Gemini Comes to AcadVille
Navin had a blog post out about a topic that Ethan Mollick has been writing about, as has TheZvi:
Summary: Don’t use free ChatGPT (except for images and voice mode). If you’re only using free accounts, use Gemini 2.5 Pro then Claude 4 Sonnet and only then go to ChatGPT. If you have a paid ChatGPT account, then use ChatGPT o3, then 4.5 before any of the others. If you have a paid Claude account, use Opus 4. More details below.
My personal preference is to stop the summary at the very first sentence. Don't use free ChatGPT. That's it.
Chat With The Bot!
And there's a very good reason for my saying so. The reason is that you're better off thinking about these services as conversationbots, rather than chatbots. Regardless of whether you are a student enrolled in a formal university or otherwise, you will learn about something or the other when you ask AI a question, and the process of learning will be a lot of back and forth between you and the AI.
Let me rephrase that: the process of learning should be a lot of back and forth between you and the AI. This matters because learning with AI allows you to converse with what you might be thinking of as a search query.
Say you enter a question into that little chat window: "Tell me about the power of a test in statistics". What a chatbot allows you to do is, well, chat with its response. Whatever its answer, you should be able to respond with what you've not understood and need further clarification on. Or you should be able to ask for examples. Or related concepts. Or related concepts from fields other than statistics. Or you might want it to come up with five simple problems for you to solve. Or maybe classic papers on this topic. Or simple blogposts written by good stats profs. Or great YouTube videos. Or all of the above, and much more!
By the way, before we proceed, "Tell me about the power of a test in statistics" is a poor prompt. Make it better!
But all of what I've written above requires you to have an in-depth conversation with the chatbot, and this in-depth conversation will result in you very quickly running out of the quota that you have been given on a free account. After that, you might find yourself in a conversation with a much less capable model, or you may find yourself having to wait until you are able to restart the conversation.
Bottomline:
You can't learn without having an extended conversation. And you cannot have an extended conversation on a free account.
GMail, GSuite and The Trojan Horse
One of my favorite underrated stories from the past decade and a half is how Google offered GMail and Gsuite for free in colleges and universities, and has ended up reaping tremendous benefits.
This is one of my favorite stories because it was a great marketing strategy, and because it was a non-zero sum game. If you have worked on a university campus over the past twenty years, chances are that you have either been a Google campus or a Microsoft campus - meaning that your university's email systems and productivity suites have been powered by either Microsoft or by Google.
This worked out for the university because the amount of space that the university was now able to offer to each user account was way more than could have been managed on a local server.
But it also worked out for the firms in question. This was because they were able to get entire cohorts of students graduating from universities who had deep familiarity (and hopefully deep preferences for) with not just the firm's products, but also the associated workflows. Not to mention the fact that competition between the firms pushed both firms to get feature parity across all of their offerings!
The pandemic, I suspect, had a silver lining for both of these firms. When the world moved online, so did education, and a lot of educational institutes switched over to the more premium offerings in order to unlock the full suite of features. That is, they started to pay for these accounts, and quite a few universities have stuck to these more premium offerings.
Say Hello To Gemini on Campus
After I read Navin's post, I messaged both him and a few folks in academia in India to ask about whether institutional access to Gemini/Claude/ChatGPT was an option in Indian colleges. Everybody I spoke to didn't know if such an option was available, and that seemed weird, given what we now know about Google's Trojan Horse strategy above, and the importance (to these firms) of getting young people to adopt AI-first workflows.
Why weird? Because it seemed like a no-brainer, and it was weird that this didn't seem to be happening in India, and was very much happening abroad:
OpenAI’s campaign is part of an escalating A.I. arms race among tech giants to win over universities and students with their chatbots. The company is following in the footsteps of rivals like Google and Microsoft that have for years pushed to get their computers and software into schools, and court students as future customers.
The competition is so heated that Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, and Elon Musk, who founded the rival xAI, posted dueling announcements on social media this spring offering free premium A.I. services for college students during exam period. Then Google upped the ante, announcing free student access to its premium chatbot service “through finals 2026.”
Well, I'm glad to report that efficient markets may be der, but not andher:
https://twitter.com/GoogleIndia/status/1945131770745082234
This is Awesome For You
Now, this is a matter of personal preference, but when it comes to learning on campus, I think Gemini and Gsuite are the best accompaniments.
Most students, especially on Google campuses, are already familiar with GMeet, GDrive, GMail, along with Slides, Sheets and Docs. Integrating Gemini into these workflows is much easier, especially because it is already baked in to these products (and these integrations will get tighter and better pretty soon).
LearnLM is a pretty cool feature to make use of while learning/teaching, and it is baked right into Gemini.
NotebookLM is a brilliant tool to use as a student. I called it a somewhat useful tool when it first came out almost a year ago, but it is much, much better now, with lots of additional features that are genuinely helpful if you are a student.
I've written about this before, but I'll say it again: NotebookLM integrated with collective class notes is a brilliant way to learn and meta-learn. I hope teachers, students and entire universities experiment with this, and I cannot wait to see what happens when this becomes second nature.
Gemini being integrated into Google Classroom will make designing and teaching courses much easier too, from the point of view of teachers and professors.
And best of all, of course, is the fact that it is all but a guarantee that OpenAI and Microsoft and Anthropic will follow with their own offerings in very short order. So if you happen to disagree with me about Gemini and Google being the best way to learn on campus, well, brilliant!
TMKK?
Don't use any of the free tiers, on any product, to learn.
If you are a student in India, figure out how to get free access for a year, and sign-up, pronto.
Learn! WATTBA!
This goes without saying, but if you need help with any of this, please feel free to reach out, anytime.