Claude Cowork has one crazy advantage that not even I knew about… until yesterday.
It doesn’t care about the size of the files it processes. I know, it sounds obvious, but hear me out.
If you try to do some analysis on large files in the Gemini Chatbot, you’re pretty much out of luck. NotebookLM has many limits:
- Max 200 MB per uploaded file for local sources like PDFs, Word docs, text, audio, etc.
- 500,000 words of text per source
- 200 MB per uploaded file
- 50 sources (free) per notebook
- 100 notebooks per account
Claude Cowork is the Honey Badger of file access:
I had it crush through 10GB of locally stored data — some that were individual 4.8GB files. I asked it to find 12 findings that were probably missed from previous reports.
- 3.6 million birth records
- Cross-tabbed against 2023 public data files
- Four data files and one PDF file
It produced a beautiful analysis of US Natality Data. Sure it churned for a bit, but I was honestly not expecting it to handle that volume.
It said… hold my beer.
As I’ve worked helping researchers understand these tools, I can’t think of anything better for those who want results from massive data sources.
I LOVE Gemini, but it has its limits. Cowork? Not so much.
