Free guide · Oct 16, 2026
AstaBrief: check a cited AI science report before you trust it
How to get your sources together, check the citations, and compare what the reports actually say.
The short version
AstaBrief 8B is Ai2's open-weights report writer. You give it a research question and paper excerpts, and it writes a cited report in one pass. You can try it as Fast mode in Asta's Generate a report feature, or download the weights (Apache 2.0, built on Qwen3-8B).
This guide shows you how I get the sources together, check every citation, and compare what two reports actually say. I reviewed Ai2's release post and model card. I have not reproduced Ai2's benchmarks.
What's in the full guide
- 01What this guide gives you
- 02Try it first in Asta
- 03Step 1: get your sources together
- 04Step 2: run the weights locally (optional)
- 05Step 3: check the citations
- 06Step 4: compare what the reports actually say
- 07Citation log
- 08Limits to keep in mind
- 09Primary sources