Compare AI tools

	Elicit S	Perplexity S	NotebookLM S	Luma Dream Machine A
Tagline	AI research assistant for academic literature.	AI search done right. Cited answers, not chat theater.	Google's research notebook. Turns your docs into a podcast.	Smooth, cinematic motion. Image-to-video specialist.
Category	research	research	research	video
Pricing	Free + $12-$42/mo	Free + $20/mo Pro	Free	Free + $10-$500/mo
Best for	Grad students, researchers, anyone doing literature reviews.	Replacing Google for any question where you want a cited answer in seconds.	Students, researchers, anyone with a stack of PDFs or a topic to learn.	Photographers animating stills, cinematic b-roll.
Strengths	Searches 125M+ papers Extracts + synthesizes findings across papers Systematic review workflow	Sources every claim Fast, current answers Pro Search runs multi-step research Spaces for persistent context	Upload anything, ask questions, get cited answers Audio Overview turns docs into a 10-min podcast Great for studying	Best image-to-video in the category Great camera motion control Ray 2 model produces striking shots
Weaknesses	Academic-only Can hallucinate citations — verify everything	Not a general chatbot Answers can be shallow on complex topics	Google-only Can be slow on large corpora	Prompt fidelity below Runway Queue times on free tier
Kai's verdict	S-tier for academic research. Nothing else comes close for systematic reviews.	S-tier for search. I use it before Google now. If you're still Googling everything, try this for a week.	S-tier for study. The Audio Overview is a killer feature. Try it with three of your favorite PDFs.	A-tier. Best for cinematic image-to-video. Pair with Runway for coverage.
Link	Open →	Open →	Open →	Open →