The race to the bottom with AI tools

What we are seeing in the AI startup space is a perfect example of the “no moat” problem: if your core product is essentially just clever prompt engineering wrapped around someone else’s frontier model, it is trivially easy for a competitor to reverse-engineer your workflow and undercut your price. Over the last few months, this lack of a defensible moat has triggered a rapid race to the bottom in automated peer review, moving from expensive managed services to open-source “bring your own key” (BYOK) scripts. Here I am going to look at three tools specifically designed to review academic papers: Refine, IsItCredible, and Coarse. Overview of the Tools Refine: Refine positions itself as a premium, rigorous option for institutions, boasting testimonials from Ivy League professors and a high price point of $49.99 per review. It uses what it calls “massive parallel compute” to make hundreds of LLM calls to stress-test every line of a document. IsItCredible: Built on the open-source…