I stumbled across something interesting the other day that got me thinking about the state of academic research tools. Someone has built an open-source academic search engine called Paperion that indexes 80 million papers, and honestly, it highlights just how broken the current system is for anyone trying to access and organize research.

The creator mentioned being shocked by the “lack of tools in the academia world” for paper search and annotation, and that really resonated with me. Even though I’m not in academia, I find myself diving into research papers constantly, especially anything related to AI and machine learning. The rapid pace of development in these fields means staying current requires consuming a lot of academic content, but the tools we have for doing this are frankly terrible.