About
Why a few students read AI papers so you don't have to.
AI research moves fast and is written for experts. Marginalia is a free, student-run guide that explains new and notable AI work in plain language, maps the field so newcomers can explore it, and, once you understand something, lets you annotate it for the next person.
The name is a nod to marginalia: the notes people scribble in the margins to make a difficult text their own. That's what we do, in public, for AI.
Each morning a pipeline pulls fresh papers from arXiv, drops anything we've covered, and drafts a plain-language explainer with Cloudflare's Workers AI. Then a person reviews every draft against the source before it publishes. The AI does the finding and drafting; humans own the quality bar.
We only ever publish original summaries, and we never republish a paper's abstract word for word. We credit and link the authors, the arXiv page, and the PDF for everything we cover. Wherever AI was involved, we say so. And nothing goes live until a person has checked the draft against the source, which is how the editorial queue catches anything the model gets wrong. The bar we hold ourselves to is simple: it should all hold up when a researcher clicks through to the paper.
Marginalia is built by students. Want to write explainers, build features, or start a chapter? Come say hi.