You can find a MUCH more up-to-date version of my AI materials at the new weteachwithai.com website which was launched with the 2nd Edition of the book Teaching with AI.

PROPRIETARY FRONTIER MODELS:

THE BIG THREE 

OTHER MODELS

OPEN SOURCE MODELS:

REGIONAL and CULTURALLY-SPECIFIC MODELS: You can find a MUCH longer and more up-to-date version of this list at the new weteachwithai.com website which was launched with the 2nd Edition of the book Teaching with AI.

• Latimer (named after African-American engineer Lewis Latimer) aims to better represent diverse communities by adding further training from (verified and licensed) books, oral histories and sources from Black and Brown communities.(Latimer is a fine-tuned version of LLAMA.)
• Fanar is a “culturally and regionally aware” Arabic LLM fluent in Arabic dialects from the Qatar Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) and the Qatar Computing Research Institute of Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU).
• ….
• You can find a MUCH longer and more up-to-date version of this list at the new weteachwithai.com website which was launched with the 2nd Edition of the book Teaching with AI.

REASONING MODELS: The next big thing are models that process through problems before answering. They do NOT actually reason (although it appears that way) but they have internal instructions that break problems down into steps which (especially when combined with web searching) improves accuracy and allows much more complicated problem solving. You need to use them a little differently (more here): give it something hard to do and note (or ask) how it describes its reasoning. Look at this example. The progress here has been rapid and substantial (read this report about the new o3 from Dec 2024), but in mid-January 2025 they were mostly behind paywalls. Many of the free versions now also include a button that activates this feature.

• ChatGPT (o3 and 4.5) have a “Thinking” or “Reason” mode in the chat box (the button types and location keep changing). You can also access OpenAi’s o1 model through CoPilot by clicking the Think Deeper button. With a paid Pro subscription there are many more models, but the numbering is a joke.
• In Gemini this is the “Deep Reasoning” button (which includes web search) also available in Google’s AI Studio. 
• DeepSeek’s v3 R1 is also open source which means you can download and build with it. You can try DeepSeekR1 on an American server using Perplexity (Pro Search). Here is a great non-technical summary of how DeepSeek works that includes a good summary of how reasoning models work.
• Qwen 3 (another Chinese open source reasoning model) allows you to control how long it thinks–so you have/get to decide based upon the difficulty of the task. It is also available in HuggingFace.
• Magistral is the reasoning version of Mistral. It is close to DeepSeek in scores but falls behind in of math and code.
• Kimi also has reasoning, but I’ve not tried it yet.
• Claude.ai Sonnet also has a “thinking mode” for paid subscribers.
• MiniMax has an open-sources reasoning model.
• Manus is an agent (see below) but also works as a reasoning model that can conduct research and produce documents.
• Sonus Pro with Reasoning (a new model from a start-up!) Select the Pro version with Reasoning turned on). 

EpochAI is an important independent organization that is keeping track of these models, how they compare and where we might be going. They maintain a great dashboardcomparing capabilities of the best models (against their own benchmarks) and also this larger data set of virtual all models. They produce excellent reports about trends including a recent prediction that AI will continue to improve rapidly.

CONSOLIDATORS: Poe (currently $5/month!!) ChatPlayground ($17/month) and ChatHub are consolidators that provides access to multiple AI through one interface.

CUSTOM BOTS & TUTORS: (How to prompt a simulation and build a custom bots have their own pages. Each of the big models also has a way to build and then distribute your own fine-tuned applications, but there are also educational platforms, like BoodleBox which allows the teacher to see everything students do–and has lots of other faculty features like “coach mode” which the chat default (and won’t provide students with direct answers. There are also GPTs (from OpenAI), Assistants(from HuggingFace), Bots (from Poe). Faculty developed writing tutors, for example, include one from Mark Marino, AI Tutor Pro from a group of Canadian faculty and MyEssayFeedback in beta from Eric Kean. The University of Sydney has now created Cognifi which also allows complete security and control over student use but there will be some institutional cost (and I think pricing is still being worked out for other countries?)

• BoodleBox, SchoolAI, MagicSchool and Khanmigo all provide tools to help with specific tasks that are free, FERPA compliant and secure. This includes creating specialized tutors. BoodleBox has these instructions. In SchoolAI go to Spaces and then Create. You can simply prompt it (Help students master content X by providing an overview and asking questions etc) or you can upload documents and set a standard for mastery. Importantly, SchoolAi also has a backend that tells you have students have engaged and what they might still be confused about. Here is a great example (solving Linear Equations in One Variable from Rebecca Tyler at Great Falls College MSU).
• Snorkl provides feedback to student on their verbal or visual thinking.
• How to Build Your Own Customized Chatbot (free chapter from Levy and Albertos (2024 Teaching Effectively with ChatGPT.
• How to use Speaker Progress in Microsoft Teams to get feedback on your/student presentations

MINI MODELS and EDGE AI: These are smaller, faster and more specialized (often) OPEN SOURCE tools that you customize to live and run on your phone. Note that the ways to make an LLM better are model size (see Frontier models above), data set size and and the amount of training. Since it is not clear that larger more capable models will be cost effective, these faster smaller models (with more training) may end up being more useful. Apple Intelligence will test this idea. More smaller models are coming. 

• Phi-3.5 from Microsoft comes in three sizes Mini, Small and Medium (3.8-41B parameters)
• OpenELM is the Apple version that comes in four sizes (270M-3B parameters)
• Gemma is the open source smaller model from Google also in several sizes

BROWSER EXTENSIONS: Google now has its Gemini AI built into its browser but there new browsers (like Dia and Comet from Perplexity) with more to come that will transform searching, research and shopping. You can also add an AI extension to your browser. If you use Chrome, some good free extensions are Perplexity AI, in the Chrome store here) SciSpace (which does everything SCiSpace above does, but in your browser), Merlin AI, Bing, or Clipy AI: now every time you do a Google search, you will also get an AI response.

AGENTS: A chatbot can only chat with you, but an “agent” can plan and execute a series of tasks, like building you a website or finding information on your computer. Agents can use multiple tools and know when to switch, so an AI agent can manage a workflow. Here are details about the “Agent2Agent” (or A2A) or “Model Context Protocol” that create these two-way connections between data sources and AI-powered tools.

Start by watching the demos from Genspark or Manus. Here are some use case examples. Then ask it to build you an interactive course website using the best research and including links to video and with interactive learning activities (or just a new episode of a TV show you like). I have also build simulations with Macaly which pitches itself as more of a vibe-coding app. Here is a website created with MiniMax by Marc Watkins. ChatGPT o3 is starting to have some agenic capabilities. Devin is not quite there, but other early tools include Swarm and Codex (also open source!) from OpenAI, Claude Computer Use (Claude Code and even 3.7 can also do tasks like create and bedbug code), Kimi-Researcher and Asana. OpenAI has introduced Operator (Jan 23, 2025)–it is called “computer use” in CoPilot. Here is a demo (from Graham Clay) where Operator has been asked to write an essay in a GoogleDoc at human speed with edits. There are now lots of demos of agents doing students homework. Another use of agents (that is also about growing use of synthetic data) is this simulated hospital with AI agents as both patients and doctors, which allowed the AI doctors to gain experience (treating 10,000 patients) and “evolve” become better. LinkedIn has an agent that helps recruit job seekers (and also an AI jobs match tool). Zoom has also given its AI companion some agency capability.

ROBOTS: There are new robots and robots platforms coming out every day, but start with the ridable hydrogen-powered Corleo from Kawasaki

You can find a complete list of AI products (tracked by Ithaka S+R) here

Here is a great AI guide for students.