Which AI for Which Job

Questions this answersQuestions this answersfaq

which AI should I use for my business?which AI should I use for my business?how do I choose a model tier per task?

There is no best one, only the right one per job. Use the expensive, clever one for something hard you do once, like reading a new state bulletin. Use the mid-range one for daily drafting and spreadsheet work, and the cheap fast one for high-volume sorting. Start one step cheaper than you think and move up only when a test says so.There is no best one, only the right one per job. Use the expensive, clever one for something hard you do once, like reading a new state bulletin. Use the mid-range one for daily drafting and spreadsheet work, and the cheap fast one for high-volume sorting. Start one step cheaper than you think and move up only when a test says so.Pick a tier, not a leaderboard winner. Frontier for one-shot hard reading and agentic work, mid for pipelines such as extraction and drafting, small for high-volume classification and routing, local where the data cannot leave. Where the output is a label, a score or a yes/no, a decision model beats all of them, and totals belong in SQL or a spreadsheet rather than any model.

how do I test which AI is better at my work?how do I test which AI is better at my work?what does a minimal eval look like?

Take one real weekly task, collect ten real examples with two ugly ones in there, and write the correct answer for each by hand. Run all ten through two or three tools with the same wording, then count who got the most right and whose mistakes were dangerous. Rerun it each quarter, because the tools change quietly.Take one real weekly task, collect ten real examples with two ugly ones in there, and write the correct answer for each by hand. Run all ten through two or three tools with the same wording, then count who got the most right and whose mistakes were dangerous. Rerun it each quarter, because the tools change quietly.Ten cases: inputs plus hand-written expected outputs, scored exactly rather than read by eye. Run the same prompt across candidate tiers and record model id, date, accuracy, median latency and cost per ten items, breaking ties on cost. A model that invents a plausible identifier instead of flagging unknown fails regardless of its accuracy score.