Consensus (https://consensus.app, also available as a custom GPT) has received quite a bit of attention, especially with the recent launch of OpenAI's GPT store (https://chat.openai.com/gpts). Consensus was one only four featured GPTs on the GPT store page, which is a pretty big deal.
Consensus describes itself as "Your AI Research Assistant. Search 200M academic papers from Consensus, get science-based answers, and draft content with accurate citations." That's a pretty tall order, but an exciting prospect. As any academic will tell you, it's a lot of work to pour through dozens of papers to get a sense of what the literature says about a topic.
So, does Consensus deliver on this promise? ... kind of. What Consensus does is actually pretty amazing. If you want a quick sense of the literature, Consensus can help. There's even a "Synthesize" button that produces a short overview of the main findings.
Consensus is NOT a chatbot, it's an AI fueled search engine that uses the Semantic Scholar database as it's source material. The database is the source of Consensus' strengths and weaknesses. Semantic Scholar's database is extensive, but problematically limited for some fields.
The results of my initial tests were lukewarm. I asked Consensus about a couple of research areas I know quite well. Although I didn't take exception with the summary that Consensus produced, the specific studies it returned didn't include the most influential papers in the area and it missed some highly-cited papers in top journals. For example, in one area, it missed papers with hundreds of citations and included a study in a third-rate journal that had only eight citations.
I also wanted to see if Consensus could help for more practice oriented tasks (as opposed to scholarly research). The results were better here. I asked about programs that can improve the success of first-generation college students. Consensus gave me a nice set of research-backed programs, although the list of supporting papers still seemed a little random. Overall, though, the results were useful.
So, if you want to get a quick handle on the literature in an area, Consensus can help. But, it is no substitute for the hard work of a proper literature review. Despite it's current limitations, Consensus is useful for some tasks and has a promising future. In other words, it's a solid start but has a quite a ways to go.
Is Consensus worth it? Maybe. It depends on what your particular use case. I suggest trying it out for yourself. There's a free tier that is more than sufficient for testing its capabilities. A Premium subscription is $6.99 a month (billed annually), which seems reasonable. Here's a link to their pricing page: https://consensus.app/pricing/.
Even if Consensus isn't right for you currently, I recommend setting up a free account and checking back occasionally. The promising start bodes well for its future.