Research — answers, not just links

What it is

AI research tools are built for the act of understanding — digesting sources, surfacing evidence, connecting ideas across papers and documents. They differ from search engines in that they synthesise rather than list. The best ones cite their sources, flag uncertainty, and let you interrogate the answer rather than just read it.

Why now

The combination of large context windows (letting models ingest whole documents) and retrieval-augmented generation (grounding answers in specific sources) made AI research tools genuinely reliable for the first time in 2023–2024. NotebookLM and Perplexity became serious tools, not curiosities.