My hope in technology has fooled me more than a naive lover with a beautiful woman.
The bottom line is that ChatGPT is unable to make a detailed comparison. I spent 6 hours working on this mostly waiting on ChatGPT which didn’t tell me that it couldn’t do what I asked until I asked it. Then it didn’t start and when I asked if it was working said it was waiting for me to tell it to start. Classic Microsoft. Find any way to avoid doing the real work.
So I jumped to Claude.ai which I had good experience in the past. I was excited when it quickly answered the first comparison I posed with two uploaded documents. Then I asked it for the second comparison but it said that the documents were 16% too large but their $20 paid account does 5X the capacity. I bought it faster than Carter takes liver pills.
So once I signed up I tried uploading the documents again. But I couldn’t. Turns out that that 5X didn’t apply to the length of a 1.5 Megabyte PDF which is small in the world of corporate PDFs. Then I used Adobe PDF to Word thinking that perhaps it would be different in a different format. The Word file was even worse over the limits of the PRO/PAID service. I was like WTF? Ok time to abandon Claude.
So then I tried WolframAlpha AI and that was more than useless. I used WA in the past and liked it but this was completely useless. I then thought I’d give Google Gemni a chance and logged in with my Google ID and then tried to upload the files to compare. It wouldn’t let me compare them but I thought lets just see if it can do a comparison without the documents. It surprised me when not only did it output acceptable answer, it was better than Claude that had documents!
So I spent about 5-10 minutes asking for more details, and just messing around to see if I could get more detail out of the answer. By default AI tries to give you the shortest answer possible. I got a pretty good answer and was satisfied with it. With a free version of Google Gemni it did a better and more through answer than the paid Claude service.
I went back to Claude and canceled it. I don’t like Google but based on this experience I know where I will turn the next time I want to use an AI.