Alright let me go over all the points. But you clearly care about finding a tool to help you with your work and are quite critical of any half-assed solutions. I would love to work together to literally make a custom tool just for you that can help with all of this, and keep going at it until it legitimately saves you a few hours a day. We have the experience, the resources and the will to do this. At no cost to you of course, I'd even be happy to discuss a comission if this ends up helping other researchers. Contact me if you'd like this: jon (at) scitodate (dot) com.

> How many people on the team have a PhD?

We are already working like this with a few other academics, as well as a number of pilots with R&D teams from industry. And yes my co-founder is a post-doc in theoretical quantum physics, and we have a number of other PhDs with experience in academia in the team, mostly chemistry and life-sciences. Myself I started early in the startup game, I have a masters in CS and have some experience working in academia (a couple of publications, supervised 4 masters thesis, interned with a couple of research groups...), but not a PhD just yet.

> as many of them can't even use standard GPT4 accounts do to privacy concerns

Azure guarantees full isolation and privacy, right now it's the only way to use GPT4 with such guarantees, and no other LLM right now can compete with GPT4 in the domain we operate in. From our side, we are working with a partner on full ISO certification, but obviously security and privacy have been a priority from the beginning.

> (regarding all your preferences on research tools)

There's too much here to cover in a comment, please contact me so we can discuss this further. Just to say that our use of LLMs has started recently (early this year), but we have 6 years of previous experience on doing things like creating global co-authorship and citation networks through state-of-the-art disambiguation and aggregating from many different sources, and working on large-scale information-retrieval infrastructure (complex boolean search with ranking). We have worked a lot with LLMs in the past year for MirrorThink to extract knowledge from the actual bodies reliably at large scale, but this is backed with a lot of non-AI substance built over years.

> I don't want these fancy ML tools to summarize and write papers for me

As stated in a previous comment, helping with writing has never been our focus. I agree with your characterization, sure LLMs can save some time with writing, but it's still hard to have them write coherent long-form text with real substance. And it's just kind of unethical, particulary in the sense that it just inflates the amount of text scientist need to keep-up with, turning small advancements into low-density decent looking publications just to get "points", this goes completely against what we are trying to do.

We do want to save a lot of time on research, and MirrorThink shows that LLMs can indeed add a lot in this area and that it is possible to keep them very factually grounded. But again, I'm not very attached to "fancy" AI, I was quite skeptical of this tech for a long time until it became hard to ignore this year. We'll do whatever works for you, however mundane. Frankly, our business needs are covered in the B2B side and I have a budget to simply contribute back to scientists, so that's the only goal.

> I'm 30 year old ABD, not an old tenured professor ... some aspects also have to be usable by my advisor or boss

That is ideal, we want people "in the treches" so to say, actually doing hands-on research every day. We'll figure it out in terms of accessibility to your supervisor, it's a great non-obvious point that is only apparent to those on the inside.

> we can discuss my anti-{journal,conference} dream and how to create a realistic peer review system

Would love that too, we've had lots of interal discussions in this area over the years, and have come close to releasing related tools many times. Again we now have a bit of budget to experiment in this direction free of short-term revenue pressures, so it would be great to get our hands dirty with your input.