

Doug Downey
118 posts

@_DougDowney
Researching AI for Science @allen_ai, Prof @northwesterncs




🔎 Deep research agents like Asta ScholarQA and OpenAI Deep Research are transforming how we perform literature review. But how do we know if the way we evaluate them is actually meaningful? Announcing our new paper: “Deep Research, Shallow Evaluation: A Case Study in Meta-Evaluation for Long-Form QA Benchmarks” 🧵


We analyzed 250K+ queries & 430K+ clickstream interactions from Asta, our AI-powered research assistant—and today we're releasing the full dataset. How do researchers actually use AI science tools? Here's what we found. 🧵

Can AI predict what scientists will do next—not just one piece, but the whole research process? PreScience is our new model eval for forecasting how science unfolds end-to-end, from how research teams form to a paper's eventual impact. Built with @UChicago, supported by @NSF.

🆕 New in Asta: multi-turn report generation. You can now have back-and-forth conversations with Asta, our agentic platform for scientific research, to refine long-form, fully cited reports instead of relying on single-shot prompts.


📊 Today we're releasing data showing which scientific papers our AI research tool Asta cites most frequently. Think of it as creating citation counts for the AI era—tracking which research is actually powering AI answers across thousands of queries. 🧵