4 ms·

Elicit

109 points by apsec112 5y ago

still_grokking 5y ago
That's cool! Could we have a desktop version to data-mine local collections of knowledge material (i.e. all kinds of media)? I would really like an AI desktop search engine that can answer natural language questions.
- api 5y ago
  > Could we have a desktop version to data-mine local collections of knowledge material (i.e. all kinds of media)? What? You can run software on a computer you own? How does it work if it doesn't have cloud in it?
  - still_grokking 5y ago
    Some ancient magic, I guess.
- stuhlmueller 5y ago
  Same! Pretty sure there will be tons of products for semantic search over local & cloud files within the next 1-2 years. For now we've chosen to build Elicit around aggregating and synthesizing research - what is the evidence in each paper, what are the arguments, how do they come together to inform questions people care about? We think research is a good starting point for figuring out how to use language models to do high-quality reasoning because (a) researchers care a lot about what's true and (b) research is already more structured than most other sources of knowledge.
  - still_grokking 5y ago
    I would be fine with something that would sort and structure my collection of research papers as a starter. :-) Actually it would be interesting to mix in some world-knowledge base like Cyc into such tool to make querying more powerful, and maybe even enable deduction of additional information out of the recognized facts and structures. But it should still run locally of course. I'm refusing to pay for any SaaS offers. Especially as it comes to research with commercial background it's also a matter of confidentiality. So I guess I'm not the only one who would prefer to have such a thing strictly on-prem.
sharmin123 5y ago
Avoid Hacking Threats: Hacking Risk You Face With Gadgets: https://www.hackerslist.co/avoid-hacking-threats-hacking-risk-you-face-with-gadgets/ https://www.hackerslist.co/avoid-hacking-threats-hacking-ris...
elwell 5y ago
Would be interested in seeing a little more details about what it does, before signing up.
- stuhlmueller 5y ago
  Cofounder here - Elicit is an AI research assistant. Right now it's focused on helping people answer research questions by searching over claims instead of papers. You can also teach Elicit to do custom tasks by giving input-output examples of intended behavior, e.g. for brainstorming counterarguments or decomposing research questions. Our mailing list at list.elicit.org has more about what we've recently been adding.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - rp1 5y ago
    What’s the corpus that’s searched?
    - stuhlmueller 5y ago
      Semantic Scholar via API (195M papers)
      - rcarmo 5y ago
        Does that include medical info? I have a friend building a pro-bono Multiple Sclerosis information database who might be interested.
        stuhlmueller 5y ago
        Yes, includes PubMed, medRxiv, and a few others. The list of publishers is at https://www.semanticscholar.org/about/publishers https://www.semanticscholar.org/about/publishers
  - 5y ago
thamer 5y ago
Pretty cool product. From playing around a little with it, just a few points of feedback. The first issue I noticed was with LaTeX syntax being presented in search results, e.g. "$${\text {O}}\bigl (f\bigr )$$O(f) rounds or $${\text {O}}\bigl (f\delta \bigr )$$O(fδ) time to achieve consensus". This also appeared in "Most Relevant Sentence" on my favorites page for the same paper (DOI: 10.1007/s00236-019-00334-w). I also tried abstract summarization with the whitepaper for Cassandra's "CEP-15: General Purpose Transactions", and it came up with completely made-up facts such as describing the ACCORD algorithm (not an acronym) as Atomic Consensus by Convex Ordering of Replicated Data, something like that. I don't know what convex means in this context, but I would suggest tuning this particular feature to be a bit less creative :-) There seem to be many more features that I haven't tried yet – or don't really have a need for – and it would be good to see those explained more, with examples/tutorials and generally more documentation. I also second beshrkayali's earlier complaint that the follow-up email is spam. I unsubscribed and reported it as such. I never signed up for this and was never warned I would sign up or given the option not to. Do better.
elwell 5y ago
The "Positive reframe" task setting is fun: "Don't stab me with that knife" --> "There are lots of ways that person can hurt me other than by stabbing me with a knife"

