Which AI Chatbot Should You Use?
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ADP knows any big thing, any small thing, any trendy thing, even a trendy thing that everyone knows isn't a great idea, but management just wants us to give it a try for a bit can change the world of work. From HR to payroll, ADP designs forward-thinking solutions to take on the next anything. Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Friday, February 7th. I'm Pierre Bien-Aimé for The Wall Street Journal.

Three AI chatbots enter the ring, one chatbot leaves? We'll hear our senior personal technology columnist Joanna Stern's take on which artificial intelligence services are actually worth paying for. But first, we hear about an AI helper that isn't devoted to productivity, but personal reflection.

Yes, among all the chatbots out there, one of them offers you the chance to connect with your older self. Future You is an interactive AI platform developed by psychologists, researchers, and technologists, and its output is informed by personalized information you put in, including a photo, so you can see yourself with a few extra wrinkles.

The idea is that if people can see and text chat with their older selves, they'll be able to think about them more concretely and maybe make some positive changes to their life in the present. Heidi Mitchell is a Wall Street Journal contributor, and she had a weeks-long chat with her future self. Heidi, how was it for you speaking with 80-year-old Heidi? Firstly...

future Heidi, she's not a fortune teller and she wasn't going to tell me when my husband was going to die or how much money I was going to have in the bank. She did come up with some specific things though, like my greatest achievement is my children, which is funny because I'm empty nesting and really enjoying that. So I thought, well, does she really know me? But we talked, we talked in quotes for weeks and she was consistent.

She was positive, always positive. Future Heidi is not telling me what's going to definitely happen or what steps I need to take. I mean, she was like, take care of your health and visit your parents and make sure you're in touch with your friends and Captain Obvious things. But sometimes you need those little reminders, a nudge for you to kind of make the right choice today. And that little step may have a really big impact.

Beyond your experience, Heidi, is there any evidence that talking with future you has any beneficial effects? One of the developers of this platform, he had read the work of Hal Hirschfield, who worked then on this project. So he recruited him to work on it. And his work is about

Future self continuity. So it's this concept of speaking to your future self, connecting to your future self can create these positive outcomes. And so in the study that they did, they had 344 young people aged 18 to 30, and they spoke for less than 30 minutes with their future self.

And they had really good outcomes. It was like 16% more motivated compared to those that didn't speak to their future self, 15% stronger connection with their future self and a strong connection with your future self has been shown that you'll actually take those steps if you envision yourself as a real person rather than just some thing. That was across all ages. So they had a small study with older people and they also had good outcomes. What kind of user base is this chatbot enjoying so far? And what happens to users' data? So

So it started out with just a few hundred young people ages 18 to 30. And that was just in America. And now it's being used by 60,000 people in 190 countries. Users can opt out of having their data used by the application, but it is anonymized. It's not used to train the model. So the way that the model works is it's

Pre-trained on a large language model, and then you fill out this quite lengthy survey and form, and with specifics, they're open-ended questions. And the more information you give it, then the more accurate and the more specific the answers would be.

And is there a business model here for future you? Does it cost money the way some other chatbots do? There's no cost to using this. It's just a project right now. There's no plan to monetize it. Heidi Mitchell is a Wall Street Journal contributor. Heidi, thank you so much for joining me in the present. Thank you, future Heidi. Thanks you. And present Heidi. Thanks you too.

Coming up, WSJ senior personal tech columnist Joanna Stern is basically a pro when it comes to getting the most out of AI. She tells us which models leave the pack. That's after the break. ADP imagines a world of work where smart machines become too smart. Copier, I need 15 copies of this. Printing. By the way, irregardless, not a word, Janet. Yeah, I know. Page six should be regardless of or irrespective of. Just print them, please.

If it were a word, Janet, it would mean without irregard, which is... Copier! Switch to silent mode. Let's put a pin in it. Anything can change the world of work. From HR to payroll, ADP helps businesses take on the next anything.

The competition among AI bots is heating up. More than two years after the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT, the alternatives abound. And some of them require a subscription for the full suite of features. So which should you consider to help you write, research, and do digital errands?

The Wall Street Journal's senior personal technology columnist, Joanna Stern, looked at three models, ChatGPT by OpenAI, but also Claude by Anthropic and DeepThink R1 by the Chinese company DeepSeek. And she's here to tell us which of these came out on top.

Joanna, what do you need an AI assistant for, first of all? What do you need one? What don't you need one for? What are you using it for? All the things that you kind of know at work you're spending too much time doing and it's not that intriguing, I'm starting to think can be given to an AI assistant. Creating spreadsheets, helping with research, creating calendars, etc.

