Blog

Updates from the Elicit team

Introducing Notebooks: A New Way to Analyze Papers in Elicit

We're excited to introduce Notebooks, a new interface to Elicit that revolutionizes the way you analyze and work with research papers. Notebooks let you combine papers from multiple searches, chat with them, create summaries, and conduct systematic literature searches, all on one page. Notebooks enable several new workflows

How we launch a user-facing feature every week

After two years of launching a user-facing feature a week, we've found a sustainable rhythm that allows us to move fast in unison. We also know what not to do and what we still need to do better.

Discovering alignment windfalls reduces AI risk

Some approaches to AI alignment incur upfront costs to the creator (an “alignment tax”). In this post, I discuss “alignment windfalls” which are strategies that tend towards the long-term public good at the same time as reaping short-term benefits for a company.

Coding assistants in technical interviews: our stance

With the rise of coding assistants like Copilot, the habits and practices of software engineers have changed quite rapidly. We aim for a nuanced stance on the use of these tools in our technical interviews: this post describes that position, and explains the thinking behind it.

Build a search engine, not a vector DB

In the last 12 months there has been a proliferation of vector DB startups. I’m not here to debate the specific design tradeoffs of any of them. Instead, I want to push back on several common approaches to what a vector database is, what it’s for, and how

Factored Verification: Detecting and reducing hallucinations in frontier models using AI supervision

We evaluate a simple automated method for detecting hallucinations in abstractive summaries of academic papers

Elicit and AI Safety

The two main impacts of Elicit on AI Safety are improving epistemics and pioneering process supervision.

Elicit's core bets: Be systematic, transparent, and unbounded

Eventually, there will be many AI assistants for chat, question-answering, search, web browsing, writing, and general computer use. They'll generally aim to be trustworthy, easy-to-use tools for important questions and decisions. What makes Elicit different?

Elicit's mission is to scale up good reasoning

Now that Elicit is a standalone company let's review our mission.

Elicit raises $9 million and becomes a public benefit corporation

We're excited to share that Elicit has raised $9 million in seed funding. Elicit was born at Ought, a non-profit research organization, and is now an independent public benefit corporation. Like Ought, our mission is to scale up good reasoning using machine learning, starting with researchers. Elicit is