109 points by apsec112 5y ago

That's cool! Could we have a desktop version to data-mine local collections of knowledge material (i.e. all kinds of media)? I would really like an AI desktop search engine that can answer natural language questions.

api 5y ago
> Could we have a desktop version to data-mine local collections of knowledge material (i.e. all kinds of media)? What? You can run software on a computer you own? How does it work if it doesn't have cloud in it?
- still_grokking 5y ago
  Some ancient magic, I guess.
stuhlmueller 5y ago
Same! Pretty sure there will be tons of products for semantic search over local & cloud files within the next 1-2 years. For now we've chosen to build Elicit around aggregating and synthesizing research - what is the evidence in each paper, what are the arguments, how do they come together to inform questions people care about? We think research is a good starting point for figuring out how to use language models to do high-quality reasoning because (a) researchers care a lot about what's true and (b) research is already more structured than most other sources of knowledge.
- still_grokking 5y ago
  I would be fine with something that would sort and structure my collection of research papers as a starter. :-) Actually it would be interesting to mix in some world-knowledge base like Cyc into such tool to make querying more powerful, and maybe even enable deduction of additional information out of the recognized facts and structures. But it should still run locally of course. I'm refusing to pay for any SaaS offers. Especially as it comes to research with commercial background it's also a matter of confidentiality. So I guess I'm not the only one who would prefer to have such a thing strictly on-prem.

sharmin123 5y ago

Avoid Hacking Threats: Hacking Risk You Face With Gadgets: https://www.hackerslist.co/avoid-hacking-threats-hacking-risk-you-face-with-gadgets/ https://www.hackerslist.co/avoid-hacking-threats-hacking-ris...

elwell 5y ago

Would be interested in seeing a little more details about what it does, before signing up.

stuhlmueller 5y ago
Cofounder here - Elicit is an AI research assistant. Right now it's focused on helping people answer research questions by searching over claims instead of papers. You can also teach Elicit to do custom tasks by giving input-output examples of intended behavior, e.g. for brainstorming counterarguments or decomposing research questions. Our mailing list at list.elicit.org has more about what we've recently been adding.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rp1 5y ago
  What’s the corpus that’s searched?
  - stuhlmueller 5y ago
    Semantic Scholar via API (195M papers)
    - rcarmo 5y ago
      Does that include medical info? I have a friend building a pro-bono Multiple Sclerosis information database who might be interested.
      - stuhlmueller 5y ago
        Yes, includes PubMed, medRxiv, and a few others. The list of publishers is at https://www.semanticscholar.org/about/publishers https://www.semanticscholar.org/about/publishers
- 5y ago

thamer 5y ago

Pretty cool product. From playing around a little with it, just a few points of feedback. The first issue I noticed was with LaTeX syntax being presented in search results, e.g. "$${\text {O}}\bigl (f\bigr )$$O(f) rounds or $${\text {O}}\bigl (f\delta \bigr )$$O(fδ) time to achieve consensus". This also appeared in "Most Relevant Sentence" on my favorites page for the same paper (DOI: 10.1007/s00236-019-00334-w). I also tried abstract summarization with the whitepaper for Cassandra's "CEP-15: General Purpose Transactions", and it came up with completely made-up facts such as describing the ACCORD algorithm (not an acronym) as Atomic Consensus by Convex Ordering of Replicated Data, something like that. I don't know what convex means in this context, but I would suggest tuning this particular feature to be a bit less creative :-) There seem to be many more features that I haven't tried yet – or don't really have a need for – and it would be good to see those explained more, with examples/tutorials and generally more documentation. I also second beshrkayali's earlier complaint that the follow-up email is spam. I unsubscribed and reported it as such. I never signed up for this and was never warned I would sign up or given the option not to. Do better.

elwell 5y ago

The "Positive reframe" task setting is fun: "Don't stab me with that knife" --> "There are lots of ways that person can hurt me other than by stabbing me with a knife"