A free AI chat you can just start using.
No account, no paywall, no “upgrade to continue.” Type a question and go. It also makes images, and if you want, it'll teach you something one step at a time instead of dumping it all at once. Runs on Google Gemini.
First time using one of these? A few things worth reading: writing better prompts, Gemini vs ChatGPT, and studying smarter with AI, or browse the full blog.
What people are asking
Click any to use it — or just start typing.
Stuff I've written
Prompts that worked, tools I've tried, and the occasional “here's what I learned the hard way.”
- Trends · 6 min
A Stealth Model Beat GPT-5.6 at Coding, ChatGPT Went to 300,000 Teachers, and Claude Kept Falling Over
A free, anonymous model called Ox Alpha topped coding benchmarks for a week before Z.ai revealed it as GLM-5.3-Flash. OpenAI expanded ChatGPT for Teachers to 55 more school districts under a 16-state privacy agreement. And Anthropic logged its sixth Claude API disruption of the month. Three stories about provenance, compliance, and reliability — the parts of shipping a chatbot that don't show up in a benchmark chart.
- Trends · 6 min
Agents Just Became AI's Biggest Customer — Now the Industry Is Racing to Make That Affordable
OpenRouter data shows agentic workloads now burn 5-15x more tokens than a normal chat turn and have overtaken human usage entirely, growing roughly 14x since February. Writer answered with a cheaper Palmyra X6 harness, OpenAI is pushing everyone off the Assistants API onto the cost-optimized Responses API, and Toyota is running 50+ production agents that prove the economics can work at scale.
- Trends · 7 min
Claude's Agent Toolkit Goes GA, Perplexity Rebuilds Itself as an Agent Platform, and Anthropic Bets on Trust Infrastructure
Computer use, the new browser use tool, the Skills API, and the Files API all left beta on the Claude Platform this week, while Perplexity repositioned its API around four building blocks for agent developers and Anthropic launched a $5M wellbeing research grant plus a free learning hub. Three signals that the chatbot platforms are quietly turning into agent infrastructure providers.
- Trends · 5 min
The Speed War Hits Chatbots, State AGs Write a Liability Playbook, and Reddit Vanishes From ChatGPT
Google and OpenAI both shipped speed-first releases on the same day — Gemini 3.7 Flash and a Cerebras-powered Ultrafast tier for GPT-5.6 Sol — while Kentucky and Pennsylvania opened two distinct state-AG legal theories against companion chatbots, and Reddit's presence in ChatGPT answers collapsed after a retrieval change. Three signals about how fragile the current chatbot stack still is, on latency, liability, and the sources it quietly depends on.
- Trends · 5 min
The Chatbot Is Leaving the Browser Tab: Agent-Native Browsers, On-Device Models, and AI That Does Your Research
Cloudflare shipped a Chromium-free browser built for AI agents alongside the x402 payment protocol, Gartner projects 40% of enterprise AI workloads will shift to small on-device models by 2027, and Google turned Gemini into a voice-driven research partner with its new Student Hub. Three infrastructure shifts pointing at the same thing: the chatbot is outgrowing the single cloud-API-in-a-browser-tab shape it launched in.
- Trends · 5 min
Binance and Alipay Just Gave AI Agents Real Money to Move, and OpenAI Gave Users a Dial to Control What ChatGPT Remembers
Binance launched Agent OS to let AI agents trade crypto through capped, revocable subaccounts, Alipay rolled out a full-stack agentic commerce protocol connecting Ah Bao to merchants across devices, Info-Tech Research Group warned that pilot-era agent stacks are outrunning static governance, and OpenAI shipped granular per-chat and per-project memory controls for ChatGPT. Four signals of the same shift: agents are getting real authority, and the guardrails are becoming the product.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it actually free, or is this a free-trial thing?
Actually free. There's no trial clock and no card on file. We make money from a small ad on the page, which is what keeps the chat itself free for you.
Do I have to make an account?
No. There's no signup step to skip past — you land on the page and the chat box is already there. That's sort of the whole point.
What do people use it for?
Mostly the everyday stuff: quick questions, fixing up an email, debugging a bit of code, making an image, or learning something. There's a Learn Mode that teaches a topic in order rather than all at once, which tends to be the part people stick around for.
How does the "teach me something" mode work?
You tell it what you want to learn and it sketches out a path, then walks you through it one piece at a time. It checks in to make sure you're following, and if you miss something it backs up instead of barreling ahead. Your progress sticks around, so you can leave and pick it up later.
How is this different from ChatGPT?
Same idea, different engine — this runs on Google Gemini. The honest difference is friction: no account, no message cap for normal use, and image generation and the tutor are built in. ChatGPT has its own strengths; we wrote a whole post comparing them if you want the long version.
What happens to my conversations?
There's no account, so there's no chat history saved to a profile — once you close the tab, the conversation isn't sitting somewhere tied to you. Like any AI tool, messages pass through the model to generate a reply, so use common sense and don't paste anything you'd be uneasy sending to a third party.
Are there limits I should know about?
Nothing you'll bump into during normal use. We only step in if someone's clearly scripting it or hammering it, which keeps it fast for everyone else.
Does it work on my phone?
Yep. It's just a web page, so any browser on any device is fine — nothing to install.
How it stacks up
There's no “best” free AI — it depends what you're doing. But here's the straight comparison against ChatGPT's free tier and Gemini, the two you've probably already tried.
| Smillee AI | ChatGPT (free) | Gemini (direct) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Signup required | No | Yes (email) | Google account |
| Daily message limits | None for normal use | Tight on free tier | Generous |
| Price | Free | Free tier | Free tier |
| AI image generation | Yes | Limited on free | Yes |
| Adaptive step-by-step tutor | Yes | No | No |
| Underlying model | Google Gemini | GPT-4-class | Google Gemini |
Credit where it's due: ChatGPT has the slicker ecosystem and voice mode, and Gemini chews through long documents better than we do. What we're betting on is the friction — you get Gemini-grade answers without the signup or the message cap, and image generation and the tutor come along for free. If you want the long version, here's Gemini vs ChatGPT or our roundup of free ChatGPT alternatives.