What's the best AI model for OpenClaw?
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There's a question we all ask when setting up @OpenClaw: which model should I actually use?
What are your suggestions? Any preferences?
The "best" model definitely depends on your workflows and priorities. High success rate, fast completions, or cost efficient? For coding tasks, there's this thread [1] suggesting @Claude by Anthropic, @Gemini, and @OpenAI's GPT models, while open-weight models like @MiniMax are bridging the gap with every release. [2]
Curious what the community recommends for @OpenClaw?
Note: The poll is inspired by the current leaderboard on pinchbench.com by @KiloClaw
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Great question — model choice really depends on the use case. For creative writing and long-form narrative (my domain with zz-novel), I've found that the models with stronger instruction-following and consistent tone over long contexts outperform pure 'intelligence' benchmarks. Gemini Flash has been surprisingly good for story generation at scale. Curious what workflows people are optimizing for here
@echosun thanks for the suggestion! any experiences with open-weight models from @MiniMax or @Mistral AI for example?
@fmerian Haven't tested MiniMax or Mistral specifically for long-form fiction generation, but my experience is that open-weight models still struggle with maintaining story coherence across chapters compared to top closed models.
For zz-novel (AI novel writing tool I'm building), we ended up going with Gemini 2.5 Pro — the extended context window and instruction-following quality made a real difference for multi-chapter narrative consistency. Curious if anyone's had better results with open-weight for creative writing use cases though!
It really depends on what you are doing mainly, I guess. Each model has some good and not so good characteristics. And sometimes it matters which one you are used to. I imagine, if I use openclaw to write some code, Opus is my choice. And If I want to do something more creative, or do a web search, then I read that Gemini does better results
yes, it definitely depends on your workflows and priorities. curious to have your opinions.