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Launch HN: Undermind (YC S24) – AI agent for discovering scientific papers

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Launch HN: Undermind (YC S24) – AI agent for discovering scientific papers

#41

Post by tom_hartke »

mangoparrot wrote: post #38

would this be able to find the latest articles on a given topic? let’s say i am interested in coffee and i’d like to get new research papers on it. would this work?

In short, yes, though it's geared toward topic search.

From a strategy perspective, we designed it for topic search because it makes more sense to find everything on a topic first, then filter for the most recent, if recent is what you want. That's because there is a lot of useful information in older articles (citation connections, what people discuss, and how), and gathering all that helps uncover the most relevant results. Conversely if you only ever filtered on articles in the last year, you might discover a few things, but you wouldn't have as much information to adapt to help the search work better.

So, you can ask for articles on coffee (though ideally it should be something a bit more specific, or there will be thousands of results). Our system will carefully find all articles, then you can filter for 2024 articles or look at the timeline.

Re: Launch HN: Undermind (YC S24) – AI agent for discovering scientific papers

#44

Post by sirlunchalot »

Very happy subscriber here, thank you for the tool. I do a lot of searching with it, however due to some changes in my life in the near future I will not need it as much so I wont be willing to spend $20 a month on it. So my question is, would you consider adding an option where one could pay per query rather than just per monthly subscription? I would love to use it for the occasional spark of curiosity when I want to know more about a certain topic without having to familiarise myself with the academic field surrounding it. Having a way for using undermind for situations like that would be truly amazing! Would gladly pay 1-2 or maybe even 3 dollars per extended query.

Re: Launch HN: Undermind (YC S24) – AI agent for discovering scientific papers

#45

Post by benzguo »

This is really cool! Both of my parents are cell biologists, and I've done some time in labs as well, so a lot of paper exploring and reading in the family. "Review" articles are a good index but something more on-demand makes a lot of sense, I can definitely see this being extremely useful.

Re: Launch HN: Undermind (YC S24) – AI agent for discovering scientific papers

#46

Post by jramette »

sirlunchalot wrote: post #44

Very happy subscriber here, thank you for the tool. I do a lot of searching with it, however due to some changes in my life in the near future I will not need it as much so I wont be willing to spend $20 a month on it. So my question is, would you consider adding an option where one could pay per query rather than just per monthly subscription? I would love to use it for the occasional spark of curiosity when I want…

We've thought quite a bit about usage-based pricing, but found that doesn't work psychologically for most people. Generally, people seem happier by paying up front for access, then feel good about having the system available whenever they need it, rather then having to think through cost tradeoffs every time they want to do a search or use up credits. Please do reach out at support@undermind.ai though, we'd love to talk about a solution for you and get your feedback.

Re: Launch HN: Undermind (YC S24) – AI agent for discovering scientific papers

#47

Post by jramette »

shashkingregory wrote: post #35
tom_hartke wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Semantic Scholar seems more focused on 1. being the data provider/aggregator for the research community, and 2. long term, I think they plan to develop software at the reading interface that learns as a researcher uses it to browse papers (a rich PDF reader, with hyperlinks, TLDRs, citation contexts, and a way to track your interactions over time, and remind you of what you've seen or not). Their core feature now is…

I've used undermind for literature search and it was very precise! Thanks for the product! I wonder how you plan to extend the search to full paper content (will Semantic Scholar api allow this) - and do you plan to connect more datasets (which ones)? (many of them are paid...)

We'll certainly be able to include open access full texts, which is already a substantial fraction of the published papers, and a growing fraction too, as the publishing industry is rapidly moving toward open access. Paywalled full text search would require working with the publishers, which is more involved.

Re: Launch HN: Undermind (YC S24) – AI agent for discovering scientific papers

#48

Post by toisanji »

tom_hartke wrote: post #10
brainwipe wrote: post #9

Independent researcher without academic address; can't get in. Best of luck.

You should be able to try it here without loggin in: https://www.undermind.ai/query_app/promotion/ (set up for HN today). If not message support@undermind.ai and I'll set you up.

can you fix it so anyone can get it, that sounds like a waste of time to block people.

Re: Launch HN: Undermind (YC S24) – AI agent for discovering scientific papers

#50

Post by mrweiden »

Ref to prior art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_(academic_company)

One anecdote that I heard from the team developing it: turned out that researchers more readily sourced material from their social networks, notably twitter at the time. Meta's search functionality didn't receive enough traffic and eventually was shut down.

Perhaps LLMs will make the search capability more compelling. I guess we'll see.

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