I've built a similar platform with searching access to arXiv and Semantic Scholar; the only difference is that our agents can highlight text in the paper down to the line level. In our testing, Gemini struggles compared to Sonnet four or Opus 4. We found that without agentic highlighting, there wasn't much difference in output quality or utility (meaning, references saved, generating with citation, or even quote gathering is still hard without actual PDF interactivity). I'd love your feedback on https://www.ubik.studio (use academic search)

Very cool! I chose gemini for two reasons; the first being it supported pdf input and the second the flash lite model being very cheap so I could comfortably make it public and free.