The chat tower · the atrium
AI chatbot: the tower, floor by floor
This is the entrance to the ai chatbot tower — the assistants themselves, what each one is actually good at, the ways all of them fail, and what it takes to run one on hardware you own.
The tower is built around a distinction that most coverage skips. There is the question of which assistant to use, which changes every few months and is the subject of endless argument. And there is the question of how to use any of them well, which barely changes at all and determines almost everything about whether they are useful to you. The second wing is the larger one here, deliberately.
The assistant floors are written to be dated rather than definitive. What each model can do moves quickly, a page claiming a ranking is out of date within a season, and the useful thing a floor can offer is a description of what a service says it does, what it costs, what it does with your conversations, and when that was last checked.
The failure wing exists because these systems fail in a specific and consistent way: fluently. A wrong answer arrives in the same confident register as a right one, with no signal distinguishing them, and that is a property of the technology rather than a bug awaiting a fix. The floors there are about recognising where that risk is highest and building the habit of checking.
And there is a wing about privacy, which is the question people ask last and should ask first. What a service does with what you type into it varies enormously between products and between the free and paid tiers of the same product, it is written down, and almost nobody reads it.
Three levels, and you are on the first. This atrium lists the floors; a floor covers one subject completely and holds the shorter guides underneath it. Nothing here is more than three clicks from the front door.
Where to start
Seven ways in. The second is the one that changes how useful all of this is to you.
- “Which assistant should I use?”
- Start at the assistants
- “I use one and the answers are mediocre.”
- That is using them well
- “How much of what it tells me is wrong?”
- Go to where they fail
- “Is my conversation being used for training?”
- That is what happens to what you type
- “Is the paid version worth it?”
- There is a floor for that in the assistants
- “Can I run one without the internet?”
- That is on your own machine
- “I want it to stop sounding like a press release.”
- Read using them well
The assistants
One floor per assistant, all answering the same questions in the same order, all carrying the date they were last checked: what it is good at, what it costs, what it keeps.
Using them well
The wing that transfers between every assistant and does not go out of date. If you only read one part of this tower, read this one.
Where they fail
Not a criticism but an operating manual. These failures are structural, they are predictable, and knowing the shape of them is what makes the tools safe to rely on.
What happens to what you type
The privacy wing. Each floor quotes the service’s own published position with the date, because these settings change and the defaults differ between tiers.
On your own machine
Running a model locally: no connection, no account, nothing leaving the computer. A short wing about what that costs in quality and in hardware.
What this tower will not do
It will not crown a best assistant. That answer changes every few months, it depends heavily on what you do, and any page claiming otherwise is either out of date or selling something.
It will not pretend these tools are reliable narrators. The failure wing is not a disclaimer bolted on at the end — it is a quarter of the building, because using them well means using them with that in mind.
It will not tell you what a service does with your conversations without quoting the service. Those policies change, they differ between free and paid, and second-hand summaries of them are frequently a year behind.
And it will not carry affiliate links, which in this category means declining the fastest-growing referral programmes on the internet.
One closing thought about how to use this tower. If you already have an assistant and are vaguely disappointed by it, the wing to read is not the one about which product to switch to. Switching rarely fixes a disappointing experience, because the difference between a poor answer and a good one is usually on your side of the conversation rather than theirs. What holds instead is simple: every assistant floor carries the date it was checked, and no floor carries an affiliate link.
Written by Alberto Gulotta
Founder and editor of AI Tools Primer, writing from Palermo, Italy. Thirty-five years of taking computers apart, starting with a Commodore 64 — the long version is on the about page.
Something wrong on this page? Write to aitoolsprimer@gmail.com and it gets fixed.
Independence and limits
No affiliate links and no paid placements anywhere on this site. Nobody pays to appear here, and no company has seen this page before you did.
This is general information, not professional advice. Where a page touches money, health, safety or the law, it names its source and the date it was read — and your situation may still differ. See the privacy page and the cookie policy.