AI Awesome List
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Ever since the launch of ChatGPT, AI powered apps have been blowing up. Every single day there’s a new AI powered app that solves a specific use case. Some of which I have no need for, but are good to know. There’s two ways to keep up to date with AI, one is to subscribe to a newsletter, and the other is to bookmark a list, so that’s what this is going to be. The problem with existing lists are their scope or vision sucks or they are not bleeding edge. This list aims to be bleeding edge and will remove unmaintained / crap projects. It also aims to categorize AI so that everybody from hacker enthusiasts to corporate overlords will benefit. I’ve looked at other lists and they do a piss poor job of moderation. An awesome list shouldn’t be recommending crap TTS products to the user.
There’s two parts to this article. One focuses on the models and how to select them, whereas
Table of Contents
AI Models
I’m starting with the topic of benchmarks because the best way to be ahead is by using the forefront leader in AI which is only possible by reading benchmark scores. One day it could be OpenAI, the next Google, the next some whale named DeepSeek, and then something called Qwen. Truly, it’s better to make informed decisions based on a heuristic than it is to blindly follow the sheep and limit yourself a single platform.
Benchmarks
In my opinion, the current state of benchmarks is very messy. I’m making progress on fixing it myself with blog posts such as SimpleQA Leaderboard however, there are a few more I would like to maintain. I suggest using these benchmarks as a heuristic in finding a handful of models to test yourself before going with one of them.
Populist Benchmarks
I’m naming these populist benchmarks because it’s basically a popularity contest (real and synthetic) rather than a merit-based benchmark.
Knowledge Benchmarks
Intelligence
Coding Benchmarks
- SWE-Bench verified: Software Engineering. (leaderboard with all tools)
- CodeForces: Competitive programming (note that there is no time penalty for the models)
LiveCodeBenchEvalPlus- Aider Polyglot (Code Editing)
The problem with LiveCodeBench is that there are different cut off dates depending on when a model is graded plus the benchmark is continuously updated. When using the earliest cut off date, some models might’ve been “contaminated” and when using later cut off dates, some models do not show up at all! If we use the scores self-reported by the company, we still run the risk of reporting non-comparable numbers. Based on how LCB works, model scores are expected to depreciate over the long run; If Grok 3 scored 100 on LCB today, it is almost certain to score less than 100 in a year.
The problem with EvalPlus is that it doesn’t include bleeding edge models, it’s basically almost solved, and not many new models even report their scores anymore.
Multimodal Benchmarks
This tests visual capabilities.
- MMMU (College-level visual problem-solving)
- Humanity’s Last Exam
Writing Benchmarks
Agentic Benchmarks
Agentic benchmarks are very new and personally I’m not too sure what these benchmarks do or even what is considered good. Personally the only agent I would ever value is one that has the same worth ethic and intelligence as I am during when I’m at my peak productivity.
- Scale MultiChallenge
- BrowseComp
Proprietary Models
Model Name | Company | Blog | Chat App |
---|---|---|---|
Gemini | updates | Google AI Studio | |
OpenAI Platform | OpenAI | news | ChatGPT |
Grok | xAI | news | Grok |
Claude | Anthropic | news | Chat |
Cohere Platform | Cohere | blog | Dashboard |
Cohere is really slacking. I almost forgot about them.
Text to Image
Open-Source Models
A table of companies that release open-source LLMs. I suggest adding these to your RSS reader or signing up for email updates. In the future, hopefully RSSHub adds support for these.
When it comes to downloading models, most vendors (that’s what I’m calling the companies) will link you to Hugging Face. My biggest gripe is how Hugging Face isn’t using P2P torrent technology to speed up downloads and reduce strain on their own servers! What a missed opportunity.
Model Family | Company | Blog | Chat App |
---|---|---|---|
DeepSeek | Chat Stream | Chat Stream Blog | ChatStream Chat |
Qwen | AliBaba | Qwen Blog | Qwen Chat |
Llama | Meta | AI at Meta Blog and Meta AI Research | OpenRouter |
Mistral | Mistral | Mistral News | Le Chat |
Gemma | DeepMind Blog | Google AI Studio | |
Phi | Microsoft | Microsoft AI Platform Blog | OpenRouter or Azure AI Foundry |
ChatGLM | THUKEG & Z.ai | OpenRouter |
Note that sometimes proprietary models are open-sourced, but this usually happens long after a model from an open-source family has beaten the outdated proprietary model. Therefore, they are not included in this list for end-users.
