Vertech Editorial
Many students say they want to find the best AI for studying. The one tool that does it all.
That is a lie.
There is no such thing as a single best AI. It's not how these tools work. Unless you count using ChatGPT for math, essays, research, citations and brainstorming all in one chat productive.
OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have each built a powerful tool inside your browser but each one can only really do one thing well at a time.
Sure — they'll all technically answer any question you throw at them. The problem is the answer often isn't very good.
It's a great time to be a student. It's just not a great time to be guessing which AI to open.
What does Best AI even mean
Students often ask me which AI is the best. I always tell them the same thing:
There isn't one. There's just the best one for the thing you're trying to do right now.
If a friend tells you ChatGPT is the best, what they really mean is it's the best for the stuff they personally use it for. They've found one workflow it handles well, and now every problem looks like that workflow. It happens so often that it may feel like a real recommendation.
But except for some people who really do only ever use AI for one type of task (trust me you're probably not one of them as a student), it's actually a messy way to pick. You lose a lot of quality forcing the wrong tool onto the wrong job.
It's an age-old question of whether you want something done correctly or done in one tab.
It's never both.
Phones help, but not really
Luckily small screen real-estate led to students mostly using one AI at a time on mobile. You open the app, ask the thing, close it. I can't imagine juggling three chatbots on a phone screen. Unless you count screenshotting from one and pasting into another the same thing.
Phones save us from AI overload with obsessive single-app use and endless scrolling through one chat thread. It's a different kind of trap but still there.
Multitasking feels productive but it's just another trap
Multi-AI usage has been around for a couple of years in the student world. Chances are you've got at least two of them bookmarked, right? I'm seeing students with all three pinned as I'm writing this.
Do you need them all for one assignment? No. Just one or two would've been enough. But we're conditioned to keep tabs open and switch between them constantly.
We'll get to the workflow soon, but I think it's important to break it down with how most students actually use these tools so it hits better when we get to the fix.
There are a couple of main ways students study with AI.
Sticking to just one AI doesn't solve this issue either
This is full commitment. Pick one tool, run everything through it. I see it most often with Claude when a student is writing a paper, or with Gemini if they're already deep in Google's ecosystem.
It feels efficient. It rarely is.
Two tabs open doesn't mean you have a workflow
Some students draft in Claude and fact-check in Gemini. Or use ChatGPT for the math and Claude for the writeup. Some also try to copy answers from one into the other to "double check" but that's mostly unproductive and goes back to not having a real workflow.
One tool per job, and yes it actually works
This is the most useful way to study with AI. You have one tool open for the task at hand, and when you need something else you CMD + TAB into the right one — grab it, and CMD + TAB back.
This is how the pros work most of the time.
This is where most students end up and it's not great
Students call this "researching." It happens when you've got ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity all open and you're pasting the same prompt into every one of them.
And as a different kind of procrastination, it works perfectly.
But would you be able to actually study like this? With four AI conversations going and none of them aware of the others? That's extremely distracting. And here we arrive at the real issue.
Running the same prompt through four AIs is not research
Sure, you can use one AI for everything, and most students probably end up doing that, but every YouTuber and every "AI workflow" thread on Reddit shows you that exact same kind of cognitive mess.
Sure — it kind of works for everything, but still it gives you that impression that you should be running every question through every model, and as we already established, that's how you end up with three mediocre answers instead of one good one.
A YouTuber I watched recently said in his review that he asks the same question to four AIs and picks the best response. And I know it was a way to show how each model thinks differently and how the answers can vary, but…
It leads us back to the same rabbit hole.
Complete cognitive overload.
When you stop knowing which answer came from where
Now imagine you're three hours into a study session.
It's actually NOT recommended by anyone to switch AI tools mid-thought but well…here we are.
Not only do you have one AI's answer in your head, but also two others contradicting it. It's also probably good to remember which one had the citation you actually needed.
We're entering immense overload category here. And this is where most students start blaming themselves instead of the workflow.
It was never about the tool, it was about the workflow
When students sign up at Vertech, the most common thing they tell us is that they're "just bad at AI."
They're not bad at AI. They're exhausted from choosing.
Almost every time, the issue isn't the tool — it's that they've been trying to make one chatbot do five different jobs, or worse, running the same question through all of them and trusting whichever answer sounded the most confident. (Spoiler: ChatGPT almost always sounds the most confident, which is why it's been getting students into trouble with made-up citations for two years now.)
Once they see what each tool was actually built for, the "I'm bad at AI" thing disappears within a week. It was never about being bad. It was about working without a system.
The problem isn't the tools, it's using all of them at once
Don't get me wrong. I think having all three options is genuinely useful to some extent but it simply poses some problems.
That cognitive overload is also why so many students keep defaulting to "just ChatGPT" — to shut out the noise and stop having to pick. It's the safer choice, but it's also the reason their writing sounds the same as everyone else's, their math gets quietly wrong, and their citations don't exist. The fix isn't more discipline. It's a workflow.
I'm building prompts daily and watching how pros actually use these tools — figuring out how far we can push each one before it breaks. That's why I'm not trying to downplay any of them — eventually, one of them will probably handle all three jobs well. ChatGPT is closest right now but still not there.
But until then, we need to be cautious about how we approach studying with AI. Overloading our session can overstimulate the whole process and, in the end, lead to worse work and worse grades.
We don't want the future of studying to lead us to worse outcomes, do we?
You only need one skill, that's it
If you only remember three things
- Math, brainstorming, step-by-step explanations → ChatGPT
- Essays, long readings, anything that needs to sound like you → Claude
- Research, current sources, anything that needs citations → Gemini
The skill isn't picking one. It's knowing which one to open for the task in front of you. That's the difference between a student who uses AI and one who works like a pro.
And if you want our take on the prompts that actually pull good work out of these tools, that's what we do at Vertech — the Generalist Teacher prompt is free, along with a bunch of other tools and resources to get you started.
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