Show HN: Using LLMs and >1k 4090s to visualize 100k scientific research articles
twitter.comCongrats on the release, Sam - the preview looks great!
I'm curious about the technical side: how are you handling the dimensionality reduction and visualization? Also noticed you mentioned "custom-trained LLMs" in the tweet - how large are those models, and what motivated using custom ones instead of existing open models?
We'll release the full data explorer soon, with more info.
At the core of this project is a structured-extraction task using a custom Qwen 14B model, which we distilled from larger closed-source models. We needed a model we could run at scale on https://devnet.inference.net, which is comprised mostly of idle consumer-grade NVIDIA devices.
Embeddings were generated using SPECTER2, a transformer model from AllenAI specifically designed for scientific documents. The model processes each paper's title, executive summary, and research context to generate 768-dimensional embeddings optimized for semantic search over scientific literature.
The visualization uses UMAP to reduce the 768D embeddings to 3D coordinates, preserving local and global structure. K-Means clustering groups papers into ~100 clusters based on semantic similarity in the embedding space. Cluster labels are automatically generated using TF-IDF analysis of paper fields and key takeaways, identifying the most distinctive terms for each cluster.