These are also the base models. If you go tho HuggingFace and LocalLLAMA, you can find many remixes (fine-tunes) of the base models to yield specific results. There are so many people doing this.
AI API Providers
These companies don’t make the models, but offer inference, either by hosting models or via a gateway
- OpenRouter (one API provider to use many APIs)
- HuggingFace (which links to Amazon, Azure, and Google)
- Groq
- Together.ai
- Replicate
AI Applications
AI but for specific tasks. A mix of apps and models (when applicable). Skip to Local AI Models to learn more about running open-source models using open-source apps
Chat
The default type of application when people say LLMs. and for a list of models. Alternatively, if you don’t mind paying, an easy way to interact with all models is through OpenRouter. Read How to Run Open-Source Models if you want to run text generation models locally.
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Forefront AI
-
Bing Chat
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Hugging Face
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Poe
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Merlin
-
WNR
Recall (RAG)
Using AI to boost productivity by letting AI do a domain search and recall on the content you provide. See section on jargon to understand what RAG is.
- NotebookLM: a tool to understand information
- TODO: somehow combine this with an RSS feed sync
- Can be used to combine a bunch of files together (pdfs, websites, youtube videos, audio, word files, etc)
- Can create a podcast out of it too
- Morphik AI
- This is more for developers who want to build enterprise applications
AI Search
Some of these can also be considered a subset of “Chat”
- Linkup
- Exa
- Perplexity
Interesting Media Research
- Segment Anything Model 2 by Meta
- example in sam.cpp
- DINOv2 by Meta
- Video Sea by Meta: add imperceptible,resilient, watermark to videos that can verify the video’s origin
- Meta Movie Gen
- VoiceBox by Meta: generate speech, correct audio
Image
- Design & Editing
- Playground AI: No need to edit in Photoshop anymore (demo
- ChatGPT prompting
- Clipdrop by Jasper (many tools like uncrop)
- Autodesigner 2.0: generate UI for apps/websites based on a prompt
- Galileo AI
- Image editing via prompting in Gemini
- AI can also be used to remove watermarks
- Gemini vs Photoshop example
- Generative (Text-to-image)
- leaderboard
- Stable Diffusion by StabilityAI (also see their Applications)
- Midjourney
- Dream by WOMBO
- ComfyUI: GUI for diffusion models
- Personal
Video
- Generation
- Pika
- Veo by Google DeepMind
- Sora by OpenAI
- Stable Diffusion Video by Stability AI
- [Gen] by Runway (also includes research papers)
- ChatGPT + Visla plugin: create a video commercial (voice over is trash though, use a TTS tool for that)
Audio
- Lyria by Google DeepMind
- Music AI Sandbox is available through YouTube’s Music AI Incubator
- AudioCraft by Meta
- Spleeter by Deezer: source separation
- Stable Audio by Stability AI
- Voice Cloning by MyShell
- WhisperX the best long-form transcription tool based on benchmarks done by Amgad Hasan
- ElevenLabs: (TTS, STT, Conversational, Dubbing, Voice cloning, reader)
- Text-to-Speech
- Dia by Nari Labs (high quality for the patient)
- kokoro-tts (fast and pretty good)
- MeloTTS TTS by MeloTTS
- ElevenLabs TTS (Jessica good)
3D
- Stable 3D by Stability AI
Creating 3D wireframes with Gemini
This changes everything for 3D artists faster, easier, and endless possibilities.
