AI Madness 2025

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Okay, I use all the prominent AI GPTs. Should I? Tom's Guide AI ran a comparison in basketball style. Which one won?

March isn’t just for college basketball anymore — this year, we’re bringing the competition to AI! Welcome to AI Madness, a bracket-style tournament where the best AI chatbots battle it out to see which one truly reigns supreme.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve put eight AI contenders through a series of head-to-head matchups, testing their accuracy, creativity, speed, and overall usefulness.

We've reached the end of the tournament, and we have a winner! You can see how it played out below, as well as a deep dive into each of the matchups to see how each chatbot performed.

You can scroll to the bottom to find out the winner and which chatbot delivers the best real-world performance across multiple categories.

We’ve carefully selected the top AI chatbots, each bringing unique strengths (and weaknesses) to the table.

ChatGPT – OpenAI’s flagship AI, known for its conversational abilities, coding skills, and deep knowledge.

Google Gemini – Google's multimodal AI, designed to handle text, images, and more.

Claude – Anthropic’s AI, praised for its ethical approach to AI and natural responses.

Grok – The AI built by Elon Musk’s xAI, tuned for humor and real-time insights.

DeepSeek – A rising AI designed for deep reasoning and factual accuracy.

Perplexity – A research-based AI optimized for fact-finding and search capabilities.

Meta AI – Meta’s contender, designed for interactive engagement and multimodal capabilities.

Mistral – A powerful open-source AI that promises advanced text generation and coding skills.

Each battle will be decided based on our six key criteria and scored on the following:

Accuracy & Factuality: Are responses correct and up to date?

Creativity & Natural Language: How engaging is the response?

Usefulness & Depth: Can it complete complex tasks well?

Multimodal Abilities: Can it handle text, images, and videos

User Experience & Interface: Is it easy to use and accessible?

We’ll start by introducing each AI and setting the stage for the matchups. From there, the head-to-head battles begin! We’ll test each AI on general knowledge, creative writing, coding, real-world tasks, and multimodal abilities.

After the initial rounds, we will break down the semi-finals, with leaderboards and highlights.

And finally, we’ll crown the AI Madness Champion, revealing the best chatbot for real-world use.

So, who will take the title? Follow along as we put AI to the ultimate test. Let the AI showdown begin!