The ULTIMATE ChatGPT Breakdown – Which Model Should You Choose?

Stop treating every model like the same tool

ChatGPT is no longer one model with a simple choice between new and old. The menu now includes different capabilities for different jobs, and the useful question is not which model is universally best. It is which tool matches the work in front of me.

The default GPT-4o is the general-purpose option. Its multimodal design lets me work with text, images, and voice, which makes it a practical starting point when I am not sure what kind of input the task will require. I can have a conversation, bring in a visual, or ask for help shaping an idea without changing tools.

Match the workflow to the capability

Canvas is useful when the work needs an editable surface rather than a single answer. For content marketing, I can draft, revise, and ask for a focused change while keeping the working document visible. That makes the interaction feel closer to collaboration than a chat transcript.

The reasoning models serve a different purpose. They are useful when a problem needs more deliberate analysis, but they can also overthink a simple request. I do not need the most expensive model to write every email. I need enough context and the right amount of reasoning for the decision.

The mini models are valuable when speed and cost matter, especially through an API or inside an automation. They can handle repeatable work without spending premium compute on every small step. The older GPT-4 model still exists for people who prefer its behavior, but the newer general model offers more input types and is the better default for many tasks.

Build a simple selection habit

My selection process starts with the deliverable. If I am brainstorming or talking through an idea, I use the general multimodal model. If I am editing a document, I reach for Canvas. If I am working through a complicated decision, I add reasoning and provide the background it needs. If I am running a repeated task at scale, I test a mini model for speed and cost.

The model menu will keep changing. A useful breakdown is therefore temporary, but the habit is durable: identify the job, understand the tool’s strengths, and review the output against the real goal. Do not choose a model because its name sounds impressive. Choose the smallest tool that can do the work well, then move up when the task actually needs more capability.

