Focal tells you whether a page is worth your time, explains the parts that lose you — in plain language, using the whole document — and checks the claims that matter. So you skip more, and understand what's left.
Free with your own OpenAI key · no account needed
We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely.
Answered from this document
Earlier models read a sentence in order, one word at a time, so each step waited on the last. This one drops that: every word looks at every other word at once. That is what the paper calls multi-head self-attention in §3.2.
Grounded in §1 and §3.2 — not from the model's memory.
Three things it does
Three questions you hit while reading — is this worth my time, what does this actually mean, and is it true. Nothing else is in the way.
A verdict before you start — worth reading, skim it, or skip it — with the claims it found and the evidence behind each one. Deliberately not a score out of ten, because you can’t check a score.
Verdict
Worth reading
4 substantive claims · ~11 min · covers ground you haven’t read
Reads the whole page before it answers, so “this method” and “as shown above” resolve to the right thing. It answers from the document or says it can’t — it won’t fill the gap from memory.
You selected
…dispensing with recurrence entirely.
Answer cites §3.2 · 94 words
Checks the claim you selected against the live web and lists its sources. Select a heading or half a sentence and it says so, instead of inventing a verdict for something that isn’t a claim.
Checked against 3 sources
The 3.57% figure is the ensemble error, not single-model.
2 sources cite the single-model number instead.
How it differs
The sidebars are model aggregators with reading bolted on; the PDF tools want your document on their servers. Focal does one job — helping you read — and it's the only one here you can run without an account at all.
| Focal | AI sidebarsSider, Monica, Merlin | PDF chat toolsChatPDF, SciSpace | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Can you skip the accountWhether you can use it without handing over an email. | Yes, with your own key | Sign-up required | Sign-up required |
| Can you keep us out of the pathWhether the page you're reading can go straight to the model. | Yes, with your own key | Always via their servers | Always via their servers |
| What you pay | Cost price, or a flat plan | Monthly subscription | Monthly subscription |
| Use your own API keyPay OpenAI's rate and keep the key on your machine. | Yes | Rarely | No |
| Works on the page you're onNo copy-paste, no uploading a file first. | In place | In place | Upload first |
| Fact-checks against the webNot just explaining the text, but testing whether it's true. | With sources | Sometimes | No |
| Tells you not to botherA verdict before you commit the time, with its reasoning. | Worth reading? | No | No |
| Reading historyWhat's kept, and where it lives. | On your machine | On their account | On their account |
Focal's answers above describe the bring-your-own-key path; the hosted plan routes through our servers so usage can be metered, like any subscription product. Competitors are grouped by how they're built, not ranked — and their plans change often enough that any price quoted here would be wrong by the time you read it.
Bring your own key
Paste an OpenAI key and the extension talks to OpenAI directly from your browser — no account, and nothing proxied through us. It's the same product as the hosted plan, minus the middleman.
Where your reading goes
Not involved on this path: a Focal server, an account, analytics, or any page you didn't ask about. Choose the hosted plan instead and requests route through us, so we can meter them.
Pricing
Bring an OpenAI key and pay cost price with no account, or let us handle the key and pay a flat rate. Same features either way — the difference is who holds the key and whether requests pass through us.
Bring your own key
Free — you pay OpenAI directly
Hosted
No key to manage