Comment by simianparrot

14 hours ago

How do people keep track of all these versions and releases of all these models and their pros/cons? Seems like a fulltime hobby to me. I'd rather just improve my own skills with all that time and energy

Unless you're interested in this type of stuff, I'm not sure you really need to. Claude, Google, and ChatGPT have been fairly aggressive at pushing you towards whatever their latest shiny is and retiring the old one.

Only time it matters if you're using some type of agnostic "router" service.

> I'd rather just improve my own skills with all that time and energy

That's what I would recommend, it's time better spent. I use AI occasionally to bounce some questions around or have some math jargon explained in simpler terms (all of which I can verify with external sources) using the free version of chatgpt or gemini or whatever I'm feeling that day, without caring about whatever version the model is. I don't need an AI to write code for me because writing the code is not really the hard part of solving a problem, in my opinion.

For me it's simple. I did my research, settled on Anthropic and Claude and got the Pro plan at ~$20/month. That way I only have to keep track of what Anthropic are offering, and that isn't even necessary as the tools I use for AI-supported development (Claude Code for VS Code extension, Xcode Intelligence and Claude Desktop) offer me to use the newsest models as soon as they are released.

on a subscription you cant access all that many different options, so you just stay with whatever the newest is unless it doesnt work.