My personal ranking of AI models as of March 1, 2026. For those who don’t know me: besides my marketing career, I’ve been developing neural networks since 2003, specifically focusing on natural language processing. Before the success of LLMs/attention systems, I spent years integrating LSTM networks and embedding systems. I’m not a researcher, but I know the field reasonably well. Most importantly, I’m a relentless nitpicker who tears everything apart.
Development, reasoning, and natural writing: Opus 4.6. Unbeatable. The $200/month plan is the greatest gift you can give yourself.
CSS, web design: GLM5 and Kimi 2.5
Best speed/quality ratio: Gemini Flash 3 Flash Preview
Best photorealism: obviously Nano Banana
Incredibly fast and absurdly cheap model if medium-low quality is enough: Groq 4.1 Fast
For chats that work like a charm: Haiku 4.5
To run locally, for free, with actual vision capabilities: Qwen3vl 2b or 4b
Decent open-source model for almost everything: OpenAI OSS 120b.
