI models and sites, most don’t end up a part of my routine.

Here are those that did.

🗣️ 1. Large language models

These are the chatbots and LLMs I turn to.

• 🎁Free:

  • Claude 4.5 Sonnet for brainstorming and creative work. Claude has a “fresh” conversational feel and tends to suggest unconventional ideas. Artifacts are fantastic and now let you build AI-powered apps. The only downside is the strict message limit for free accounts.

  • Gemini 3 Pro (via Google AI Studio) [UPDATED - replaced 2.5] for working with big files. Gemini’s massive token window and native processing of audio and video make it a beast for handling long inputs in multiple formats.

  • GPT 5.2 [UPDATED - replaced GPT 5/GPT-4o] for regular day-to-day chats. It’s also quite hard to beat the all-in-one free ChatGPT package with web access, voice more, image creation, and more.

• 💵Paid:

  • Claude 4.6 Opus [NEW] as the main driver for everything I do with Claude Code. It just does things and turns natural-language requests into action.

  • OpenAI o3 and GPT-5.2 Thinking for web research tasks. GPT-5.2 is better on benchmarks, but I have a soft spot for o3’s tendency to structure responses in tables, which some find annoying, but I find quite helpful.

🖼️ 2. AI images

Here are my favorite image models.

• 🎁Free:

  • Gemini 3 Pro Image (aka Nano Banana Pro) [UPDATED - replacing Nano Banana] for image editing. Solid update that does detail-preserving image edits from natural-language requests.

  • GPT Image 1.5: [NEW - replacing GPT-4o image]. Still the top-ranked image generation model that understands context and can render entire pages of text in an image. You get a free quota on ChatGPT and can also run it for free on copilot.microsoft.com.

  • Grok Imagine [NEW]. A surprisingly solid model that popped up seemingly out of nowhere and currently gives you a generous free quota.

• 💵Paid:

  • Midjourney V7: I’ve written dozens of posts about Midjourney over the years. It’s fallen behind on benchmarks like text rendering and prompt following, but it remains great for artistic style exploration, creating a personalized aesthetic, and generating realistic photographic images.

📽️ 3. AI video

The AI video space is making the biggest leaps lately. Here’s my take on AI video models based on thorough tests of both text-to-video and image-to-video.

• 🎁Free:

  • Grok Imagine [NEW]. Jumped near the top of both text-to-video and image-to-video leaderboards and comes with a generous free quota for now.

• 💵 Paid:

  • Sora 2 [MOVED] is now paid. While I dislike OpenAI’s “social media app” play, Sora 2 is an excellent model that generates its own audio and works with different prompting approaches.

  • Veo 3.1 is a top-tier model for lifelike videos with native audio effects and speech. The Flow platform makes it even more useful for serious filmmaking.

🎵 4. AI music

This space is surprisingly steady. I rarely use AI music tools, but when I do…

• 🎁Free:

  • Suno

  • Producer (formerly Riffusion)

  • Udio

The three are largely interchangeable for casual users, with similar features, interfaces, and output quality.¹ All give you a generous amount of free credits, so take them for a spin to see which one you prefer. Suno may have a slight edge thanks to its recent feature releases and better audio quality.

• 💵 Paid:

  • Any of the above: Once you’ve picked your favorite, you can always upgrade for additional features.

🔬 5. Research

• 🎁Free:

  • NotebookLM [UPDATED] remains a super easy recommendation. I’ve been a fan since March 2024. Since my last update, NotebookLM got Nano Banana Pro for image generation in slides and infographics, and added Data Tables. (I covered everything in my recent live video walkthrough.)

  • Learn About is another Google product that complements NotebookLM nicely. While NotebookLM is grounded in your preselected sources and synthesizes info across them, Learn About can browse the web and is built for open-ended exploration of any topic.

  • Perplexity I don’t use Perplexity very often, but its “Pro” search is a good midway point between simple web browsing and the time-intensive “Deep Research” tools.

• 💵 Paid:

  • Perplexity Deep Research [NEW] was recently upgraded with the latest Claude models to reach SOTA performance on deep research benchmarks.

📈 6. Productivity

• 🎁Free:

  • Google AI Studio: It’s still crazy to me that Google makes so much available for free here. You can try its latest frontier models, voice generation, coding tools, and live calls with screen or camera sharing. It’s a great way to sample most of what Google has to offer at no charge.

  • Napkin automatically turns walls of text into catchy visuals like diagrams, infographics, etc. For design-challenged people like myself, it’s a superb way to illustrate concepts with minimal effort.

• 💵 Paid:

  • Claude Code [NEW]: It took me a long while to finally try Claude Code, but it quickly became my primary daily driver for actually building stuff with AI. (Here’s just some of what Claude Code can do for you.)

  • Genspark Super Agent: A robust agent that can orchestrate dozens of tools to complete complex, multi-step tasks. You get free monthly credits to try it, but you’ll likely need the paid plan for bigger tasks.

🫵 Over to you…

What AI tools do you use the most? What would you add to the above list?

Leave a comment or drop me an email at whytryai@substack.com.

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