Best AI for studying

There's no single best AI for studying: for understanding a topic and asking questions any general-purpose assistant will do, like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, and for studying from your own notes a tool that works only with your documents is better, like Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM). The choice depends more on the material you have than on the brand.

The difference matters. A general-purpose chat answers with what it learned during training: it explains well, but it can make things up or stray from your syllabus. A source-based tool sticks to what you upload (notes, PDFs, videos) and shows you which part each answer comes from, so it's easier to check. What usually confuses people is looking for "the best" one as if it were a phone: almost all of them explain well, and what changes the result is how you use it. It's also best not to let the tool decide what's important in the syllabus; that's set by your teacher or your exam, not by the automatic summary.

I work mainly with Claude for almost everything, and when I need to understand a pile of specific documents I use Gemini Notebook, since back when it was called NotebookLM. In "What I really use NotebookLM for" I explain how it differs from a chat, my real uses, what it does badly and how I combine it with Claude, with a short guide to getting started.