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This was a fascinating read. The well-meaning and hard-working author went through several iterations of trying to make a profit on 'academic-knowledge-graph-ad

This was a fascinating read. The well-meaning and hard-working author went through several iterations of trying to make a profit on 'academic-knowledge-graph-adjacent' products, but things ultimately fell through. The article describes two separate things likely to appeal to HN readers. The first is that there is a lot of tacit knowledge not captured in scientific publications. The second is that the author and his team, despite best efforts, never found product-market fit. To the first point: it wasn't until I got to graduate school that I realized that the scientific literature isn't exactly 'An accurate record of true facts.' It is instead the paper-trail of a slow-moving conversation among researchers, where old ideas are slowly jettisoned and new ideas are evaluated and tried on. To the second point, a few reactions: * If your primary market / audience is graduate students or post-docs, good luck! You can't sell to people who don't have money: grad students are paid around minimum wage, postdocs its slightly better. If I had to sell a science or research-adjacent product, I'd either sell to entire departments or colleges / campuses. This is likely a pretty protracted sales process and doesn't seem pleasant. * I wonder if Law would be a better place to start. Either selling to law-firms directly (building tools for generating internal knowledge graphs when they are given 80k documents in the discovery process), or particularly for IP lawyers. IP lawyers have the money and expertise to have their skills augmented by AI-powered literature searches. I have to imagine it's not just patents they read when looking for prior art. * I wonder if the author and his team tried to solve too broad of a problem: they never seem to have gotten hyper-specific, and built something from the bottom up.

PaulHoule 3y ago
Corporate filings. Business intelligence. There is value in those areas. Science is too esoteric. And boy there are a lot of papers that don’t really signify anything at all but they fill up some pages and add to somebody’s paper count. It is a hoot that they sell access to individual scientific papers for $35 because if you think one will help you with some commercial problem you have the odds are the real value is $0.00.
- riku_iki 3y ago
  > Corporate filings. Business intelligence. There is value in those areas also, lots of competition already
  - Etheryte 3y ago
    Competition is good, it means there is a market. There's plenty of empty niches with no competition exactly because there's no money there.
    - riku_iki 3y ago
      As for corporate fillings, there are lots of strong products already, also data in those fillings is rather limited. "Business intelligence" is very broad term, maybe it is possible to find market fit there, since area is moving very fast, but hard to judge without seeing specifics.
      - hbcondo714 3y ago
        I happen to run a corporate filings product[1] so I'm curious to know in what way you find the data in filings limited. There are financial statements (ex. balance sheet) & disclosures (ex. litigation) in 100+ page annual reports so our tool makes it easier to find them. We also do AI (ex. sentiment analysis) and diffs (ex. redline / blackline) which yield their own insights. [1] https://last10k.com https://last10k.com
        riku_iki 3y ago
        > so I'm curious to know in what way you find the data in filings limited. to me every filling has maybe 20 essential numbers which are interesting: balance sheet, income statement and major sectors, everything else is some generic boilerplate, and there are dozens of services which will already sell it for cheap. Not sure what else you can sell to your clients..
        3y ago
luma 3y ago
Law firms have about as much money as pharma, and the major legal research services (Westlaw et al) already have LLM based offerings.
Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
Academic here. To be honest, while the author's depiction of academic publishing is mostly not wrong, they make it sound much worse than it actually is. Folk knowledge is a thing, but papers do contain most of the valuable knowledge if you know how to read them. I think 95% of this person's failure to monetize their product comes from trying to sell it to an audience that is just quite broke, and the rest is probably mostly post hoc rationalization. Not only grad students and postdoc wages are low, in many countries (not the US) professors aren't well paid either (and buying software subscriptions from grant funds is often not allowed or difficult due to crazy bureaucracy). As a full professor myself, I almost don't buy software for work. I suffer the torture of Microsoft Office, which my institution is subscribed to, I'm subscribed to Overleaf with grant money (for now, but I might be forced to cancel depending on how the funding goes) and I pay for ChatGPT out of pocket because trying to use grant money for that is bureaucratic hell. That's all. It would take a really transformative piece of software for me to subscribe to something else.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  What do you use ChatGPT for? I know this has been discussed to death but never by someone outside of the mobile app writing business.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
    Quite a lot of things. A (probably non-exhaustive, off the top of my head) of things where it saves me the most time: - Bureaucracy. Writing silly boilerplate, e.g. data management plans or gender perspective statements in grant proposals. - Cutting or expanding text (we routinely have lots of forms and submissions where you need to write a text in a given word or character range). - Polite emails in English to people I don't know much (e.g. "Write a polite professional email reminding this person that the deadline for reviewing paper Y expired yesterday...") - Brainstorming. "Give me 10 ideas about research direction in topic X". It won't give great ideas, but it's good to set the mind rolling. - Routine scripts/code used in experiments and papers: write a Python script to make a box plot with such and such data, or to take a file in this format and strip this unneeded content, etc. The typical kind of code that appears a lot in research, is trivial to code but consumes time and ChatGPT does it in seconds. - Suggest titles (paper titles, grant proposal titles, etc.). - Suggest ideas for exercises or exam questions (e.g. write an assignment that can be solved with the coin change algorithm but involves no coins or currency). - How to do X in Excel (although the problem here is that my Excel is in Spanish - why, why did they decide to translate function names? - and it's not that good at that - but anyway, it's very useful). The productivity boost is very noticeable, well worth the cost, even if it hurts to pay out of pocket for a tool used at work.
bigger_cheese 3y ago
I'm an Engineer (not a scientist) not sure how much is applicable to other fields but when I've been interested in what the "current state of topic X is" I have looked for recently published thesis on the topic, a good thesis will have summarized the papers for me (gone through all the churn of papers and highlighted the key points). I think this is kind of what the author attempted to build (i.e. something that spits out the Literature review portion of a thesis.) I think that's probably why graduate students were excited - they are the people who have to write a thesis at the end of the day.

