Out of GPT-5-thinking, Claude Opus 4.1, or Gemini Pro 2.5, my first choice for learning topics or reading papers is Gemini. In general, I think Gemini communicates in the simplest and most verbose language. This is often annoying if I want an LLM for quick daily questions, but the verbosity feels great for learning.
Some notes on Gemini for learning:
Gemini offers a “Directed Learning” mode where it tries to teach you concepts by asking you leading questions to help you reach conclusions yourself (Socratic-ish learning). I’ve found that Gemini hasn’t implemented this well, and it asks questions that are often too tiny, causing the learning to be slow, but I haven’t played around with this feature much
Unfortunately, Gemini’s voice-transcription feature is basically unusable on iPhone because the Gemini app will automatically send your voice message if you pause talking. However, if you’re on your computer you can easily address this by doing voice transcription with another app (e.g., Wispr Flow [Windows] or Superwhisper [Mac]). Voice transcription seems pretty helpful if you are trying to summarize what you’ve learned back to the LLM, which you should be doing.
Gemini also offers a quizzing feature. In the chat web app, just ask the model to make you a multiple-choice quiz, and it’ll generate that in a nice UI. I like the quizzes. Multiple-choice quizzes are sometimes nicer than free-response quizzes, which any model could provide.
Learning with Opus feels okay. Opus seems faster than Gemini or GPT-5-thinking, which is nice, but I always felt like I was learning slower with its explanations than Gemini’s. If you’re into the learn-by-answering-leading-questions thing (kinda Socratic learning), then Claude’s is okay and seems to ask better questions than Gemini
Learning complicated topics with GPT-5 feels confusing as its responses feel too terse. Maybe a good system prompt fixes this. ChatGPT offers a Socratic learning mode, but I haven’t used it.
Out of GPT-5-thinking, Claude Opus 4.1, or Gemini Pro 2.5, my first choice for learning topics or reading papers is Gemini. In general, I think Gemini communicates in the simplest and most verbose language. This is often annoying if I want an LLM for quick daily questions, but the verbosity feels great for learning.
Some notes on Gemini for learning:
Gemini offers a “Directed Learning” mode where it tries to teach you concepts by asking you leading questions to help you reach conclusions yourself (Socratic-ish learning). I’ve found that Gemini hasn’t implemented this well, and it asks questions that are often too tiny, causing the learning to be slow, but I haven’t played around with this feature much
Unfortunately, Gemini’s voice-transcription feature is basically unusable on iPhone because the Gemini app will automatically send your voice message if you pause talking. However, if you’re on your computer you can easily address this by doing voice transcription with another app (e.g., Wispr Flow [Windows] or Superwhisper [Mac]). Voice transcription seems pretty helpful if you are trying to summarize what you’ve learned back to the LLM, which you should be doing.
Gemini also offers a quizzing feature. In the chat web app, just ask the model to make you a multiple-choice quiz, and it’ll generate that in a nice UI. I like the quizzes. Multiple-choice quizzes are sometimes nicer than free-response quizzes, which any model could provide.
Learning with Opus feels okay. Opus seems faster than Gemini or GPT-5-thinking, which is nice, but I always felt like I was learning slower with its explanations than Gemini’s. If you’re into the learn-by-answering-leading-questions thing (kinda Socratic learning), then Claude’s is okay and seems to ask better questions than Gemini
Learning complicated topics with GPT-5 feels confusing as its responses feel too terse. Maybe a good system prompt fixes this. ChatGPT offers a Socratic learning mode, but I haven’t used it.