All the types of things you might spend time on, but you're like, I don't think this is the best use of my time. So what AI bots do you use typically? So over the last few months, ChatGPT and Claude have become my go-tos. And I'm paying both of those companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, $20 a month for their pro plans.

But of course, over the last couple of weeks, everyone wants to talk about DeepSeek, the Chinese open source model. And so I added that in. I will say it is not as impressive in terms of features. It is a smart model. And of course, that is something to really consider. But what this piece really was about is that smarts are important. But these features, the ones that let you take advantage of those smarts,

are a lot more important when you're considering which of these assistants or bots you want to pay for. Okay, so you had those three contenders. How do they compare? You want to think about, am I getting the best model? And of course, that is the race that is happening in the industry. And lots of them right now are talking about reasoning models. This is the idea that the model takes a little bit more time to think about its answer. And in the case of DeepSeek, it even gives you kind of a play-by-play of how the model is thinking. It's kind of a self-aware way

quirky bot that's like, hmm, maybe I should answer with this. Maybe I should answer with that. And you see that. But actually, OpenAI has had a reasoning model, and it doesn't do that, but it just says thinking. And that's where I think these all are really going to become more about features, because you're only going to require so much of that smarts if you're just a basic worker. We're not all trying to find the cure to cancer or...

solve the world's biggest issues at work. We're all trying to just kind of get some of our basic stuff done, whether that be writing or research or creating spreadsheets, managing email. And so that's where I think the features now come into play in a big way. And you want to look at what those features are. And that's what I tried to do in this piece is really try to compare which is the leading one in terms of features and in terms of how you can actually utilize the smarts. Can you give me some examples of what you used them for and which one maybe shined the most?

So the reason I'm paying for two right now is that one of the models, Claude, is really good at writing. It's really good at research and projects. But then ChatGPT is decent at writing, but is really good at web access, memory, and other types of features.

So let's break down Claude for a second. One of the things I love about Anthropics Claude is they have this projects feature where you can go in. I'm working on a book right now, so I have a big project that I'm working on. And you can go in and you can upload lots of documents and information about a certain topic or project. And then the bot really starts to know those things. So when you prompt it to say, oh, remind me about who I wanted to interview about that healthcare AI startup.

It knows. It pulls that from the document and says, oh, yeah, that person is blah, blah, blah. Here's some more information and background information about them. OpenAI with ChatGPT has added a similar feature, but I got really sucked into Claude on this. So Claude, like any good assistant, is going to have some memory of like what you're doing, what you're working on, what you want to achieve. Well, memory is really interesting. So Claude has memory within that project feature. But if you're using it just in the normal interface, it doesn't have much memory.

And that's a place that ChatGPT actually wins. They've given you the ability to put in information about yourself through something called custom instructions. You can tell it, for instance, ChatGPT knows I'm allergic to avocado. It knows I have two kids. It knows what I do. It knows I'm a technology journalist. But also along the way, as you're chatting with it, it picks up information and stores it in its memory. ChatGPT over time is starting to remember things about you, which makes its answers more helpful.

Anthropic is working on that. But again, you do have that memory in the projects area. And tell us more about this third one, DeepSeek. It's kind of the AI model that's been

really turning heads lately? DeepSeek, really, I think you have to think about as the early days of ChatGPT in terms of features. It is really just a chatbot right now. What's special about it is that it's quite smart and it has this R1 reasoning model. But of course, the big buzz about that in the industry hasn't necessarily been how smart it is. It's been, has this company been able to create smarts with a fraction of the power and the costs that the American

AI companies have. And so I have been using it to just ask questions and see the results. I should say with DeepSeek, I do have some concerns about privacy and security of the Chinese ownership. So I've actually been using it via Perplexity. And that company is hosting the model on U.S. servers, which don't have ties to China.

That was our senior personal tech columnist, Joanna Stern. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show is produced by Julie Chang. I'm your host, Pierre Bien-Aimé. Additional support this week from Belle Lin. Jessica Fenton and Michael LaValle wrote our theme music. Our supervising producer is Catherine Milsop. Our development producer is Aisha Al-Muslim. Scott Salloway and Chris Inslee are our deputy editors. And Falana Patterson is the Wall Street Journal's head of news audio. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.

ADP knows any big thing, any small thing, any trendy thing, even a trendy thing that everyone knows isn't a great idea, but management just wants us to give it a try for a bit can change the world of work. From HR to payroll, ADP designs forward-thinking solutions to take on the next anything.