Summary

I make a large part of my living performing literature reviews to answer scientific questions. For years AI has been unable to do anything to lower my research workload, but back in August I tried Perplexity, and it immediately provided value far beyond what I’d gotten from other tools. This wasn’t a fair comparison because I hadn’t tried any other AI research assistant in months, which is decades in AI time. In this post I right that wrong by running two test questions through every major tool, plus a smaller tool recommended in the comments of the last post

Spoilers: the result was a rough tie between You.com and Elicit. Each placed first on one task and was among top-3 in the other.

Tasks + Results

Tl;dr:

You.com had a small edge in searching for papers, followed by Elicit and [...]

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Outline:

(00:08) Summary

(00:55) Tasks + Results

(01:37) Finding papers on water gargling as an antiviral

(03:50) Hepcidin

(04:57) (Lack of) Conflict of interest

(05:30) Conclusions

The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.

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First published:
October 12th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pvnYS9WrWDRprQGMm/ai-research-assistants-competition-2024q3-tie-between-elicit

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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“AI research assistants competition 2024Q3: Tie between Elicit and You.com” by Elizabeth

LessWrong (30+ Karma)