AI Coffee Break – AI Chatbots for Academics

Ever feel like you’re drowning in a sea of chatbots?

Every week, there’s a new tool or update – each with its own dizzying array of versions, features, and pricing tiers.

Free vs. premium, basic vs. advanced – it’s hard to know which one will actually support our academic work instead of just adding to the chaos.

Even just within ChatGPT, the choices are overwhelming: GPT-4o is the go-to for most tasks, while GPT-4o mini prioritizes speed. Then there’s o1 for advanced reasoning, o3-mini for fast logic-based responses, and o3-mini-high, supposedly great for coding. Not to mention the scheduled tasks (Beta) feature creeping in. And that’s just one platform!

Throw in Claude, Perplexity, NotebookLM, Gemini, Copilot, Cohere, DeepSeek, Ollama, and now BoodleBox!?, and it’s enough to make your head spin.

This Wednesday, we will meet to try to figure out if there’s any hope for clarity in this overwhelming AI landscape!