PaulHoule 3y ago

Corporate filings. Business intelligence. There is value in those areas. Science is too esoteric. And boy there are a lot of papers that don’t really signify anything at all but they fill up some pages and add to somebody’s paper count. It is a hoot that they sell access to individual scientific papers for $35 because if you think one will help you with some commercial problem you have the odds are the real value is $0.00.

riku_iki 3y ago
> Corporate filings. Business intelligence. There is value in those areas also, lots of competition already
- Etheryte 3y ago
  Competition is good, it means there is a market. There's plenty of empty niches with no competition exactly because there's no money there.
  - riku_iki 3y ago
    As for corporate fillings, there are lots of strong products already, also data in those fillings is rather limited. "Business intelligence" is very broad term, maybe it is possible to find market fit there, since area is moving very fast, but hard to judge without seeing specifics.
    - hbcondo714 3y ago
      I happen to run a corporate filings product[1] so I'm curious to know in what way you find the data in filings limited. There are financial statements (ex. balance sheet) & disclosures (ex. litigation) in 100+ page annual reports so our tool makes it easier to find them. We also do AI (ex. sentiment analysis) and diffs (ex. redline / blackline) which yield their own insights. [1] https://last10k.com https://last10k.com
      - riku_iki 3y ago
        > so I'm curious to know in what way you find the data in filings limited. to me every filling has maybe 20 essential numbers which are interesting: balance sheet, income statement and major sectors, everything else is some generic boilerplate, and there are dozens of services which will already sell it for cheap. Not sure what else you can sell to your clients..
        3y ago

luma 3y ago

Law firms have about as much money as pharma, and the major legal research services (Westlaw et al) already have LLM based offerings.

Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago

Academic here. To be honest, while the author's depiction of academic publishing is mostly not wrong, they make it sound much worse than it actually is. Folk knowledge is a thing, but papers do contain most of the valuable knowledge if you know how to read them. I think 95% of this person's failure to monetize their product comes from trying to sell it to an audience that is just quite broke, and the rest is probably mostly post hoc rationalization. Not only grad students and postdoc wages are low, in many countries (not the US) professors aren't well paid either (and buying software subscriptions from grant funds is often not allowed or difficult due to crazy bureaucracy). As a full professor myself, I almost don't buy software for work. I suffer the torture of Microsoft Office, which my institution is subscribed to, I'm subscribed to Overleaf with grant money (for now, but I might be forced to cancel depending on how the funding goes) and I pay for ChatGPT out of pocket because trying to use grant money for that is bureaucratic hell. That's all. It would take a really transformative piece of software for me to subscribe to something else.

whatshisface 3y ago
What do you use ChatGPT for? I know this has been discussed to death but never by someone outside of the mobile app writing business.
- Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
  Quite a lot of things. A (probably non-exhaustive, off the top of my head) of things where it saves me the most time: - Bureaucracy. Writing silly boilerplate, e.g. data management plans or gender perspective statements in grant proposals. - Cutting or expanding text (we routinely have lots of forms and submissions where you need to write a text in a given word or character range). - Polite emails in English to people I don't know much (e.g. "Write a polite professional email reminding this person that the deadline for reviewing paper Y expired yesterday...") - Brainstorming. "Give me 10 ideas about research direction in topic X". It won't give great ideas, but it's good to set the mind rolling. - Routine scripts/code used in experiments and papers: write a Python script to make a box plot with such and such data, or to take a file in this format and strip this unneeded content, etc. The typical kind of code that appears a lot in research, is trivial to code but consumes time and ChatGPT does it in seconds. - Suggest titles (paper titles, grant proposal titles, etc.). - Suggest ideas for exercises or exam questions (e.g. write an assignment that can be solved with the coin change algorithm but involves no coins or currency). - How to do X in Excel (although the problem here is that my Excel is in Spanish - why, why did they decide to translate function names? - and it's not that good at that - but anyway, it's very useful). The productivity boost is very noticeable, well worth the cost, even if it hurts to pay out of pocket for a tool used at work.

bigger_cheese 3y ago

I'm an Engineer (not a scientist) not sure how much is applicable to other fields but when I've been interested in what the "current state of topic X is" I have looked for recently published thesis on the topic, a good thesis will have summarized the papers for me (gone through all the churn of papers and highlighted the key points). I think this is kind of what the author attempted to build (i.e. something that spits out the Literature review portion of a thesis.) I think that's probably why graduate students were excited - they are the people who have to write a thesis at the end of the day.