Show HN: Asxiv.org – Ask ArXiv papers questions through chat (opens in new tab)

Impressive project, especially for a day's work!

My site, https://www.emergentmind.com, is similar, though I'm two years in :)

I've found Gemini 2.5 Flash is the best model in terms of speed/cost/quality. Pro is great as well, but probably not necessary for most chat-with-paper functionality.

I'll add too that building an AI layer on top of arXiv is a deep, deep rabbit hole depending on how far you want to take the project. Drop me a note if you want to chat more about my experience with it.

Regardless, thanks for sharing this!

It looks like it doesn't handle ArXiv IDs that have a forward slash in them, eg, https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0211011 as viewed at https://asxiv.org/pdf/cs/0211011 is a 404 error.

Have you tried https://www.alphaxiv.org before inventing your thing?

Very interesting, I still need to test it more, but it seems like it parses only the arxiv PDF data. For getting more accurate equations it might be a good idea to download the original tex source and let it parse that (maybe even both).

EDIT: Another thought: maybe the output could also support markdown/latex like chatgpt.

It's a nice project, but the LLM itself seems to struggle with actually comprehending the subjects. It can point me very well to parts of the paper, but it could not explain parts of the equations based on other knowledge outside of the paper.

I've built a similar platform with searching access to arXiv and Semantic Scholar; the only difference is that our agents can highlight text in the paper down to the line level. In our testing, Gemini struggles compared to Sonnet four or Opus 4. We found that without agentic highlighting, there wasn't much difference in output quality or utility (meaning, references saved, generating with citation, or even quote gathering is still hard without actual PDF interactivity). I'd love your feedback on https://www.ubik.studio (use academic search)

Hi. Cool project! But I wonder what is the different between this and alphaxiv.org?

Nice that it will link to specific pages. I wonder if it could be made to highlight specific parts of a page (i.e. highlight the exact thing I am looking for)?

Super cool project! Didn’t expect it to be this good tbh

It'll be useful to have a short demo

that is cool and all, but don't forget that some researchers were caught putting hidden messages (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.06185) instructing LLMs to praise the paper.

it would be good if you made some sort of protection against these techniques. I think feeding images of pages instead of the page code itself would be beneficial.

Cool