In the wake of OpenAI’s deal with the Department of the Army, more and more people are canceling their ChatGPT subscriptions online. I have been using ChatGPT for years and have always been reluctant to change, but I felt now was the right time so I asked ChatGPT which AI best suited my needs. The answer surprised me.
The perfect AI chatbot doesn’t exist — so here’s my solution
The more AI chatbots, the merrier!
I’ve been thinking about quitting ChatGPT for a while.
Inertia was my biggest obstacle
FOMO is a scary thing. I’ve been using ChatGPT with a Plus subscription for several years. I have many projects and custom GPT setups that have been finely honed over the years. ChatGPT also knows me well.
But I couldn’t help but feel a little jealous of people using other AI products. After seeing people rave about Google’s Antigravity IDE, I was tempted to make the switch. After seeing your post about using Claude Cowork and Claude Code, I was itching to try it out.
My biggest worry was having to start from scratch. I had spent so much time setting everything up with ChatGPT and had so much information in its memory and saved chats that moving to another provider felt like a daunting task. Last week I decided to take the leap.
We have asked ChatGPT to conduct a detailed investigation.
chatbot knows me well
If I were to switch, I wanted to choose the platform that best suited my use of AI. Each model has its own strengths and weaknesses, so I wanted to make the best choice for my personal needs. I thought I would ask ChatGPT for help.
I asked them to compare the leading AI options that offer subscriptions that are comparable in price to the ChatGPT Plus subscription you currently pay. ChatGPT knows me well, so I asked them to compare different options to find the one that best fits my current AI usage, work, interests, hobbies, and everything else they know about me.
I used ChatGPT’s deep investigation feature and now it works. Deep research usually takes time, but eventually I got the answer.
the results were amazing
I was sure it would recommend itself
I’ll be honest. I was convinced that every AI system prompt should have something built into it that always recommends itself before other products. With so much competition, companies probably don’t want their models to recommend other products.
That’s why I was so surprised by this result. To be fair, that initial reaction was to recommend ChatGPT, citing features like scheduled tasks and large file uploads, and the large amount of context ChatGPT already has about me.
I don’t use scheduled tasks and don’t need to upload huge files, so I reconfigured the prompt to play these functions. I asked, if I were to start completely from scratch on one of the major AI platforms, what would be your recommendations? Based on previous research, the recommendation was that Claude was the most suitable for my needs.
We chose Claude for several reasons. For example, you can start a Claude Code session on your Mac and continue to interact with it from your iPhone, and it’s great for configuring Home Assistant and refactoring scripts. Interestingly, ChatGPT also recommended Claude’s project as a good way to build reference-style libraries for various tasks, even though it offers similar functionality.
Obviously, this is one prompt, and it’s based on how I use AI and my personal work and interests, so the answer is unlikely to be the same for everyone. But the reasoning is solid and who am I to argue with ChatGPT? I signed up for ClaudePro.
A new chatbot is like starting a new relationship
It seems like it will take some time to get to know each other
There’s a lot to like about Claude, but it certainly wasn’t a smooth transition. Although there are a lot of similar features, they all feel a little different and take some time to get used to. For example, the same custom instructions that worked well in the ChatGPT project didn’t work quite the same way in the Claude project and had to be rewritten.
Another thing that took some getting used to was Claude’s usage limitations. I had never thought about using ChatGPT, so I was quite shocked when it stopped in the middle of a rather long session with Claude Code and I had to wait several hours before continuing.
Claude has a nice feature that prompts you to export the memories you typed into your current AI chatbot and saved, which you can then paste into Claude. This worked well, but the output from ChatGPT was much more minimal than I expected, so I used my own prompts to generate a more general summary and added it to Claude’s memory as well.
So far, I’m happy with following ChatGPT’s recommendations. But with the pace of AI development, new features will soon emerge from other platforms that will cause FOMO again.
If you’re thinking of making the switch, ask for support
I’ve been putting off switching AI providers for a long time, thinking I’d have to configure everything from scratch, but I’m glad I finally made the move. If you’re considering making the switch and aren’t sure which AI to choose, why not ask a chatbot for help?
