Everyone Building AI Research Tools Is Solving the Wrong Problem

Everyone building AI research tools optimized retrieval. Nobody optimized reasoning. You get a chatbot that summarizes papers. A semantic search engine dressed up with a chat interface. A RAG pipeline that chunks abstracts into a vector and hands you the top-k most similar results. Useful. Not intelligent. There's a difference between a system that finds information and a system that thinks about it. The research community got so excited about retrieval that it forgot the actual bottleneck was never finding papers - it was knowing what to do with them.