As AI models continue to evolve, they are beginning to give us different products for different kinds of use cases. The three products I find most useful are: - Chat - Work - Code There are also specialized products for things such as design, research, and working with source material—including tools like Claude Design, Gemini Notebook. But for today, let’s stick with the three horsemen: Chat, Work, and Code. Each AI company is known for its models. The large, well-known models—ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini—are commonly referred to as frontier models and are generally associated with closed, cloud-based systems rather than open-source models running locally. Please refer to the "Frontier AI Ecosystem Matrix" to see what OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, xAI, and Perplexity call their respective models and products. For this series, I will use the follow product naming convention: - Chat - (Co)Work - Code(x) The parentheses are simply my shorthand to cover the names used by ChatGPT and Claude. Please note that these are not official industry terms. They simply save me from repeatedly writing “Work or Cowork” and “Code or Codex.” LOL! Here is the easiest way I have found to explain the difference between the products: Chat: What question can I answer for you, right now? (Co)Work: What can I take off your plate? Code(x): What can I build for you? The goal is not to create a perfect technical definition. It is to give you a simple way to recognize which type of AI product may be the best fit for the task in front of you. In Part 2, we will look more closely at Chat, (Co)Work, and Code(x) product features, how each product is actually used and where the lines between products overlap. In Part 3, we will work through a few practice exercises to help solidify the use cases for each product. If you have any questions, please ask in the comments below. Make it a great AI day!

For those that were in the LIVE Session yesterday, I successfully downloaded Ollama onto my Windows laptop. For my non-technical members, Ollama is an LLM like ChatGPT that you run local on your computer - with no internet. It is what people use that are concerned about privacy and the frontier models using your information as training data. Claude Cowork was guiding me through the process, step by step. After a few diagnostic tests, the screen said: >>> Send a message (/? for help) I began what is effectively the local AI version of "Hello, world". Enter: “Summarize this in one sentence: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Ollama responded! Wow. Side note: It is wrong I am as excited as a kid in the candy store. My own AI model. Running locally. On my laptop. After a few more simple tests, Cowork suggested I verify that Ollama was truly working offline. The instructions were clear. ☑️ Turn off Wi-Fi. ☑️ Enter prompt. ☑️ Wait for response?!? Check. Check and Check! Holy Smokes! It actually works. Mind you, I am using Cowork to guide me through what feels like my first few steps on Mars. So... Now I decide to really test it with a complex prompt: "Can you write a brief story about two 12 year old boys throwing a football in the front yard, dreaming about playing in the NFL?" It produces a very nice short story. Offline. On my laptop. I am impressed. I am proud. Queue the tears... So naturally, I copy the story and paste it back into Claude Cowork to await my atta’ boy! Instead ⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️ “We couldn’t connect to Claude. Please check your network connection and try again.” OMG! The F*&king WI-FI is off. LMAO! The local AI passed the offline test with flying colors. The AI helping me test the local AI did not. Now that is AI in Real Life.

Okay, I am going to say something I may be completely alone in thinking. I keep coming back to the same question. Why are we so obsessed with making robots look like us? I understand the argument. The world was built for humans. Doors. Stairs. Tools. Handles. Factories. Warehouses. Kitchens. Vehicles. So the logic makes sense on the surface. Build a robot shaped like a human and it can operate inside the world humans already built. Fair point. But then I look at a humanoid robot pushing a lawn mower (illustrative) through tall grass, and I cannot help but ask: Is that really the best solution? A purpose-built mowing machine seems far more logical than a human-shaped machine using a human-designed tool to perform a machine-friendly job. A humanoid robot mowing the lawn looks futuristic. But the boring machine built specifically to cut grass may actually be the better answer. And that just makes me pause and shake my head. Because this is where humanoid robots start to feel more like form over function. They look impressive. They photograph well. They feel like the future we were promised in movies, cartoons, and science fiction. But impressive is not the same as useful. And familiar is not the same as optimal. Maybe humanoid robots are necessary because we are trying to automate environments that were designed around people. Maybe they are a bridge technology. A way to bring robotics into homes, businesses, factories, and job sites without rebuilding the world around the robot. That is possible. But I still wonder if we are making a deeper mistake. Maybe we are not just designing robots to solve problems. Maybe we are designing robots in our own image because we still struggle to imagine intelligence, labor, and usefulness without putting ourselves at the center. That is the tension. We say we want machines to do the work better. But then we keep making the machine look like the worker. That is a very human thing to do. And maybe that is exactly the problem.