Welcome to the HightowerAI Blog! 🚀
Hello and welcome to the HightowerAI blog where we will be sharing insights about artificial intelligence as it relates to business and life and society as a whole. In this first post, I'd like to talk about how I use AI in my daily life.
Let’s start with something we all know well: ChatGPT. Throughout 2024, I must’ve had 3+ separate conversations with ChatGPT per day, not including coding help. It was helpful for nearly all tasks and knowledge, and it still is. However, Grok3 has since replaced that role in my day. Grok is smarter: it uses logical thinking to more often provide original thoughts rather than parroting my question – it responds to vague questions kind of like us annoying engineers with, “by ‘X’ I am assuming you are asking ‘Y’”. It is able to pull relevant information from much earlier in the conversation in a way that is striking and rivals the attention of a focused human listener. Grok is also more honest: its use of logic allows it to construct original thought rather than telling the user what they want to hear. Its post training tuning and alignment training do not wash away its original thinking or cause it to offer responses that align with a particular ideology or be excessively polite or vague. Grok has caused me to change course on and has greatly enhanced several projects in only the last several weeks. All this being said, I still use ChatGPT (non-paid version) for one reason: when you download the desktop app, you can press Option + Space, and a little CGPT pop up will appear regardless of what screen or window you are in – very convenient.
I use Cursor/Claude daily. Cursor is an AI IDE that is changing the software world. While it doesn’t allow someone with zero technical background to build a large scale production ready application, it is greatly increasing productivity across the board and opening the door for people (like me) to build large scale full stack applications solo. Check out Cursor cofounder Aman Sanger’s recent interview on the Peak XV YT channel for an inspiring founder’s story. The primary LLM that Cursor defaults to in generating and reviewing code is Claude Sonnet 3.7 from Anthropic. Claude models have become the go-to in the U.S. for enterprise AI use cases.
I also use Google’s Gemini. For some reason, it is currently the only mainstream LLM with a live voice mode feature that can use tool calls (e.g. search the web). If I want to ask about a current event and I want to use voice mode in the car, it is the only option that I am aware of that can reference current events beyond its training data.
Lastly, for a shameless plug, I use SheetAssist. It is an app I created to automate spreadsheet tasks. It runs on Claude 3.5 Sonnet and helps me automate things like data entry and spreadsheet operations. The other day, when I was thinking of panic selling my stock portfolio, I grabbed a screenshot of my portfolio and told SheetAssist to put it in a Google Sheet for me - it achieved the task in seconds.
How do you use AI in your life/job? Do you notice different personalities in different models?
Cameron Hightower
Founder | HightowerAI
Let’s start with something we all know well: ChatGPT. Throughout 2024, I must’ve had 3+ separate conversations with ChatGPT per day, not including coding help. It was helpful for nearly all tasks and knowledge, and it still is. However, Grok3 has since replaced that role in my day. Grok is smarter: it uses logical thinking to more often provide original thoughts rather than parroting my question – it responds to vague questions kind of like us annoying engineers with, “by ‘X’ I am assuming you are asking ‘Y’”. It is able to pull relevant information from much earlier in the conversation in a way that is striking and rivals the attention of a focused human listener. Grok is also more honest: its use of logic allows it to construct original thought rather than telling the user what they want to hear. Its post training tuning and alignment training do not wash away its original thinking or cause it to offer responses that align with a particular ideology or be excessively polite or vague. Grok has caused me to change course on and has greatly enhanced several projects in only the last several weeks. All this being said, I still use ChatGPT (non-paid version) for one reason: when you download the desktop app, you can press Option + Space, and a little CGPT pop up will appear regardless of what screen or window you are in – very convenient.
I use Cursor/Claude daily. Cursor is an AI IDE that is changing the software world. While it doesn’t allow someone with zero technical background to build a large scale production ready application, it is greatly increasing productivity across the board and opening the door for people (like me) to build large scale full stack applications solo. Check out Cursor cofounder Aman Sanger’s recent interview on the Peak XV YT channel for an inspiring founder’s story. The primary LLM that Cursor defaults to in generating and reviewing code is Claude Sonnet 3.7 from Anthropic. Claude models have become the go-to in the U.S. for enterprise AI use cases.
I also use Google’s Gemini. For some reason, it is currently the only mainstream LLM with a live voice mode feature that can use tool calls (e.g. search the web). If I want to ask about a current event and I want to use voice mode in the car, it is the only option that I am aware of that can reference current events beyond its training data.
Lastly, for a shameless plug, I use SheetAssist. It is an app I created to automate spreadsheet tasks. It runs on Claude 3.5 Sonnet and helps me automate things like data entry and spreadsheet operations. The other day, when I was thinking of panic selling my stock portfolio, I grabbed a screenshot of my portfolio and told SheetAssist to put it in a Google Sheet for me - it achieved the task in seconds.
How do you use AI in your life/job? Do you notice different personalities in different models?
Cameron Hightower
Founder | HightowerAI