Elicit

Elicit is an AI-powered research assistant that leverages large language models to streamline academic literature reviews and analysis. Launched in 2021, the platform searches across 125 million academic papers from the Semantic Scholar corpus, covering all disciplines. Elicit's core functionality allows researchers to input natural language questions and receive relevant papers, summaries, and extracted key information in a user-friendly table format. The system goes beyond simple keyword matching, utilizing semantic search to understand concepts and find connections across disciplines that traditional search methods might miss.

The platform's capabilities include automating literature reviews, extracting and synthesizing data from papers, generating summaries, and identifying patterns across research. Elicit employs techniques like iterated task decomposition to mitigate the risk of AI hallucinations, aiming to provide more reliable information for scientific inquiry. As of September 2023, Elicit had been used by over 2 million researchers, with a monthly active user base of 200,000. The company operates as a public benefit corporation, reflecting its mission to accelerate scientific discovery and maximize positive societal impact through AI technology.

Key customers and partnerships

Elicit's user base spans academic institutions and industry leaders. Researchers from prestigious universities such as MIT and Stanford utilize the platform, as do scientists from pharmaceutical companies like Novartis and Genentech. Additionally, AI research organizations have incorporated Elicit into their workflows.