Do you know what the difference is between Chat and Cowork? I’ve got a video walkthrough at the bottom too 👇

The function kind of similarly, but they are inherently different from each other and provide different solutions, depending on what you're working on.

Everyone is probably familiar with chat. This was the first thing that came onto the scene and was popularized. It's the interface that virtually every LLM tool uses today.

You chat back-and-forth asking questions getting answers and getting it to produce things for you.

If you're not careful, these can become extremely lengthy and depending upon the model that you're using, costly.

Cowork is related to this and aesthetically looks about the same.

You toggle between chat and cowork by simply select in one of the other. As of a recent update, this works almost identically whether you're in ChatGPT or Claude.

ChatGPT causes it work, however, instead of cowork.

Here's what it looks like in Claude:

Here's what it looks like in ChatGPT:

Claude selection makes a little more sense as it's right next to where you're already typing and looking.

Prediction: ChatGPT will update theirs to do exactly the same thing. I think it's a little out of place way up at the top of the screen.

Work (or Cowork) is intended to be used when you need the LLM model to actually do something for you - create/edit files, upload things to your Google Drive, draft and email, etc.

You’ll give it additional permissions so it can do work on your behalf.

Now the interface is the same - it’s a chat window just like we’re used to.

But you can also add a project or a local folder to the chat thread, allowing the tool to work in that projector folder rather than just in the chat window.

I've used coworker quite a bit myself and creating websites as well as code snippets to run on my computer.

This is allowed me to automate some very boring tasks in a much faster manner than going back back-and-forth with the LLM model every single time.

Here's the quick video walk-through I did on this topic. Hope it's helpful for you: