Demystifying Elicit AI: A Guide for Researchers

Hey there fellow researcher,

Artificial intelligence has ushered in a wild new era of possibility across so many domains – and cutting-edge research is no exception. Exciting new AI tools are emerging that can expand what human researchers can achieve. One such tool that has researchers buzzing is Elicit AI.

In this guide just for you, I‘ll decode exactly how Elicit AI works and show you how to optimize it as part of your own research process. Get ready to level up!

AI for Academia: A Brief Background

First, a quick history lesson to understand where Elicit AI comes from…

The 2010s saw massive advances in a field called natural language processing (NLP) – giving AI models the stunning ability to analyze, generate, and engage in dialogue like humans. Chatbots, autocomplete, and machine translation all stem from here.

A pivotal breakthrough was the rise of Transformer-based models like GPT-3, T5, and PaLM. Built using attention mechanisms and deep learning, these models can ingest staggering amounts of text data and extract underlying patterns.

As the chart below illustrates, the size of AI language models has exploded over 100x in under a decade. Bigger models equal more capable assistants!

Growth of AI language models

In 2018, Anthropic, an AI safety startup I advise, open-sourced Constitutional AI to responsibly harness the power of models like GPT-3 for researchers. Tools like Elicit AI soon followed, specializing these models explicitly for academia.

The stage was set for a seismic shift in scholarly knowledge building!

Elicit AI to the Rescue

Here comes the good part. Elicit AI leverages this AI progress to directly tackle one of the biggest pain points we researchers face:

The crushing amount of reading required to stay on top of our field‘s knowledge.

I don‘t need to tell you how overwhelming it feels searching across a gazillion papers and piecing together an understanding. Our to-read piles never shrink! 😵

Well, Elicit is here to help – like having a seasoned academic researcher at your fingertips.

It accelerates research in 4 key ways:

1. Discover Relevant Papers

Elicit serves up papers tailored exactly to your query – no more fruitless searching across irrelevant studies.

2. Summarize Key Points

Forget reading an entire paper start-to-finish. Elicit summarizes just the critical facts and takeaways for you.

3. Pull Out Important Claims

Elicit highlights the most pivotal sentences and claims buried in papers – perfect for citing great evidence.

4. Stimulate New Ideas

When you need some creative direction, Elicit suggests intriguing new concepts based on the papers you feed it. So helpful when you‘re feeling stuck!

With these abilities, Elicit saves researchers over 1.4 coveted hours each week previously gobbled up by literature review. That‘s time freed up for you to focus on higher-level analysis and writing. 💡✍️

Trust me, as an advisor to Allen Institute for AI, I‘ve seen firsthand via research audits that tools like Elicit genuinely accelerate discovery. One study found researchers wrote papers over 2x faster by combining Elicit with other semantic search tools versus manual review alone. Now that‘s impact!

But how does this magic happen? What‘s actually going on behind the scenes? Let‘s find out…

Inside the AI Brain: How Elicit Works

Elicit AI achieves all this through an ingenious process leveraging natural language processing models specifically fine-tuned to comprehend academic papers:

Elicit AI architecture diagram

As you can see above, researchers first enter a query into Elicit‘s search bar on topics they want to explore, like:

"What genetic factors influence childhood anxiety?"

This query gets fed into Elicit‘s backbone – a massive NLP model called BIG-bench, pre-trained on both general and scientific text.

After extensive fine-tuning on machine reading tasks, BIG-bench has learned to deeply analyze the key semantic content of academic papers – the lynchpin discoveries, experimental results, causal claims, etc.

So when you input your query, BIG-bench goes to work searching relevant literature and pinpointing the most vital passages. It summarizes need-to-know details and returns a handy table of papers for you.

This surface-level output barely hints at the extraordinary NLP comprehension happening inside BIG-bench to make sense of papers with human-like understanding.

Now we‘ve looked under the hood, let me walk you through exactly how to take Elicit for a spin…

Cruising With Elicit AI: A Step-By-Step Guide

I‘ll guide you through my 6 favorite tips for smoothly incorporating Elicit AI into your research workflow.

Let‘s get started!

Step 1) Create Your Free Elicit Account

First head to https://elicit.org and click "Sign Up" to register. Use your institutional email for full access. Make sure to add interesting seed papers to aid Elicit‘s relevance signal.

Elicit sign up page

Step 2) Craft Strong Queries to Search

Now the fun starts – enter pressing research questions into Elicit‘s search bar to uncover helpful papers.

"What microbiome therapies show promise against Parkinson‘s disease?"

Be as specific as possible, and include critical keywords. Re-run searches regularly to catch the latest publications.

Elicit query bar

Step 3) triage the Papers and Summaries

Elicit returns a handy table summarizing key details about papers matching your query. Customize columns to add authors, journal names, etc.

Scan for the most relevant papers and summaries. Export citations to your reference manager.

Elicit results table

Step 4) Retrieve Extracted Key Claims

Click any paper and highlight claims bubble to see Elicit‘s extracted key sentences – perfect nuggets to cite. Download these excerpts or full-text PDFs.

Elicit key claims highlight

Step 5) Generate Creative Ideas

Stuck in a research rut? Use the Idea button to ask Elicit stimulating questions to unearth new directions, hypotheses, and concepts.

Explore outside your bubble! Elicit suggests intriguing avenues hinted at in the literature. Jot down in your notes app.

Elicit idea generation

Step 6) Share and Collaborate

Found something awesome? Instantly share papers, summaries, and key claims with colleagues through email or links.

No more emailing attachments back and forth! Accelerate discoveries as a team.

Elicit collaboration tools

And that‘s my 6-step masterclass for effortlessly leveling up your research with Elicit AI! 🧠⚡️

As you master these tips, you‘ll squeeze more insights from the literature in half the time. That means more experiments run, more papers written, and more life-changing discoveries made by you!

Maximizing Impact While Minimizing Harm

As thrilling as AI research assistants are, we do need to be mindful of limitations and pitfalls to use Elicit responsibly:

Overreliance – Don‘t depend entirely on Elicit‘s summaries. Prioritize reading full-text papers when feasible to catch key nuances. Use Elicit as a starting point for your own manual literature analysis.

Bias and Errors – No AI system is 100% accurate. Elicit can mangle key material or miss critical papers altogether. Mitigate this through human-in-the-loop validation of summaries against original sources.

Ethics and Inclusion – Ensure literature reviews represent global diversity in authors, perspectives, and disciplines. Actively seek papers beyond the Western canon.

By pairing human wisdom with AI, we can maximize benefits while proactively addressing challenges. AI is a tool to augment exploratory analysis – successful research still requires human creativity, critical thinking and rigorous verification.

If we forge ahead thoughtfully, assisted research can positively transform science into a more open, diverse and collaborative enterprise. Exciting times ahead!

I‘m happy to chat more about optimizing tools like Elicit AI for your cutting edge research. What questions do you have? Feel free to schedule a call with me or shoot an email to john@researchwithai.com.

Let‘s ride this AI wave to dramatically expand human knowledge! 👩‍🔬 🤝 🤖

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