ML Research Resident

Elicit is building a research agent that can use an unlimited amount of test-time compute while keeping its reasoning transparent and verifiable.

The residency

Transformers do a fixed amount of computation per token, and the quality of work degrades rapidly when they are applied iteratively. As research resident, you'll work with us for 3 months on developing computational procedures (operators) that can reliably improve a knowledge state over thousands of iterations.

What is a knowledge state? A knowledge state consists of structured information - for example, a scientific paper might be represented as a set of claims supported by evidence and connected through logical reasoning; this might be combined with scratchpads, evergreen “notes to self”, search trees, and other information.

What counts as improvement? Like scientists, we want LLMs to make genuine progress in understanding - separating inferences from raw evidence, finding connections between ideas, building clearer explanations, and identifying gaps in reasoning. But unlike typical ML systems that are often trained to do “whatever works”, we need improvements that are epistemically sound - each step should make the knowledge state more useful while remaining human-readable. An improvement might reorganize information to better answer a quest