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Show HN: Turn Any ArXiv Paper into a 200-Page Prerequisite Reading Book (instabooks.ai)
6 points by melvinmelih 25 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments
I created this tool over the weekend because, as someone interested in AI and technology, I find many research papers on arXiv fascinating but often incredibly dense and difficult to understand due to the heavy jargon and technical language. I wanted to make these complex topics more accessible to laypeople like myself by converting the topics described in these papers into full-length books that break down key concepts, making cutting-edge research easier to grasp. You can think of it as generating prerequisite reading materials before being able to read the actual paper.

Here are some noteworthy arXiv papers you can test this with:

- Attention is All You Need: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

- BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805

- GPT-3: Language Models are Few-Shot Learners: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165

- Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition (ResNet): https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.03385

The tool leverages GPT-4o, Perplexity, and Instructor to analyze and break down the complex concepts within these papers. Keep in mind, it's not built for heavy traffic (current capacity is about 50 books per hour) so if things get busy, it may take a bit longer, but the book will arrive via email eventually!




I was wondering (also to billconan's comment), does anyone check that the LLM doesn't hallucinate? I mean, if one reads a study for the fun of it, go crazy! If someone finds a study about diabetes, and decides to follow the 'diet' that the book suggests, it can go very south - very fast.


This is a valid concern and while there are no guarantees that the AI won't hallucinate (hence the disclaimer in the book, especially for medical topics), I try to minimize it by pairing the writing with real-time research from Perplexity, so at least it is (or should be) based on verifiable information.


this will be very useful for me, if the quality is good.




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