Jun 29, 2026 · 44 min · 12 segments
This week on AppStories, This week, Federico and John talk about the state of AI aggregator apps and their future prospects before checking in on their current AI app setups for the AppStories+…
Federico ViticciHost
John VoorheesHost
Uh, because, you know, we've talked in the past quite a bit about LLMs in general, and kind of the big players.
But today we wanted to talk a little bit more about apps that aggregate various LLMs, whether it's from those big players or, you know, some of the open source-
... things that can be run locally, some of the other specialized models that are out there.
It's a very fast-moving category, I think, and one that has already evolved quite a bit and attracted some bigger players, so we thought it would be interesting to talk a little bit about those.
And so I guess maybe the first thing to do, Federico, before we actually get into some of the apps that bring together all these different models, we should talk a little bit about what these apps are and sort of the general pros and cons we've found from using them ourselves.
I, I think it's an interesting market, right? These services that, um, basically th- they let you...
They make you pay another subscription to have access to frontier models usually, and maybe some of the open source ones as well.
Uh, I think lately we've seen a lot of, a lot of buzz around the new GLM 5.2 model from, from ZAI out of China.
All of these, these aggregators, as we call them, I mean, we're referring to the likes of Perplexity maybe, and Notion AI to an extent.
The idea is that rather than using those, um, those off- like the official clients and the official, uh, chatbots and apps from those companies, you're using a, a different, uh, front end, a different client that aggregates a bunch of these models, and usually they let you pick between these models, right? And so right there, I think the first, uh, advantage maybe, uh, o- of this approach is that you usually get, like, a list of different models that you can try, and they make you choose.
They let you choose between different, different LLMs, uh, with different versions of those models, different reasoning levels of those models.
Usually with, you know, you take a look at Perplexity, for example, you can choose Gemini, you can use GPT 5.5, you can use Opus.
Uh, because, you know, we've talked in the past quite a bit about LLMs in general, and kind of the big players.
But today we wanted to talk a little bit more about apps that aggregate various LLMs, whether it's from those big players or, you know, some of the open source-
... things that can be run locally, some of the other specialized models that are out there.
It's a very fast-moving category, I think, and one that has already evolved quite a bit and attracted some bigger players, so we thought it would be interesting to talk a little bit about those.
And so I guess maybe the first thing to do, Federico, before we actually get into some of the apps that bring together all these different models, we should talk a little bit about what these apps are and sort of the general pros and cons we've found from using them ourselves.
I, I think it's an interesting market, right? These services that, um, basically th- they let you...
They make you pay another subscription to have access to frontier models usually, and maybe some of the open source ones as well.
Uh, I think lately we've seen a lot of, a lot of buzz around the new GLM 5.2 model from, from ZAI out of China.
All of these, these aggregators, as we call them, I mean, we're referring to the likes of Perplexity maybe, and Notion AI to an extent.
The idea is that rather than using those, um, those off- like the official clients and the official, uh, chatbots and apps from those companies, you're using a, a different, uh, front end, a different client that aggregates a bunch of these models, and usually they let you pick between these models, right? And so right there, I think the first, uh, advantage maybe, uh, o- of this approach is that you usually get, like, a list of different models that you can try, and they make you choose.
They let you choose between different, different LLMs, uh, with different versions of those models, different reasoning levels of those models.
Usually with, you know, you take a look at Perplexity, for example, you can choose Gemini, you can use GPT 5.5, you can use Opus.
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