Summaries

Summarising a document, finding what it is about, sharpening a summary with a critique loop, and editing it yourself.

On a document's page, once its text has been read, you have three buttons:

• Summarise it (or Summarise it again). While it works, it shows Reading it… (2 of 5).
• What it is about: lists the document's concepts, each with its kind and a quotation that supports it.
• Sharpen the summary: a second model criticises the summary, and the first rewrites it, until the critique finds nothing worth changing.

How a summary is made

The model set for Summarising a document reads the document, repeatably (temperature 0). A long document is read in parts of about 12,000 characters, up to twelve parts, and the parts are then combined. Beyond about 140,000 characters, only the beginning is used, and the summary says Made from the beginning of the document rather than all of it.

Reading a summary

The heading A model's summary carries the note: Written by llama3.1, not by the author. Read it as a starting point, not as what the paper says. The link See exactly what was asked, and what came back opens the record of the call.

Editing a summary

1. Press Edit, change the text, and press Save.
2. The heading becomes A summary, written by the model and edited by you.
3. What the model wrote keeps the original, and Earlier edits lists each version, with roughly how much of the model's wording you changed.
4. Go back to the model's words undoes your edits.

If you ask for a new summary, or sharpen one you have edited, the workbench asks first: Replace my edited summary or Keep it.

Sharpening

Sharpening runs a small workflow, the critique loop. It is limited to at most 8 steps, a cost of 0.20 and 5 minutes. It ends by saying how many times the summary was rewritten, with See the run, step by step (see Experiments and runs). Replacing a summary that already exists is a change to something you have, so it may wait for your approval under Approvals.

Summaries are shown in a document's Details drawer too, and the folder list marks summarised documents Summarised.