Going Old-School & The research tool of your dreams

My name is Philipp and you are reading Creativerly, the internet corner where I unpack my musings, curate and write about noteworthy apps and software, and explore the latest trends in design and tech.

Hey and welcome to Creativerly 285 👋

We are back with another long-form post in this week's issue of Creativerly. The idea to write about Elicit, an AI-powered research assistant, sat in my backlog for quite some time. I followed its development closely. I especially got impressed by the fact that the team behind it pretty much shipped a new user-facing feature every single week. When using the app, you can feel and experience the pure dedication the team is putting into it.

It is a lovely designed piece of software, and what excites me most is that it supports an ethical usage of AI, and using the power of that technology to serve meaningful and thoughtful purposes, helping the most creative and smart minds out there to boost their research workflows.

Learn more about Elicit in this week's deep dive.

Summarize papers, extract data, and synthesize your findings – with Elicit

I love reading. While I dive into books, articles, and blog posts most of the time, I adore reading research and academic papers too. Whenever I stumble across an interesting claim, insight, or topic within a book, blog post, or article, I highlight and process it in my note-taking system. As part of that, I like to dive deep into those topics, research connections, and get a great understanding of what I read, consumed, and processed. Since I am not a professional researcher, the actual research part of this process got limited to navigating through countless results based on query I put into a web search engine.

The process of doing that was time-consuming, and frustrating at some point. After diving into some papers, it was hard to distill the most important information, or I realized that it was not

I tried to optimize my workflows, used different academic search engines of which some offered abstracts, references, and related articles (making the whole research process a bit more streamlined for me), however there were a couple of things that felt a bit off-putting when it comes to all the apps and tools tailored at research. Most of the tools out there are lacking when it comes to the design, the user experience, and the usability. Since I am working as a Product Designer, a lack in those areas immediately stand out to me. I value when apps emphasize and focus on delivering a lovely user experience. It is not the only reason, yet a significant one if I stick with an app or not.

As most of the research apps I had a look at featured a poor design, once I stumbled across Elicit it immediately gained my attention. Elicit is a lovely and powerfull tool that helps you automate time-consuming research tasks like summarizing papers, extracting data, and synthesizing your findings.

I stumbled across Elicit almost two years ago, or rather, Ought - a non-profit machine learning research lab, where Elicit got born. A Tweet by Maggie Appleton about her joining the Ought team (unfortunately, she announced that she left Elicit after two years and wrote an insightful post including reflections about her time and work, check it out), drew my attention to Ought/Elicit. Throughout 2021, the Ought team built Elicit to support researchers, as they identified that high-quality research is a bottleneck to important progress, they built a streaming task execution engine for running compositions of language model tasks, and attracted 1,500 people who used Elicit every single month. In 2022, the goals were to expand the literature review to digest the full text of research papers, extract evidence, and help researchers do deeper evaluations, but also adding other research workflows, and ultimately turn Elicit into a general-purpose reasoning assitant, transforming any task involving evidence, arguments, plans, and decisions.

As Elicit continued to grow, an independent board of directors at Ought consisting of Owain Evans, Paul Christiano, and Owen Cotton-Barrat made the decision to spun off Elicit as a public benefit corporation, and transferring most of its staff. The decision was touted as the best way to pursue Ought's mission, especially as it allowed Elicit to raise funding and scale up its efforts. Elicit raised $9 million in seed funding with Fifty Years, Basis Set Ventures, Arash Ferdowsi (co-founder of Dropbox), Tom Preston-Werner (co-founder of GitHub), Jeff Dean (Chief Scientist at Google), and others joining in on the round. Besides raising a seed round by such high-profile investors and experts from the field of AI, Elicit grew to over 200,000 researchers using the tool every month. Some of the smartest folks from top research labs at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford relied on Elicit's research assistant.

Let us take a closer look at the tool itself.

Read the whole post here:

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Fresh Updates & News

Lex for Teams →

Lex just announced its Teams feature, which gives you the possibility to invite people to a folder in your Lex account and make them join you are your writing drafts. While other AI-writing tools are built to generate bulk content, Lex honors the magic of writing, and that sometimes also means collaborating while writing. Lex offers a fluid interface that was built for collaborating with AI. Give it a try.

