Forget saving one hour, these 10 AI Tools offer a 100x increase in productivity
The Only 10 AI Tools You Need to Achieve Peak Productivity in 2025
DeepSeek R1 + Internet Access: A Reasoning-Based Large Language Model, Your Own “Thinking” Brain Trust
DeepSeek R1 has been making waves recently. Even though I’m almost sick of hearing about it in the news every day, I want to emphasize its significance: it allows the general public to experience the magic of AI at an extremely low cost.
Besides the low cost of training and inference, because this reasoning-based large language model, especially with its rich Chinese corpus, understands us very well, we don’t need sophisticated prompts to get excellent output.
This significantly lowers the barrier to entry. I won’t go into too much detail here, but I want to stress that when using it, remember to click “Deep Thinking” and, ideally, “Connect to Internet.”
Reasoning-based LLMs are more prone to confidently spouting nonsense than previous instruction-tuned models, and it sounds even more convincing. Without searching or providing good background information, it’s easy to be fooled.
If the official website is unstable, you can switch to APIs from platforms like SiliconFlow, and set the temperature parameter to 0.6 for output that more closely resembles the official website. Don’t forget to prompt it to “speak plainly,” or it’ll start talking about quantum entanglement.
2. Napkin.ai: “Illustrate” Your Articles with a Single Click, for a More Comfortable Reading Experience
Napkin.ai can generate corresponding charts and diagrams for selected sentences and paragraphs, and it even allows you to further modify the color scheme and edit the text. It’s a godsend for anyone working with text and images. And it’s free.
3. Conch Audio: Turn Text into “Digital Human Narration”
Their AI voices are probably top-tier. You only need 10 seconds or more of audio to clone a voice. The rhythm, intonation, and emotion are all quite good.
It’s just that sometimes you need to “roll the dice” many times to get a satisfactory result. If you have needs related to digital humans, it’s worth checking out.
4. Tripo3d.ai
Tripo3d.ai is fun to use. You could upload an image and then transfer to 3D model. Surprisingly, it has great texture and lighting.
5. Google Labs: Experience the Cutting Edge of “Black Tech,” See Further
Google is indeed taking AI seriously now. Here are a few I highly recommend:
NotebookLM: Integrates multiple documents, web pages, and videos into a unified knowledge system, and can automatically generate personalized podcasts to help you absorb content more deeply.
AI Studio (Gemini): Gemini 2.0 Pro has an extremely long context window (can handle large amounts of text) and can also perform multimodal tasks; Gemini Flash is more advantageous in terms of response speed and cost.
ImageFX: Google’s “Midjourney alternative,” the generated images are of quite good quality, and it’s free.
Learn About: Use AI to quickly drill down into an industry, a product, or a thing, a very systematic way of learning. Unfortunately, it currently only supports English and requires a US-based network.
6. tldraw: From Sketch to Interactive UI, the “Magic Whiteboard”
compute.tldraw started as just an online whiteboard, but now, with the help of AI, it can transform your mind maps and hand-drawn sketches into preliminary interactive UI interfaces, and even generate simple application prototypes.
For example, early on, it used GPT-4’s multimedia API to turn a newly drawn diagram into an interactive prototype with a single click. Now it’s been upgraded. It can now form an AI workflow through simple drag-and-drop, allowing you to easily edit and batch generate text, images, audio, and even video, and it’s also convenient for continuous iteration.
7. Flowith: Build Your Own “Knowledge Garden”
I just bought an annual membership for Flowith. I feel that serious AI tool users, after using them for a while, really need a powerful knowledge base.
Flowith has launched a knowledge garden where you can collect web pages, WeChat Official Account articles, PDFs, etc. All kinds of materials can be integrated into a knowledge base.
It defaults to a whiteboard, and we can easily reference different modules from the knowledge base to try out different themes, styles, and content. I think this is more oriented towards deep thinking and content output compared to the previous cross-note Q&A apps.
8. Learn to Use APIs: Explore Your Own AI Applications
Many AI platforms offer APIs (such as SiliconFlow, Groq, Openrouter, etc.). You can embed these model capabilities into your own websites, apps, or scripts for more flexible customized development.
Don’t be afraid, thinking that APIs are difficult. They are essentially just usernames and passwords. You can put them into software like ChatBox, Cherry Studio, or AnythingLLM, and they can be implemented in a very low-cost but feature-rich, somewhat decentralized way.
9. Don’t Be Afraid of Code: Learn AI Code Editors like Cursor and Trae.ai
Just as you shouldn’t be afraid of APIs, I think with the arrival of the AI era, everyone might as well try more boundary-breaking explorations. For example, writing code is a great way.
It’s not about writing code itself, but you can use AI to help you achieve things through code, such as: creating a photography app, creating software to batch generate anime-style images and text, or on a smaller scale, creating a script to automatically check for typos in a tender document. AI is becoming the new Excel.
10. Treat Yourself as the Method: 10x is Easier Than 2x
I really like the theory of the book “10x Is Easier Than 2x”: 2x growth often means doubling down on effort within the old framework, draining your energy but still facing diminishing marginal returns. 10x growth forces you to completely jump out of your original thinking and find a completely different path.
What’s behind this is “doing less but more important things,” abandoning some low-value actions, and fully pursuing huge returns. Combined with AI tools, you have stronger leverage, and the cost of failure is also reduced. As long as you dare to think and dare to try, you can quickly find a breakthrough.
Don’t be afraid of making mistakes in the process of trying. Instead of carefully gaining a little efficiency, it’s better to go all out and use AI to drive yourself to achieve leapfrog growth in 2025.