A tool that makes reading technical papers easier than ever before, with its simple explanations of complex prerequisites.

An attempt to democratize paper reading in AI safety

Interactive Concept Exploration

Lets you explore concepts recursively, in place. There's no need for a separate tab where you go and ask an LLM about it.
Annotated Reading

Read the original paper and the concepts it uses side by side in a single view, so that you can read uninterrupted.
Quick Skim

Get a quick overview of the paper, or of a single concept it uses, without working through the whole paper.

Why not the PDF, or an LLM

AI safety papers are usually prerequisite-heavy, so it is easy to come across unfamiliar concepts and ideas while reading one. Sometimes the paper gives you some context for what is going on, but usually that is not thorough enough. This makes it difficult for a researcher who is not familiar with that particular prerequisite concept to carry on reading. This is especially true for beginners trying to come into AI safety. Skimmaxxer exists to make skimming a technical paper as frictionless as possible.

A paper is written for experts active in the field.
It explains a new contribution and its context. For the rest of the prerequisites, you need to read the cited papers.
Reading is constantly blocked by concepts you haven't seen before.
Reading past unknown concepts gets costlier as you progress, because the next section builds on what you skipped.
So it's hard to make progress even when you put in the time, because your effort is diluted by researching prerequisites.

You often don't have the background knowledge to ask the right questions.
Every question you have about the paper costs you the time it takes the LLM to reply.
You usually try to understand one concept at a time and sometimes lose the big picture.
When the paper is prerequisite-heavy, you end up with multiple chats open at once and waste time switching between them.
It's simply not an interface optimized for reading a prerequisite-heavy technical paper.

The paper is presented several ways at once: as a summary, as a detailed explanation, with its figures broken down, and as individual concepts. So you can always come at it from whichever side you like.
Every term the paper takes for granted already has its own write-up.
Each concept gets a page. Every term on that page gets one too, and so on, as deep as you need to go.
Most of the work of aggregating information is already done for you.

The point is not that this is faster. It is that the time you spend here adds up. You are never stopped by something you do not know, and you are never waiting for an answer. By the end of an hour, you understand things you did not understand at the start.

Where this is going

Right now I add papers by hand. This is a personal project, and I'll add more features if there's interest. Below is what typical future milestones would look like.

Now

Manual runs
Next

Automatic runs
After that

Live progress
After that

Public queue
Later

Adjustable difficulty
Later

Linked papers

Enter Skimmaxxer

A tool that makes reading technical papers easier than ever before, with its simple explanations of complex prerequisites.

Interactive Concept Exploration

Annotated Reading

Quick Skim

Why not the PDF, or an LLM

Where this is going

Manual runs

Automatic runs

Live progress

Public queue

Adjustable difficulty

Linked papers