If AI related news items were people walking down a street, it would take us an hour to walk a city block. Every day we see reports on new generative AI tools, advances in the capabilities of these tools and their large language models, the latest on initiatives to regulate or establish principles for how AI models are built and used, and even scandals involving the executives at market leading AI companies.
I’m following some of that closely - especially things related to establishing principles for use. What I’m most interested in though is finding the AI apps that work best for me and learning how to use them efficiently - becoming a jedi master of prompt engineering or something approaching that :)
When I say work best for me, I mean pretty much exclusively for professional purposes. The goal being that they help to make me a better, smarter cybersecurity analyst. And I have found a number of AI apps that are doing that and doing it very well. I work in the GRC (governance, risk, and compliance) area of cybersecurity, but I believe the same apps that serve me well will likely serve just as well for those who work in any of the other areas of cyber.
I should mention that I use these apps mostly for research - getting deeper dive type data on topics I already know well or to acquire new knowledge on those I don’t. Just as a quick example I’ve researched on things like how to get more MITRE ATT&CK TTPs integration within SIEM or other security tools’ alerts, and on crafting queries to search within those sorts of tools. I don’t use them to write a document for me, and I’m not interested in that use case for them. I do sometimes use them to serve as food for thought, or a brainstorming starting point when I need to write something though.
With that in mind, here is a rundown of the AI apps I am using, those I am finding the most useful, and a prompt engineering learning recommendation:
The Top 2.5
Perplexity:
I mentioned Perplexity once before here as a favorite research tool. Key features of Perplexity include:
It lets you choose which chatbot to use - its own, ChatGPT/GPT4, or Claude-2 (I find Claude-2 to be the best of those).
It is an “answer engine” that incorporates both an AI search engine and the chatbots. The search engine is a crucial piece, for two reasons: it can offer more up-to-date responses than most other chatbots, and it provides “citations” - links to the sources it referenced in crafting its response. This is a big benefit when it comes to trying to verify the accuracy of responses.
You can create Collections in Perplexity, to group and organize its responses by topic.
Poe
Poe’s headline feature is that it offers access to more than 25 chatbots from a number of different AI companies (some of these are just different versions of the same bot though). These include chatbots like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and DALL-E, Claude from Anthropic, and other well-known bots and providers.
Notion AI
Notion AI is the .5 here because it is not an AI app. It’s a popular productivity and note taking app. Its standout AI feature is called Q&A - which is like internal search of your Notion notes on steroids. It also offers AI summarizer features to, for instance, look at a web article you link to in a database and summarize the article’s key takeaways in 5 bullet points.
More AI Apps, Tools, Resources
ChatGPT: OpenAI’s chatbot is the one that made history with its surge to 100 million users in an incredible 60 days, and is still arguably the gold standard and recently leveled up abilities in its GPT-4 version. I also find it to be The Best bot for image creation, in particular using its mobile app version.
Bard: Google’s initial (many say rushed job) response to ChatGPT. I’ve found Bard to be steadily improving over recent months, and that has now accelerated with Google’s release of their “largest, most capable” model, Gemini, this week. I am hoping that the upcoming Assistant with Bard on the Pixel 8 phones will be even more impressive.
Pi: Pi is the first AI app I’ve used where continuous conversation really works and feels smooth. Pi’s responses are top quality as well. I think it may soon be a rival to Perplexity as my most used AI app.
Cybersecurity GPTs: These are single purpose mini chatbots and there is already a great GitHub for Cybersecurity specific GPTs created by cyber threat intel researcher Thomas Rocchia. I wrote about that and some of the better cyber GPTs I spotted in it, here: https://pjordan.substack.com/p/awesome-gpts-for-cybersecurity-are.
Learn Prompting: I’ve looked around a lot and tried quite a few training resources for prompt engineering - which is all about improving how you craft your question to a chatbot to get the best and most accurate results. Learn Prompting is the most approachable and best that I’ve found so far.
A few other things to note on this topic. I find that I use these AI apps most often (by far) on my phone. Several of these apps require subscriptions to use them; Perplexity, OpenAI (for access to ChatGPT and DALL-E, maybe more by now), and Poe are all right around $20 per month. Learn Prompting and Bard are free. Pi is free right now, but I would be surprised if it doesn’t become paid sometime soon.
I hope at least one of these apps / resources will be helpful to you if you work in cybersecurity. Also, I’m confident that they can serve just as well for people in many other professions. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on any AI apps you’re using and how you’re using them.