For programming it is Sonnet 3.5, there is no remotely close 2nd place that I have tried or heard of, and I am always looking. I personally don't really have any interest in measuring them in other ways. But for coding, Sonnet 3.5 is in a distant lead. Abacus.ai is a nice way to try various models for cheap. Really, some sort of agent setup like mixture of agents that uses Claude and got and maybe some others may do better than Claude alone. Matthew Berman shows Mixture of Agents with local models beating gpt4o, so doing it with sonnet3.5 and others of the best closed models would probably be pretty great.

I’ve been using Sonnet 3.5 a lot recently. Does seem like it’s better and more creative than others for a lot of tasks. I also think it’s training set is up to April 2024 which is nice.

I’ve also found that GPT-4o is worse than GPT-4 in my experience. Seems to hallucinate more

GPT-4 is apparently the model to beat. I haven't seen all that much difference in practice between GPT-4 and 4o. I've heard various claims about various other models outperforming it (notably including Claude) but I haven't seen the claims materialize over the long haul as yet.

I have however heard that Mistral can get quite close to GPT-4, run for free locally with the right hardware, if you build up a hand curated set of around 100 query/response pairs from GPT-4 that are what you want it to do, and then fine-tune Mistral against that training set. I haven't tried it but that's what I've heard.

Ollama (+ web-ui but ollama serve & && ollama run is all you need) then compare and contrast the various models

I've had luck with Mistral for example

Most models that I've played with are only about as good as what you put into it. If you ask it the right questions in the right way, you can get pretty good results.

GPT3.5 has worked well for me. I've also run AI on my pc locally using Ollama and lots of different models. Most do well with simple questions or requests.

Llama 3 instruct is what I've liked the most so far.

No AI are to this level, are a massive security risk, and none are "smart".

pay if it's worth it

It isn't.

ChatGPT 4o is the top dog right now, by a lot.

It's GPT-4 to tell the truth.

Not sure it'll do the tasks you list at the start but it's the front runner.

Not sure about paid models, but Claude Sonnet 3.5 is so good it's not even funny. I've had arguments with it, where it was right in the end, and it never even considered that I was right (because I wasn't; I ended up looking it up afterwards). I've never seen that with any other model

Humans. For the best experience, get some third world contractor. Costs more tho.