— Amira Zairi (@azed_ai) March 16, 2025
Google Gemini is awesome, try this prompt by bilawal:
edit this image to create a 3d wireframe representation of every unique object and subject in this scene. it should look like a blender 3d… https://t.co/MkJ57IMEvD pic.twitter.com/uTWWez2XHy
Websites
- Creating one
- v0: for developers to speedrun website development
- Lovable: for developers to speedrun website development
- UIDESIGN.AI: AI for Shopify Themes & Figma
- Bolt
- Same
- Replit
- Other
- Post Cheetah: Improve SEO with AI
Creating Mobile Apps with AI
Marketing
Software Development
Aside from prompting the Chat apps, there are a variety of ways to use AI. I personally use Cline with an OpenRouter API key, however this is because I never got RooCode to work and so didn’t bother setting it up.
- VSCode Extensions
- RooCode
- Cline
- GitHub Co-Pilot
- Twinny (not user-friendly at all and useful only for local models)
- Qodo.ai (previously CodiumAI)
- IDEs
- WindSurf
- Cusor
- PearAI
- Other
- Claude Code
- Open Source DeepWiki: Wiki Generator for GitHub/Gitlab Repositories
- Devin
- GitHub Integration
- QoDo Merge
CyberSecurity
-peneterrer: AI Security Tester (pairs well with vibe coded websites)
We’re so confident in our security testing capabilities that if we don’t find any vulnerabilities, you get your money back. No questions asked.
Agents
- Open Interpreter: A natural language interface for computers
- Computer Use by Anthropic guide
Writing
I take great pride in stating that this blog post is ironically 100% free of AI generation. I’m not opposed to AI but knowing that AI is a FLUFF GENERATOR means that I can really only use AI to turn a bland writing post into a pleasant post (see That Time I Went to a Dog Food Eating Convention). If you rely on AI 100%, it can make your content over the top sweet, so I find the best way to use it on your own words is to incorporate some of its suggestions rather than all.
I have two book ideas I want to pursue one day in the future. What I don’t approve of using AI for, is to generate redundant slop, which is basically plagiarism. Jetpack AI’s own demo shows itself generating slop. Using AI to write a blog post about being a better blogger? What? I think these companies are going to get whatever moat they think they have eaten by Chat apps or open-sourced fine-tuned models.
Here are some thoughts I have on pursuing fictional writing
- models from David Belton aka DavidAU
- Maybe try the recent Qwen3 models since that’s the latest model?
- It seems like a PITA to deploy this myself, so if you want to use these models, I recommend trying to run them locally
- localllama comment
- creative writing benchmark
Other AI Apps
- Glif: A platform to build and use mini AI apps
- Explore Hugging Face models
- Sample Multi-modal project using GPT4
- You could probably use this as a base project and combine with other tools and models to make something better.
- LLM voice assistant project
- This project allows you to vocally converse with an LLM. It also has some functional capabilities like reading/writing to clipboard.
What else can you accomplish with AI?
Convert line art out of an uploaded sketch + colorize with Gemini
convert sketches to line art and colorize them https://t.co/TfNHCaLP0D pic.twitter.com/qKy8RvuGuV
— Dreaming Tulpa 🥓👑 (@dreamingtulpa) March 17, 2025
Extracting a professional shot product from a picture
insane insane insane pic.twitter.com/BcmihUNeJY
— nic (@nicdunz) March 16, 2025
Combining a product with a picture of a human (which could also be AI generated) for marketing or e-commerce shots. You can also do virtual try ons.
You guys should try this: Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental
— Kurawa Dono (@KurawaDono) March 13, 2025
👍👍👍👍👍 pic.twitter.com/crjgDUKuTq
Alright, Google really killed it here.
— Halim Alrasihi (@HalimAlrasihi) March 14, 2025
You can easily swap your garment just by uploading the pieces to Gemini Flash 2.0 and telling it what to do. pic.twitter.com/pNPBkIdRqy
Creating a pixel sprite using Glif Sprite Generator, and then turning it into concept art using Gemini
next level.
— AP (@angrypenguinPNG) March 13, 2025
Pixel Sprite Character -> In Game Concept Art.
everything is computer. pic.twitter.com/h1q4DQ0Ec6
Creating gif animations using Gemini
Gemini can generate pretty consistent gif animations too:
— Cristian Peñas ░░░░░░░░ (@ilumine_ai) March 13, 2025
'Create an animation by generating multiple frames, showing a seed growing into a plant and then blooming into a flower, in a pixel art style' pic.twitter.com/hbVTXEj5XZ
Interior decoration
You can now design your house with AI.
