beginner
8 min read
Choosing an AI Tool
You have three tabs open. ChatGPT in one, Claude in another, Gemini in the third. You paste the same question into all three, and you get three different…
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Using AI Tools
Choose how you want to work with AI across ChatGPT, Gemini, local and open models, multimodal systems, and connected applications.
Tutorials
Articles in Using AI Tools
Follow these lessons in order, or jump directly to the topic you need.
beginner
10 min read
Getting Started with ChatGPT
You're staring at a blank chat box. The cursor blinks. Somewhere in the back of your mind, a voice whispers: What if I type something wrong? What if this…
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beginner
9 min read
Using Google Gemini
Gemini is two things at once: Google's family of AI models and the chatbot that lets you talk to them. For your first session, you don't need to care about…
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beginner
9 min read
Using Open Source LLMs
Running an open source LLM on your own machine today feels closer to installing a desktop app than building a neural network. You don't need a data center,…
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beginner
8 min read
Integrating AI Tools with Other Apps
You have ChatGPT open in one tab, your actual work open in another, and you are shuttling text between them like a courier. Draft here. Copy. Paste there.…
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beginner
11 min read
AI Tools Practice Exercises
Reading about AI tools builds recognition, not skill. Skill comes from running the tool, inspecting the output, and making one small change to see what…
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beginner
9 min read
Cloud vs Local LLMs: Which Setup Fits Your First Project?
The "local is more private, cloud is more powerful" story sounds clean. It's also too simple to make a good decision with.
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beginner
9 min read
What Are Multimodal LLMs? Understanding Text, Images, and More
You upload a photo of a handwritten recipe to your AI chatbot and ask it to turn the ingredients into a shopping list. A moment later, the list…
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beginner
13 min read
Open-Weight vs Closed LLMs: What Control Do You Actually Need?
You do not need the best model. You need the model that matches the control you actually require.
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beginner
9 min read
Vision-Language Models vs Image Generators: What Each System Does
You asked a chat tool to describe a photo and got a polite apology instead. You asked an image tool to draw a picture and got something that looked…
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beginner
9 min read
Practice Verifying a Multimodal LLM's Answers About Images
The model wrote three confident sentences about your screenshot. You still don't know if it actually looked.
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beginner
9 min read
Run a Small Local LLM and Measure Its Resource Use
The model finishes downloading. You type a prompt. The cursor blinks, the fan spins up, and nothing happens for a while. That pause is the whole question:…
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beginner
8 min read
Estimate the Memory a Local LLM Needs
Two people run the same 7B model. One says it needs 4 GB. The other says it needs 9 GB. Neither is lying.
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intermediate
11 min read
Hosted vs Local LLM Cost: Calculate the Break-Even Workload
Two people run the same break-even calculator, feed it the same hardware price, and get opposite answers. Both are right.
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intermediate
8 min read
How Multimodal Inputs Use Model Capacity Beyond Text Tokens
You type a short question, attach one screenshot, and hit send. The words are maybe forty. The request behaves like it swallowed a page.
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beginner
8 min read
Practice Checking LLM Claims Against Audio and Transcript Evidence
The transcript reads clean. The summary reads confident. The wrong name sails through both, and nothing in the text ever flinches.
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beginner
11 min read
Compare LLM Tools Fairly with Matched Tasks
Three tabs open. A leaderboard screenshot you saved last week. A nagging feeling that you still don't know which one to actually use.
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intermediate
10 min read
LLM Quantization Tradeoffs: What Lower Precision Changes
Two model files sit in your download folder. Both say 4-bit. One is smaller, one runs faster, and they give you different answers to the same prompt. If…
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beginner
10 min read
Practice Choosing a Local LLM Within a Memory Budget
That is the moment this exercise trains you for. You already know how to estimate weight storage, and you have already run one small model and watched its…
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intermediate
10 min read
Practice Comparing Quantized LLM Outputs on a Fixed Task
You swap a model to a 4-bit build, run the same prompt, and get a slightly different answer. Now what? You cannot tell whether quantization degraded the…
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beginner
8 min read
Practice Choosing an AI Tool from Realistic Constraints
Most beginners pick an AI setup the way they pick a restaurant: the one that sounds best, then hope the bill and the wait are tolerable. Then the…
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beginner
9 min read
ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini: Compare Them on Real Tasks
That is the real beginner moment, and it does not get solved by reading one more "which AI is best" listicle. Those lists go stale the moment a new model…
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absolute beginner
9 min read
Getting Started with Claude: A Beginner’s First Interaction
The first prompt is not a test of Claude. It is a test of whether you described the task.
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