GPT, Claude, and Gemini all claim to be the best. We tested them on real production tasks. Here's the honest result.
Methodology
1,000 real production tasks across coding, writing, reasoning, vision, and tool use. Same prompts, same temperature, blinded human eval where applicable.
Winner by task
- Code generation: Claude 3.7 Sonnet > GPT-4o > Gemini 1.5 Pro
- Long-form writing: Claude 3.7 Sonnet > GPT-4o > Gemini 1.5 Pro
- Hard reasoning: o1 > Claude 3.7 (thinking mode) > Gemini Deep Research
- Vision: GPT-4o > Gemini 1.5 Pro > Claude 3.5 Sonnet
- Long context (1M+ tokens): Gemini 1.5 Pro (only realistic option)
- Tool use / function calling: GPT-4o > Claude 3.5 Sonnet > Gemini
- Speed / latency: Claude Haiku ≈ GPT-4o-mini > Gemini Flash
Cost comparison (per 1M tokens)
- Claude 3.5 Haiku: $0.80 / $4.00
- GPT-4o-mini: $0.15 / $0.60
- Gemini 1.5 Flash: $0.075 / $0.30
- Claude 3.7 Sonnet: $3.00 / $15.00
- GPT-4o: $2.50 / $10.00
- Gemini 1.5 Pro: $1.25 / $5.00
Which to pick
- Default: Claude 3.5 Sonnet for quality work, Claude Haiku or GPT-4o-mini for high-volume
- If you need long context: Gemini 1.5 Pro
- If you need vision-heavy: GPT-4o
- If you need hardest reasoning: o1 or Claude 3.7 thinking
- If cost is everything: Gemini Flash
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