Top all-time · #9086
O
Ought
Company blog · ought.org/updatesaiscience
Ought is the company blog at ought.org, writing about ai and science. Since 2018, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 39 times, most often “Ought.org: Scale up good reasoning”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
39mentions?
9HN people?
2018–2025first – last linked?
Too few sampled comments (12) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Ought is the AI research lab that spun out Elicit. HN readers link its Factored Cognition write-up as the source of Elicit's approach. Most comments are Elicit job posts or product mentions.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 12 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Ought is a product-driven research lab that develops mechanisms for delegating high-quality reasoning to advanced machine learning systems.
Most-linked posts?
- Ought.org: Scale up good reasoning4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-02-23
- /elicit2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-12-08
What Hacker News says?
Ought | https://ought.org | Software Engineer | San Francisco (onsite) We're a non-profit AI research lab. Our goal is to make machine learning solve tasks where success can’t be reduced to a simple metric. We're working towards a future where ML is as helpful for open-ended questions like “Should I get this medical procedure?” and “What career is right for me” as it is for optimizing ad click-through rates. To do t…
Comment linking /careers/engineering-lead
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring right now?”Submitted Evaluating Arguments One Step at a Time as a story · 2 points
HN discussionElicit | San Francisco + remote (US timezones) | https://elicit.com/careers Elicit is an AI research assistant that uses language models to help researchers figure out what’s true and make better decisions. We've scaled to >$3MM annual revenue and 400k MAU with our small team. We're hiring for multiple roles and are primarily interested in people with early-stage company experience, who are comfortable in high-agenc…
Comment linking /updates/2022-04-06-process
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2025)”Submitted Ought.org: Scale up good reasoning as a story · 1 points
HN discussionOught | https://ought.org | Engineering Team Lead | San Francisco (onsite) We're a non-profit AI research lab. Our goal is to make machine learning solve tasks where success can’t be reduced to a simple metric. We're working towards a future where ML is as helpful for open-ended questions like “Should I get this medical procedure?” and “What career is right for me” as it is for optimizing ad click-through rates. The…
Comment linking /careers/engineering-lead
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2020)”Submitted Machine learning to help people think as a story · 1 points
HN discussionOught | https://ought.org | Engineering Team Lead | San Francisco (onsite) We're a non-profit AI research lab. Our goal is to make machine learning solve tasks where success can’t be reduced to a simple metric. We're working towards a future where ML is as helpful for open-ended questions like “Should I get this medical procedure?” and “What career is right for me” as it is for optimizing ad click-through rates. The…
Comment linking /careers/engineering-lead
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2019)”Elicit | San Francisco + remote (US timezones) | https://elicit.com/careers Elicit is building AI for science. We scaled to >$7MM annual revenue and 450k MAU fast. We're hiring for multiple roles and are primarily interested in people with early-stage company experience, who are comfortable in high-agency, fast-paced teams. Reasons you might want to join Elicit: 1. We have been thinking about how to apply AI for hig…
Comment linking /updates/2022-04-06-process
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2025)”Ought | https://ought.org | Software Engineer | San Francisco (onsite) We're a non-profit AI research lab. Our goal is to make machine learning solve tasks where success can’t be reduced to a simple metric. We're working towards a future where ML is as helpful for open-ended questions like “Should I get this medical procedure?” and “What career is right for me” as it is for optimizing ad click-through rates. To do t…
Comment linking /careers/engineering-lead
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2020)”Elicit | San Francisco + remote (US timezones) | https://elicit.com/careers Elicit is an AI research assistant that uses language models to help researchers figure out what’s true and make better decisions. We've scaled to >$3MM annual revenue and 400k MAU with our small team. We're hiring for multiple roles and are primarily interested in people with early-stage company experience, who are comfortable in high-agenc…
Comment linking /updates/2022-04-06-process
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2025)”Ought | Full-Stack Software Engineer | Remote/hybrid | https://elicit.org/ Ought is using large language models to build Elicit, an AI-powered research assistant that automates and extends parts of the scientific research process. We are part startup, part research lab, and we're dedicated to making tools which help people think. Apply here: - Full-stack Software Engineer: https://ought.org/careers/software-engineer…
Comment linking /careers/ml-engineer