Elicit revamps its Basic plan →

Elicit recently revamped its Basic plan to supercharge your research. The Basic plan is free, the team behind Elicit eliminated credits entirely, which means you are no longer limited to 5,000 free credits on the free plan. Besides that, features like Find Papers, Summaries, and Chat are now unlimited within the Basic plan. This means Elicit Basic is completely free to use. A great way to check it out, giving it an in-depth try, and decide whether it is a fit for you or not.

Craft mobile web beta →

The newest Craft update introduced the Mobile Web Beta to everyone, which means you can now access all your documents on any device. This is a major milestone for Craft, as it enables everyone to access their documents on any mobile device, including Android.

Mental Wealth

❯ An Antidote To The Cult of Self-Discipline – “Procrastination, or the art of doing the wrong things at one specifically wrong time, has become a bugbear of our productivity-obsessed era. Wasting resources? Everybody’s doing it! But wasting time? God forbid. Schemes to keep ourselves in efficiency mode—the rebranding of rest into self-care, and of hobbies into side hustles—have made procrastinating a tic that people are desperate to dispel; “life hacks” now govern life. As the anti-productivity champion Oliver Burkeman once put it, “Today’s cacophony of anti-procrastination advice seems rather sinister: a subtle way of inducing conformity, to get you to do what you ‘should’ be doing.” By that measure, the procrastinator is doing something revolutionary: using their time without aim. Take to the barricades, soldiers, and when you get there, do absolutely nothing!”

❯ How even the smallest acts of kindness make us happier and healthier – “When a windy arctic blast raged through the Northeast U.S. this past winter, more than 600,000 people lost power for days. I was one of them. Because we don’t own a generator, our family toughed it out in the freezing cold without power. It tested everyone’s mettle. But when I stepped back from my extreme discomfort for a few moments, I discovered some extraordinary goings on: random acts of kindness.”

❯ Going Old-School: Why Top Achievers Shun Digital Tools for Productivity. – “If you listen to interviews with incredibly productive people, you will notice that most of them are not using many digital tools to organise their work. Yes, they use a digital calendar, which makes sense as it solves a particular problem. Before the digital revolution, we needed to carry around a diary. If you were fortunate enough to have an assistant, they needed a copy of your diary to know where you were on specific days. The digital calendar solved that by allowing assistants and family members to access their calendars.”

❯ Creative flow: what’s going on inside the brain when everything just clicks – “If you’ve ever experienced a state of creative flow, perhaps when writing, playing music, or even gardening, you’ll know that it feels like everything just clicks into place. But what is actually happening inside the brain?”

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Appendix

❯ ICYMI

Are you on the hunt for a minimal, lightweight, and simple writing and note-taking app for macOS? Check out the third part of my content series Tiny macOS utility apps I love in which I focused on exactly that, simple and lightweight writing apps that are a joy to use.

❯ Quick Bits

• Apple reports record revenues despite stagnant iPhone sales
• Cloudflare once again comes under pressure for enabling abusive sites
• Microsoft strips ads from Skype in a move toward “user-centric design”
• Founder of collapsed social media site charged with fraud
• CrowdStrike sued by shareholders over global outage
• Intel announces plan to cut 15,000 jobs to ‘resize and refocus’ business
• EU AI Act enters into force, sets global standard for AI governance
• UK startup accuses Google of ‘predatory conduct’ over withdrawal of Gmail API
• OpenAI might be a partner, but it's also a competitor, says Microsoft
• Firefox's Mozilla follows Google in losing trust in Entrust's TLS certificates
• Google pulls its terrible pro-AI “Dear Sydney” ad after backlash
• DOJ sues TikTok, alleging “massive-scale invasions of children’s privacy”
• Sam Altman accused of being shady about OpenAI’s safety efforts
• Why have the big seven tech companies been hit by AI boom doubts?
• How the Netherlands became a target for cyber espionage — and why Europe should be worried

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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