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The most underrated use of AI isn’t learning faster—it’s becoming capable of learning knowledge that’s deeper, harder, and more abstract.
In this article, I share how I use AI to teach myself a textbook step by step, and why the gains in depth + quality have been mind-blowing.
It’s been a while since I’ve written a letter to the @Heptabase community, and it’s been a while since I hosted my last AMA. Today, I’m doing both.
I know you have many questions about what we’ve been shipping in the past few months and what we’re going to ship in the upcoming months. I will use this letter and the AMA to answer these questions for you. Feel free to ask me anything in the comments under this Reddit post. I will start answering questions tomorrow!
reddit.com/r/heptabase/comme…
I started @Heptabase 4 years ago, with the mission to give people the power to gain a deep understanding of anything. We began by building a visual knowledge base for students, researchers, and lifelong learners. It quickly became a beloved product used in over 150+ countries around the world, won the @ProductHunt annual Golden Kitty Award in the Personal Productivity category, and scaled profitably into millions in revenue.
However, I’m not satisfied. For sure, it’s a great app to organize and make sense of all your learning and research notes. But it’s still far from our mission. You can’t learn quantum mechanics or the theory of relativity just by downloading Heptabase. You still need to have a teacher or spend a lot of time reading difficult sources on your own before you can get the most value out of Heptabase.
Things have changed today. I’m very excited to introduce Heptabase’s AI Tutor — an AI agent that is designed to help you achieve any learning goal you’ve set. This is not another “upload and ask” AI app like ChatGPT, Gemini, or NotebookLM. It’s built to help you make step-by-step progress toward your goal:
1. Goal-Oriented Curriculum: Simply state your learning goal (e.g., study Western philosophy, understand international politics, pass the bar exam, or achieve financial freedom), and the AI Tutor will design a personalized syllabus tailored to your level and needs.
2. Systematic & Personalized Learning: Instead of trying to figure out what question to ask, the AI Tutor guides you. It provides step-by-step reading materials—allowing you to highlight important content and ask questions about anything you don't understand—then tests your understanding and dynamically adapts to your learning style and pace over time.
3. Seamless Note-taking Integration: Your highlights, notes, and Q&A sessions are automatically organized onto dedicated whiteboards and converted into clean review notes. You have the best note-taking experience in the world available to you while learning with AI!
AI Tutor is another significant product milestone that helps us move toward our mission. In the past two months, I have taken over 50 lessons using AI Tutor, and the experience is just mind-blowing. It’s a dream come true for all curious people who want to understand more about the world. I really wish I had it when I was a kid!
AI Tutor is now available for all Premium Plan users and will be available for Pro users soon. Try it out, tell your friends, and share your feedback with us! I hope you enjoy it!
One of my favorite features!
🚀 New in Heptabase: PDF Parser
- Extract text, tables, equations & images (even from scanned PDFs) → save as clean Markdown
- Ask AI with precise context (page ranges & paragraphs) → responses include link refs back to the source
- MAX mode ensures AI reads every word → perfect for translation, summarization & fact-checking
Alan Chan retweeted
★ Dynamicland's new website documents ten years of progress toward a humane dynamic medium. dynamicland.org
I hosted an AMA in @Heptabase 's Discord community last weekend. Check out this thread to see my responses to the top upvoted questions, which cover the following topics:
- Heptabase's position in the PKM market and its attitude toward AI.
- Heptabase's attitude toward interoperability.
- Heptabase's plans for team expansion.
- Heptabase's plans for upcoming feature direction.
- Heptabase's plans for diagramming.
- Heptabase's plans for long-form writing.
- Heptabase's plans for whiteboard collaboration.
- Heptabase's daily use case.
Heptabase's plans for whiteboard collaboration.
The reason we’re building the Whiteboard: Collaboration and Discussion is the same as the reason we build other feature: we want to better serve our users who’s working on a complex project, which a lot of times involves a lot of discussions and feedback loops that result in a high volume of text responses that are hard to trace back and make use of in the future. We’re less interested in solving the problem of “presentation” and more interested in helping our users gradually build “structure” on top of all the discussions they have around a topic.
There will be two phases of implementation. The first phase is rather trivial, which is laying out the technical foundation of the permission model where you can invite other people to your whiteboard, collaboratively edit this whiteboard, let other people bring their own cards to your whiteboard, etc. The second phase is more important, which involves introducing the discussion feature that has a lot of interplay with the whiteboard.
Heptabase's daily use case.
I always start my day by deciding what I want to work on and writing down my to-dos in the Journal. For example, today I’m focusing on researching “application layer design.” My to-dos include the things I want to read, the questions I want to answer, etc. I’ll then go to the “Product” tab group and enter the pinned whiteboard called “Application Layer” to stare at it and think, add new content to existing cards, add new cards, add new connections, rearrange cards, break down cards, etc. During the process, I might clip some internet content or add some PDFs I found to the whiteboard, break it down into atomic cards, delete useless cards, rewrite the headers of useful cards in my own words, etc. That’s pretty much it.
Over the course of a few weeks, the whiteboard will go from empty to messy to structured, and then eventually I might write a document that synthesizes my research on this whiteboard and share this document with my team. When drafting this document, I always open it on the right sidebar of the whiteboard and start by adding relevant links from the whiteboard to the document (using the copy link feature), so I can click those links to navigate the whiteboard and replace those links with the words I write.
