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

I think we associate learning/discovery with those moments because they happen together, not because they're causally related.

I think this is somewhat equivalent to how we used to have to learn 100 different integrals and derivatives in calculus. That's somewhat helpful. I learned to see patterns in math like that, the same way I learned a decent bit by browsing irrelevant abstracts and follow citation trails. But physically memorizing 100s of integrals is mostly a waste, and so are the irrelevant abstracts. You'll be much better at math (and hopefully science) if you can learn ~10 key integrals or read ~10 abstracts, and then spend the rest of your time understanding the high level patterns and implications by talking with an expert. Just like I can now ask GPT-4 to explain why some integral formula is true, which ones are related, and so on.

And that's the last point - these literature search tools aren't developing in isolation. We will get to have a local "expert" to discuss what we find with. That changes the cost-benefit analysis too.

If it's easy/fast to check the literature, hopefully people's instinct changes. If we had time, we should be doing that for any small idea.

quite impressive! This is really more like what I was hoping Elicit would be.

Are you breakdown the question into subtopics, doing a broad search and then doing some sort of dim reduction -> topical clustering to get it in the format?

Hi Josh and Tom, thank you for the post.

Are there any plans on releasing any sort of API integration? I work in Technology Transfer consultancy for research institutes in Europe, and often we have to do manual evaluation of publications for novelty check and similar developments. Since most of the projects we work on were developed by leading researchers in academic institutions, it is important for us to quickly assess if a certain topic has been studied already.

Currently, one of my company's internal projects is a LLM-powered software to automate much of the manual search, together with other features related to the industry.

I think it be very beneficial for us to implement academic papers search function, but for that an API system would be required.

Great work nonetheless, good luck on the journey

I did a search on an obscure topic I like and got impressively well informed results, so hats off to you. If this isn't an awkward question, how does one avoid running afoul of Google's rules against crawling when implementing a service like this? If someone were to post a link to a report obtained through your service on a blog or something, would that be a good thing in your view or more like piracy?