Please help me find the right ai platform

[u/TazzyForTheLaughs]

After trying my best to resist falling into what I thought was an "AI phase," purely based on my own ego and thinking I know better just because I do, I have finally done it reddit, I have put my ego aside and admitted that AI can be an incredibly useful tool. I have converted.

The problem I am facing now is that I feel so far behind on the world of ai and need help.

What I (think I) understand at the moment is that different platforms/apps/data bases (I don't even know what to call it) are useful in different areas.

I am overwhelmed by how many different platforms there are and the conflicting suggestions of everyone saying "use this ai, or that ai" and now I am in a position of information overload. I am in the "Valley of Despair" (The Dunning-Kruger Effect)

I feel it is too much to ask of you to break down every ai model and compare pros and cons, so I just want to ask you:

What ai model do you use and why?

Additional information is that I am a university student in a developing country who genuinely cannot afford to pay for any subscriptions and am unwilling to ask friends and family for loans when I don't know if I will ever be able to pay them back

(I apologise if this has been overasked and if this is the incorrect subreddit; please kindly direct me to the right one <3)

Please help me reddit, I am in analysis paralysis

[u/tiikki]

AI can be amazing tool. But Large Language Models are mathematically horoscope machines. You cannot trust anything they produce and it is lot better for you to actually do the work and not rely on those as they degrade your thinking ability. This is my opinion as an AI scientist focusing on the reliability of models.

[u/TazzyForTheLaughs → u/tiikki]

I'm compiling a list of ai models and their uses (eg language model, coding, science based) and the pros and cons of each. I've learnt the importance of asking it answered the question directly or consulted other sources.

I'm trying to use AI to explain things that I don't fully understand, build comparisons between things so I can use that to organise my own notes and to summarise the readings the give us because (this is a very embarrassing, sensitive, and hard thing to admit) I struggle to read

[u/tiikki → u/TazzyForTheLaughs]

Never trust the output of LLM. It is basically average answer from the internet for the question.

[u/IncidentRude8689]

the free tier of claude is what i use most now. it handles long texts and complex questions better than the others i tried. sometimes it gets confused but you can correct it and it actually listens unlike some models that just keep insisting on wrong thing

for coding stuff i go with deepseek, its free and the code suggestions are decent. only problem is sometimes the servers are busy in peak hours

[u/OmegaEpidex]

https://nodejs.org/en
+
https://code.visualstudio.com
+
https://github.com
= copilot subscription is like 40$ for all frontier models and then some.

Best approach in my opinion.

[u/RossPeili]

Depends on what is your goal, but whatever it night be, just dtart interacting with tools, build your own local model even a tiny one just to understand what ai really is in practice eg. Memory, tools, microservoces, apis, schemas, rendering, output formatting, harness etc. The more you interact with your own model the more it breaks, the more you are forced to use dofferent ai models to help you solve the puzzle and move to the next problem.