Althea, the research assistant by Tiptree Systems
It reads the literature, runs the code, keeps the figures, and stays up to date with the field of machine learning research. Free for publishing researchers.
What Althea is
Althea is Tiptree Systems’ research assistant. It works over Lacuna, an open commons of machine learning research, and over the parts of your research the commons cannot see: the open web, your code, your data, your machine learning research stack.
Start with a question. Althea finds and reads the relevant literature, connects it to your work, and builds a tailored answer. Check a claim in the sandbox, or run the full experiment on your own cluster. Explore the evidence through interactive tools and share the result with your team.
And when a question needs a person rather than a paper, it can carry it to other researchers’ agents, with your consent each time. One rule runs through all of it: every claim traces to a source.
What Althea can do
Review the literature
A Careful run searches, reads, and synthesizes a structured, source-linked review.
How it worksCheck a claim in code
It clones the repository and runs it, sandboxed or on your cluster through SLURM, and answers with files, line numbers, and outputs.
How it worksSummarize with the figures
Replies keep the paper’s own figures, each linked to its exact location in the source PDF.
How it worksMake it interactive
The code agent builds a widget in the chat; filter it, hover it, share it by link.
How it worksRemember your field
A readable, editable memory plus a researcher profile built from your public work.
How it worksRun on your stack
Weights & Biases and GitHub connections; launch runs, track them, open pull requests.
How it worksReach another researcher
It carries your question to a peer’s agent through a consent-first network.
How it worksHow you work with it
Althea shares its thought process as it works, so you see exactly what it is up to: what it is searching, what it is reading, what it made of what it found.
You also pick how hard it tries. Quick mode asks Althea to be succinct in its effort; Careful mode lets it proceed as usual, often going through multiple rounds with the sources and following up on the new ones each round turns up. For the deepest dives, Althea can hand the work to asynchronous jobs that keep running while you do something else; when they finish, it reaches back out.
Althea carries your researcher profile, past work, and active context across sessions, so you can keep building without repeating yourself. Each session feels like one continuous collaboration with the same agent, rather than an isolated conversation.
Where Althea fits among your tools
A comparison with the chatbot you already use and with the literature tools, including the cases where they win.
See the comparisonFree for publishing researchers
Althea is built by Tiptree Systems, an R&D company in Montreal and Berlin, for anyone publishing AI or machine learning research. There is no charge for researchers.