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Sprint projectJul 28, 2024

Academic Weapon

Luis Tercero Herman · Team Academic Weapon

Submitted to Research Augmentation Hackathon. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

Academic Weapon is a Chrome extension designed to address the steep learning curve in AI Alignment research. Using state-of-the-art LLMs, Academic Weapon provides instant, contextual assistance as you browse bleeding-edge research.

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  1. This is a good idea, however I would have liked to hear a bit more about how the tool was built, what models it uses and how it differs from existing tools.

  2. Good project idea! Any tool that reduces the inferential gap for researchers is definitely important and there should be more work in this direction. I like the interface, especially how it allows users to perform key repetitive actions through one click such as summarising and explaining. I would like to see more features that are unique to helping alignment researchers, as we have specific needs as a community, and general-purpose tools are often created for economic value.

  3. This is a great idea, but I’d love to see it fleshed out more. For example, what makes this extension differ from similar tools, eg Brave Leo AI? I’d be excited to see the LLM calls being made to a fine-tuned model that tailored its responses to be especially useful for AI safety research.

  4. I like the design of this extension, makes things fast. Overall, it seems useful for understanding jargon and other things.In order to improve the quality of the responses, the tool should probably be fed more context from the page you are in order to provide contextual information.In addition, there should be alignment-specific features since we can expect that tools like this will be built by the market and open source community since it seems generally useful! So, more focus on making it especially useful in alignment research workflows would be great!

Cite this project

@misc{herman2024academic,
  title = {{Academic Weapon}},
  author = {Luis Tercero Herman},
  year = {2024},
  month = jul,
  note = {Submitted to Research Augmentation Hackathon, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/academic-weapon}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/academic-weapon}
}

Build something like this at the next Sprint

AI Collusion Research Sprint · Oct 23 - 25, 2026