I have a growing frustration with how AI platforms have appropriated the word notebook. Google has Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM). Microsoft has M365 Copilot Notebooks. Neither of them is a notebook, and the distinction matters (at least to me) more than the branding suggests.
A notebook is where you capture ideas, both external ones and your own. You contribute to it. You write in it. A binder is where you collect things for reference. Some of those things might be yours, but you aren’t authoring anything. You’re just binding material together. A binder is assembled. A notebook is written.
Jupyter notebooks (and tools like them) get this right. You write the content, you weave in references, you capture the output. The notebook is yours because you made it.
What Gemini and Copilot shipped are binders. Feed the AI a pile of sources, let it index them, then ask it questions about what it ingested. Useful, absolutely. But the entire interaction is built around feeding the AI and consuming what it summarizes back. There is no page in the product for your own thinking. Nothing that captures your ideas. Your narrative.
To their credit, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity at least call these things Projects (or Spaces), which is more honest branding. But the gap is the same across all of them. These products are designed for the consumption of content, not the capture of thought.
And that gap is the whole point of a notebook. I want to talk through my ideas with something that understands the material I’ve collected. I want it to help pull the ideas out of me, and I want those ideas captured in the pages. References inform the writing; they aren’t the writing. References arrive as the writing demands them. Every idea starts with you. You have an intent. You have a problem space. You have a thought.
So yes, give me a set of references that ground a conversation, inform what has been done before, and what is currently understood as possible. Yes, give me an intelligent agent that understands it. But also give me the canvas to capture my sentiment and expression.