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2022)”Elicit | San Francisco + remote (US timezones) | https://elicit.com/careers Elicit is an AI research assistant that uses language models to help researchers figure out what’s true and make better decisions. We scaled to >$6MM annual revenue and 450k MAU fast . We're hiring for multiple roles and are primarily interested in people with early-stage company experience, who are comfortable in high-agency, fast-paced tea…
Comment linking /updates/2022-04-06-process
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2025)”Elicit | San Francisco + remote (US timezones) | https://elicit.com/careers Elicit is an AI research assistant that uses language models to help researchers figure out what’s true and make better decisions. We've scaled to >$3MM annual revenue and 400k MAU with our small team. We're hiring for multiple roles and are primarily interested in people with early-stage company experience, who are comfortable in high-agenc…
Comment linking /updates/2022-04-06-process
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2025)”Ought | https://ought.org | Engineering Team Lead | San Francisco (onsite) We're a non-profit AI research lab. Our goal is to make machine learning solve tasks where success can’t be reduced to a simple metric. We're working towards a future where ML is as helpful for open-ended questions like “Should I get this medical procedure?” and “What career is right for me” as it is for optimizing ad click-through rates. The…
Comment linking /careers/engineering-lead
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2019)”Ought | https://ought.org | Engineering Team Lead | San Francisco (onsite) We're a non-profit AI research lab. Our goal is to make machine learning solve tasks where success can’t be reduced to a simple metric. We're working towards a future where ML is as helpful for open-ended questions like “Should I get this medical procedure?” and “What career is right for me” as it is for optimizing ad click-through rates. The…
Comment linking /careers/engineering-lead
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2019)”Elicit | San Francisco + remote (US timezones) | https://elicit.com/careers Elicit is an AI research assistant that uses language models to help researchers figure out what’s true and make better decisions. We scaled to >$5MM annual revenue and 450k MAU fast . We're hiring for multiple roles and are primarily interested in people with early-stage company experience, who are comfortable in high-agency, fast-paced tea…
Comment linking /updates/2022-04-06-process
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2025)”Elicit | San Francisco + remote (US timezones) | https://elicit.com/careers Elicit is an AI research assistant that uses language models to help researchers figure out what’s true and make better decisions. We scaled to >$6MM annual revenue and 450k MAU fast . We're hiring for multiple roles and are primarily interested in people with early-stage company experience, who are comfortable in high-agency, fast-paced tea…
Comment linking /updates/2022-04-06-process
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2025)”Actually, it's not an LLM! We do use LLMs, but the secret sauce is an approach we call Factored Cognition which we wrote about here: https://ought.org/research/factored-cognition (Elicit the company and app was spun out from Ought the research lab). We do joke internally about the homophone (in fact, IIRC we did a little joke on our CEO by rebranding for his birthday in 2022) but I'm sorry to report that we're all c…
Comment linking /research/factored-cognition
on “Elicit – AI Research Assistant”Ought | Infrastructure Engineer | Remote/hybrid | https://elicit.org/ Ought is using large language models to build Elicit, an AI-powered research assistant that automates and extends parts of the scientific research process. We are part startup, part research lab, and we're dedicated to making tools which help people think. The ideal candidate has several years experience working on infrastructure: e.g. production…
Comment linking /careers/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2023)”Take a look at what the AI lab Ought is working on building https://elicit.org , a research assistant for searching and parsing published papers. Under the hood it composes many calls to GPT-3 and other models in a big DAG workflow, parses things like "is this an RCT", "what was the effect size", "what critiques have other authors made about this paper". Not affiliated, just think that it's a promising direction. Yo…
Comment linking /elicit
on “BioGPT: A Language Model Pre-Trained on Large-Scale Biomedical Literature”Similar idea: https://ought.org/elicit
Comment linking /elicit
on “Show HN: Web search using a ChatGPT-like model that can cite its sources”Here's the recording of the webinar we held with current Elicit users to talk about the future of Elicit on July 11, 2023. Thank you so much to everyone who participated! It was wonderful hearing from our users - you gave insightful feedback and helpful encouragement. Thank you also to all Elicit users for your support! Here's the link to sign up for access to the beta of the new Elicit: https://elicit.org/gpt4-wait…
Comment linking /
on “The Future of Elicit: User Town Hall Webinar Recording [video]”> One interactive component that we use heavily that might interest you for futurecoder is what we call an interactive walkthrough: https://www.learncs.online/best#interactive-walkthroughs . It's like a video but preserving the interactive nature of a playground. Students really like them, and enjoy the opportunity to hear multiple explanations for the same concept when they're stuck. (We're working on popping this…
Comment linking /
on “Show HN: A 100% free and interactive Python course for coding beginners”