ah chg you just don't get it anytime you run into a scenario like that anytime it's just not going deep enough where a human would be able to go you're just like ah AI is failing me it's time to bring out the big guns chat GPT is no longer just chat GPT it is now six different models six different tools that you can use to upgrade your marketing game and in this video I wanted to break down all six of them and talk about when to use what so that you can get the most out of this tool all right let's start with defining each tool and giving a little backstory before we actually jump into which ones you should use for which starting with the most recent one I'm going to open up here on my desktop if you're listening aot I'm explaining it so you don't have to watch the video but it certainly helps to have a visual so join us on YouTube or on Aid driven marketer.com where you can follow along visually so I'm in chat GPT and you can notice if you haven't been here recently then you you probably don't know but like there is a huge drop down menu of which model to use and it used to easy because it was just four and 3.5 it was like the new version and the old version right and everybody just used the newest version but now there's multiple Tools in here so let's break them down we start off with cat GPT 40 this came out last spring and is now their most you could say their most vanilla like leading model and it's 40 um I think o stands for Omni and it's essentially multi multimodal they call it it can deal with text it can deal with images it can output voice it now has has the new voice feature right it can understand not it doesn't just convert your voice to text and then another creates the response in text and converts the voice no it understands the sound of your voice natively and then converts that and can can have a conversation with you by converting it back to voice it's very cool if you haven't tried the voice feature um but it's so nice it's Can it can be applied to so many different things and this is just the generic version that every if you're not sure what you're using you're probably just using 40 um and this is their most upto-date modern track but of course there's all kinds of variations of this now so let's take a look at some of the others there's chat GPT 40 with canvas and if you haven't watched my last video I go into depth about how to use canvas so go and check out that video link in the description um but canvas is the new model where it essentially 40 but now if you ask it to create a written piece or code something for you it opens up a separate window for you to be able to edit and kind of collaborate with chat GPT uh in order to like collaborate on a doc it's almost like 40 as if Google Docs was loaded into it you can collaborate on a document with the AI itself it's really nice go check out that last video if you want a deep dive on canvas though the next one is 01 preview this one just got released uh say about a month ago and it is open AI reasoning model it is slow by Design in order to reason through problems I've done another video on this I'll link to that one too because it is mind-blowing good and its ability to overcome a lot of the limitations of a 40 and a lot of the other AI models in being able to like work through normal like everyday things that we take for granted it can now overcome them like being able to count the amount of letters in a sentence or the amount of RS in Strawberry it's famously known for getting wrong it can now do because it can think logically and break break what's a simple problem for us down it's also been known to do very complicated reason in and and work through doctoral level problems and I've seen examples of people on Twitter doctoral students working on a thesis and 's able to crush it uh and work through the same amount of problems they've been spending years on trying to prove it can go through and maybe not create proofs but honestly do the amount of reasoning and coming to conclusions that were very difficult before 01 is starting to set a new a new bar for what AI is capable of cognitively um from here we have a bunch of submodels of these three we have 01 mini which is a lighter version of 01 preview um and I'll get into why you would want to use this but it's essentially a lighter version you get more use cases of it um but it does what 01 preview does it just doesn't do it quite as well um and you're limited on o1 preview to 50 uses a week which is plenty for most people but if you ever need more reasons you go use 01 preview 01 mini uh we also have jet GPT 40 Mini mini which is kind of like 01 mini but 04 and just smaller and faster we also have chat GPT 4 Legacy right which is the old model the one that was the newest one up until just last April um when o when 40 came out that one is still available to use and not to mention beyond all these you also have your custom gpts all the different customized versions of essentially 40 you have them loaded with instructions with knowledge and documents and all kinds of things so there's all those in the mix too so now the be question becomes which one should you use when so I'm going to open up my screen and take a look here so starting with 40 to work back through our list I'm going to say I'm going to start with 40 and this is like chat GPT plain vanilla right if you're not sure where to start start with 40 it can solve most things it's really great um as a thinking tool a brainstorming tool coming up with content tool it could do most things really well but of course there are and I would recommend starting there except there are some situations when some of the other models are better suited if in doubt just use 40 it's the standard model it's the leading model but there are certain situations that I use all the time where I'm starting to use some of these other models now moving on to 40 with canvas uh this model crushes it when it comes to just writing content and creating code I'm starting here first for all writing projects and all code projects which I'm doing all the time as a marketer and if you're a marketer you're probably writing content all the time too shoot even if I'm coming up with Internal Documentation like job descriptions performance reviews I'm using o uh 40 with canvas it's in beta right now but I find that it's fantastic at collaborating with AI and writing and with code so that you don't have to it doesn't just give you a draft and you respond you get a whole new draft you can edit just parts of it or you can collaborate with it or do an overhaul with it and it all stays in the same place even if you're working on multiple documents I've I had to come up with multiple job descriptions a few weeks ago and I just knocked them all out one at a time once I got one locked in with a certain style was like all right now do the same but for this job title and here's some information about it bam done it again and then again bam I created multiple job descriptions in a very short amount of time because I had a document that was perfected with AI and then I could duplicate over and over again and that's the power you could do that with blog posts LinkedIn posts Twitter post like anytime I'm coming up with content I'm using canvas now 01 preview well actually before we dump dive into 01 preview let's talk about custom gpts now this is a topic I've covered multiple times on this podcast I know lots of references back to old episodes and I will link to those too but chat GP custom gpts uh every marketer needs to learn how to make these things because they are making life so