— Deedy (@deedydas) March 15, 2025
I asked Google Gemini "make the furniture go away" and then "decorate it with a modern chic aesthetic". It did it on the first try.
An interior designer would have charged $5–10k for this in the US. You can get infinite reps for free. pic.twitter.com/Tiv6TjuAyl
AI Research
Local AI Models
The best aggregate about open-source LLMs is r/LocalLLaMA. However, it should be noted there is a base knowledge expectations required. I’ll go over it briefly.
How to Run Open-Source Models
This section comes first because it’s derived from the resources in the rest of this page. The models you will be able to download will be limited by your RAM. To run a model locally, you may need hardware. Next, pick an open-source model based on the benchmark closest to the task you want. In LM Studio, search for the model, and choose a quantization to download.
Once you’ve downloaded models, you can load them in LM Studio, select a system prompt, and continue. You can also start a server and integrate with local apps that are ollama compatible.
Open-Source Interfaces
An interface is something that interacts with the model, but not the model itself. I know of a few.
Interfaces
- LM Studio
- Jan
- ComfyUI: diffusion model GUI
- Stable Diffusion web UI
- openwebui
- text-generation-webui
Some of these require “backends” which all come from llama.cpp. However, Ollama is super simple for running models.
Learning
Using AI
Building with AI
Researcher-oriented
- pytorch
- tensor
- llama.cpp
Read Frontier Papers
One of the most eye opening things my friend told me is that there is practical benefit to reading frontier research articles. In his case it was related to algorithmic trading, but I’m going to go further and suggest that it applies to all areas of frontier development. Whether that be quant finance, AI research, cancer research. There is merit in spending time on reading research if you are able to utilize new information readily.
Follow AI Researchers
They will talk about new things they may have learned or how to break in, or tweet out an article, etc.
- Yann Lecunn - VP & Chief AI Scientist At Meta
- Andrew Ng - previously head of Baidu AI and Google Brain
- Andrej Karpathy - founding team @ OpenAI
- Demis Hassabis - Co-Founder & CEO @GoogleDeepMind
- François Chollet - creator of ARC-AGI benchmark
Get Resources
The easiest way to get resources is to get MONEY. To get MONEY, you need a JOB. It’s probably easier to GET A JOB than to already have the money necessarily to buy hardware.
AI Research Companies
Company | Based | Notes |
---|---|---|
Cohere | Canada/USA | Command R model |
Open AI | USA | The creator of ChatGPT, led by Sam Altman (disclosure, I’m biased against Altman) |
Google DeepMind | USA | They came out with the original Transformer research that OpenAI used successfully and work on Gemini and Gemma |
xAI | USA | Creator of grok, very integrated with X, owned by Elon Musk |
Meta AI | Anywhere | Creators of LLaMA |
NVIDIA | USA | Manufacturer of the best commercially available GPUs for training AI |
Anthropic | USA | Claude |
Safe Superintelligence Inc. | Palo Alto, Tel Aviv | Ilya Sutskever former OpenAI Chief Scientist & Co-founder |
Thinking Machines Lab | USA? | Mira Murati former Open AI CTO |
Ndea | USA | intelligence science lab founded by X:@fchollet & X:@mikeknoop |
Vector Institute | Toronto, CA | - |
Mila | Quebec | - |
Ai2 | Seattle, WA | - |
AI Product Companies
AI Hardware
- NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs: enterprise
- Truffle: end-customer hardware for running models locally
Jargon
- AI: Artificial Intelligence
- RAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation
- Fine-Tuning
- LLM: Large Language Model
- LLaMA : Large Language Model Meta AI
- Model Context Protocol (MCP)
- Inference
- Segment
- Tokens
- NGMI: not going to make it
- SOTA: State of the art
Final Words
There are a lot of variety of tools, models, and research. There’s an opportunity to capitalize on research, combine multiple models, and provide an offering that is SOTA. If you’re unemployed, you should seize on this opportunity. VC appetite is high for AI-related companies, and competition is very hot.