3 Ai Tools Everyone Should Try

Most people have tried, or at least heard of ChatGPT from OpenAI, and there are a lot of rapid advancements to AI every day. In this post I’ll highlight three that I think everyone should try.

LangFlow

If you’re actively developing in AI, you’re familiar with Langchain but not everyone is a developer, in which case you should check out LangFlow which is a no code tool that allows anyone to drag and drop tools together to build an AI application, in some cases even in minutes. Click on “Community examples” at the top to get started, and click on “Basic Chat”. The lightning bolt in the bottom right allows you to run your new no code application at any time.

This is the most powerful tool today that allows anyone to build an AI application without any experience in software development.

Ollama

The next tool I think everyone should try is Ollama, which is a command line tool. It’s super easy to download and install and you can be using it in a minute or two. Start by going to the Ollama website or if you’re more nerdy, the Ollama GitHub. It will walk you through the install process, which is simply to curl their installer and run it through sh, or you can use their Docker image.

If you’re on OSX, you can find terminal in the Applications/Utilities folder. Once you have it installed, you can use any of the model libraries, but I recommend mistral which runs fine on my several year old laptop:

$ ollama run mistral

That’s it! Why is this cool? It doesn’t need an internet connection, the prompts you provide are not going to Microsoft, or any American tech company. It’s completely private, it doesn’t need an internet connection once installed. It can even read local files, for example:

$ ollama run mistral “Which days are the busiest from this file:” “$(cat spreadsheet.of.dates.and.sales.csv)”

This is powerful, as if you have some software development skills and a curious and creative mind, the possibilities are endless personally and professionally.

LM Studio

The final recommendation I have here is LM Studio. Similar to Ollama, this is a UI that allows you to discover, download, and use Language Models on your laptop, entirely offline. In the business world, what we call “on prem”(ises), allows you to put sensitive or company information into it without it being processed for a foreign company.

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This technology is so transformative, it allows anyone to create the next billion dollar company, or improve their personal life, as a single individual.

I teach classes to individuals and organizations, on how to leverage AI in their organizations, as well as provide business advisory if you’re interested. Most notably based on the frequency of request, I don’t answer a generic “How can we use AI in our business?” without an understanding of which problems your organization needs to solve, and how bad that pain point is – maybe AI is a good fit, maybe not, and solving your business issues is my priority, from solopreneur to Enterprise.