much easier and there's generally two different types of custom gpts that I'm working with there there are the general custom gpts and the specific custom gpts on your general ones you can essentially load it up with all your brand information and i' make one of these per brand that I work with um you load it with all the marketing information think about what you would give a new marketing higher what would they need to know about the brand your mission your products your target audience uh your value proposition to that target audience maybe a breakdown of your most popular products uh your messaging guides your writing style um all the basic things that a maybe if you were assigning a writer a the ability to write for you what else would it need to know you load it with all that stuff and then it becomes a better version of just the the 40 model because it's already trained on who you are and those are the ones anytime I'm using a doing any kind of work with AI for a company I almost always just start with the general GPT that I've created for that brand because its ability to pull in the right context is very very good and makes all of its outputs way better than if you were just working with the vanilla GPT because it's it's been trained just like a human if it's trained on your brand is going to be able to write better blog posts for you so so is AI so just treat it like a human give it the context that it needs in order to work well for you um so that's the general custom GPT um and I've gone I'm not going to explain how to make it or more about it because I've done it in other previous episodes Link in the description all the links are in the description now there are the specific G gpts um or custom gpts and those are ones that I make to accomplish very specific tasks over and over again you can make as many as you want but I have ones like my most one I've talked about most on the show is the my showrunner custom GPT you can find it at my show runner.com if you want to have it for yourself or or even take the instructions and make your own but it's a very specific GPT that just runs through podcast pre-production and accelerates my pre-production time from an hour down to about five minutes um which is very useful but it's something that I do over and over again and I pull that custom GPT which now again only uses chat GPT 40 model underneath and custom instructions and step-by-step guidance and some knowledge of documents of examples and things loaded in it to just help it do those things more quickly so I don't have to re-explain it every time it's just loaded with the instructions so I have multiple custom gpts uh that accomplish a very specific use case over and over again every time I need to do the thing I call up that custom GPT and Bam we get it done together so custom gpts are what I do for a lot of different things for any of those brand General brand things or very specific use cases I'm using custom gpts so to kind of review we have chat GPT 40 That's the vanilla version that's good for everyday things I have cat gp40 with canvas which I'm using now for all writing tasks and coding tasks because the canvas model is just so useful can't wait for them to bake that into custom gpts by the way that pulling those things together would be ideal but they're not right now um and then we have three custom gpts to accomplish a bunch of General brand things and specific use cases so what else do we got let's take a look we have 01 preview 01 preview is a new model that came out about a month ago again another video on that I will link to it uh but it is exceptionally good at Deep reasoning AI gets stuck sometimes and I find that it's hard to get it unstuck right you've asked it to do things and you're just kind of like ah jpg you just don't get it anytime you run into a scenario like that anytime it's just not going deep enough where a human would be able to go you're just like ah AI is failing me it's time for 01 preview it's time to bring out the big guns it kind of reminds me of a meme where you have like a bolt on a car that's just not giving and this meme just goes sequentially through it I'll throw it up here in the video uh but like it starts with a little wrench and you're like not working so you go to the bigger wrench I wasn't asking uh and then it goes to like a a like a huge wrench you're like you will obey and then it goes to like the saw can't like can't stop me now right 01 is like the next level up where it's like hey you didn't work out before so let's throw a one preview at it it's probably going to get you unstuck it's going to get you farther in being able to deal with the more difficult problems um so anytime I'm getting stuck with the other ones I'm going to 01 preview uh and that generally fixes it that's able to reason through the deeper things if you find that it's just giving you shallow answers or it's just not taking everything into account or it needs to break something down more step by step 01 preview is is your model okay now let's move on to some of these other ones which I don't find are very useful for marketers so let's talk about what they are useful for that is 01 mini which is the smaller version of 01 preview uh chat GPT 40 mini and chat GPT 4 so let's talk about the minis and then chat GPT 4 starting with the minis um The Minis are not really useful for US unless you're using like 01 preview so much that you run out of your 50 use cases for it in a week and then you just downgrade to 01 mini it's faster and you get more use cases out of it so you can use that otherwise it's really for the API that these things come in really handy because if you're using the API in order to do your AI work then you might not just be doing a few or a dozen different instances of it you're probably doing hundreds or thousands you scale some kind of use case with it maybe you're having to go check surveys and summarize results it's in the API that it makes more sense because it's not uh it's charging you per use of it and the minis are much cheaper than their Bigger Brothers so if you want to save money and move it faster that's when the minis start to become helpful um when you're using the API to accomplish things as a marketer if you're not using the API then it's they're not really that help helpful so I'm not using them that much but there are times where I'm using the API and it just makes sense to use the minis because it works faster and can get it done for much much much less sometimes like a tenth of the cost uh the minis are costing uh and that brings us down to chat gp4 the Legacy model I think there were just people that got used to how it worked and maybe aren't happy with 40 I'm really happy with 40 I think 40 does a great job and 40 has gotten better even after they've released it just months ago um but some people are probably still using the Legacy model I don't I can't really think of why else you would want to use just chat gp4 anymore considering 40 better faster and can take more different inputs from a uh bunch of different directions from image and voice and uh can out and produce in both of those mediums so that's it that's the breakdown let me know in the comments which one you're using and if this episode was helpful to you please give it a thumbs up on YouTube or a rating that you feel like it deserves on whatever podcast platform you're listening to too I appreciate every single one

Stop treating every model like the same tool

Match the workflow to the capability

Build a simple selection habit

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