I've been disappointed in some of these services before, because in the early days and I suspect now still as well they used RAG for obvious reasons. I feel like for research it's rare that RAG works really well.

What I'm really excited about is a tool like Elicit using the new Google Gemini 1.5 Pro/Ultra models with the 2 Million token window sizes, filtering down the papers using traditional search and high quality meta-data, then critically, prompt/activation caching to make the tool economically viable.

Maybe it won't work better, but I'm willing to bet it'll find those really specific ideas/needles in the haystack a lot more often than vanilla RAG will.