Short answer: there’s no single “best” LLM—it depends on what you need.

As of late 2024 (my latest knowledge), here are strong choices by use case:
- Best generalist chat/analysis: GPT‑4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet (great quality, broad skills, solid safety)
- Hard reasoning (math, logic, planning): OpenAI’s o1/o3 “reasoning” models (strongest on deliberate reasoning but slower/costlier)
- Coding and software help: o3, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, or Google Gemini 1.5 Pro (excellent multi-file edits, debugging, code search)
- Multimodal (images/audio/video + text): GPT‑4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro
- Very long context (huge PDFs/repos): Gemini 1.5 Pro (up to very large contexts) and Claude 3.5 Sonnet (large contexts)
- Fast/cheap at scale: GPT‑4o mini, Gemini 1.5 Flash, Claude 3.5 Haiku
- Open‑source/local: Llama 3.1 (70B/405B where available), Qwen2.5‑72B, Gemma 2 (good quality without vendor lock‑in); on-device: Llama 3 8B, Phi‑3 variants

Quick picks:
- “I want the best overall”: Claude 3.5 Sonnet or GPT‑4o
- “I need deep step‑by‑step reasoning”: o1/o3
- “I need long docs or large repos”: Gemini 1.5 Pro
- “I have lots of images/audio”: GPT‑4o
- “I’m budget‑sensitive”: Gemini 1.5 Flash or GPT‑4o mini
- “Must be open‑source/local”: Llama 3.1 70B or Qwen2.5‑72B

If you tell me your primary task, budget/latency needs, context length, multimodal needs, and whether open‑source is required, I can recommend a specific model and provider.
