The ultimate solution for a personal knowledge base, just remember these two points:
- Put your own stuff in Obsidian.
- Put other people’s stuff in NotebookLM.
Your own stuff should definitely be local-first. Never trust any company, even if it is at the height of its power. Put it in Obsidian, where each note is a Markdown document and is extremely AI-friendly. You can process it with Obsidian’s AI plugins, or with Claude Code. It’s very convenient and highly customizable.
As for other people’s stuff, there’s no need to worry about privacy—focus on performance. NotebookLM is the most suitable and also the most powerful tool right now. If you really can’t use it, then something like ima is fine as a stopgap.