ChatGPT-5 Update for Academics Dear Scholar, The big topic in AI news this week has been the release of ChatGPT-5 just a few days ago. I spent my weekend testing out different scenarios and writing an in-depth review of what has changed and how that influences your academic career. For those who have purchased my Effortless AI course, I have also recorded two new videos about the details and implications of this major release. Subjectively speaking, GPT-5 is just a better, more intuitive...
20 days ago • 1 min read
Agentic AI finds new research ideas Dear Scholar, A new type of AI has been released this week: AI Agents. Instead of answering a query in one step, like a generative AI, an agent has a goal, and it will plan, search, and review results to achieve it (see diagram below). This involves many iterations and can easily take 15 minutes. The SciSpace AI agent does this for academics and searches academic papers, rather than the internet, as the ChatGPT agent does. You can imagine that this opens...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
AI Atomic Sentences For Academic Writing Dear Scholar, My core approach to research involves breaking complex ideas down into atomic statements (or notes) and then creatively finding new connections to form new ideas. This method also works for academic writing, and it helped me to write my last paper in record time! In today's brief tutorial, I will share with you an AI assistant (prompt and link included) that breaks down complex papers into concise, simple sentences. These atomic sentences...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Sponsor: Anara Anara uses AI to help researchers quickly understand dense materials, whether academic papers, books, or lecture recordings, while keeping everything organized and traceable. Learn more about Anara.com Get 20% off: ILYA20 Writing Your Discussion With ChatGPT Deep Research Dear Scholar, I am just finishing the final edits for a paper we are about to submit. I took the opportunity to experiment with writing as much of it as possible using AI and my notes. Surprisingly, the...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Top 20 Resources for Effortless Academics Dear Scholar, Over the past few years, I have published numerous articles on various tools, techniques, and innovative applications of AI in academia. This week I am sending you the 17 most popular and essential tutorials: Digital Note-Taking: Foundations of my digital note-taking system Adding AI to your digital note collection in Obsidian The best way to read and annotate PDFs in Obsidian Making "Colorful" Links for more structure in Obsidian →...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Tool Review: Yomu.ai for Academic Writing Dear Scholar, I am currently refining my latest paper and experimenting with various tools to enhance my academic writing. Today, I want to present a deep dive into Yomu.ai, which might be the most collaborative academic writing tool. In my opinion, Yomu is more targeted at younger career researchers or academics who are pivoting to a new domain or doing cross-disciplinary research. A recent Nature study I was reading proposes that there is a "pivot...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Sponsor: Yomu.ai Yomu AI is a writing assistant for essays and research papers. It enables real-time collaboration and offers features like citation management (via Sourcely), text editing, feedback, and plagiarism checking—all in one place. Learn more about Yomu.ai Get 20% off monthly: EFFORTLESS20Get 40% off yearly: EFFORTLESS40 Tutorial: Following Journals, Authors, and Domains Dear Scholar, Most of you have developed a way of finding relevant literature for your work using various tools....
3 months ago • 1 min read
Tool Review: Paperpal for writing papers Dear Scholar, Writing papers is a process that can feel glacially slow the closer the manuscript gets to submission (and the more authors are involved). Paperpal promises to make polishing and editing faster and easier using AI that has been specifically trained on academic texts. I previously wrote about Paperpal about a year ago. Like every AI tool, things have evolved, and it's time for an update. Paperpal has added features such as contextual...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Sponsor: Anara Anara uses AI to help researchers quickly understand dense materials, whether academic papers, books, or lecture recordings, while keeping everything organized and traceable. Learn more about Anara Get 20% off with code ILYA20 Tutorial: Styling Links with Obsidian Dear Scholar, The Academic Knowledge Management Webinar 2.0 just concluded with over 200 academics joining. During this and previous webinars, people repeatedly asked me one thing about my Obsidian vault: How do I...
4 months ago • 1 min read