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Caktus AI is an education-first generative AI platform for students and educators trained on scholarly data.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
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It was founded by Tao Zhang and Harrison Leonard in 2022 and has already attracted over 2.6 million users in just a few years.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
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Caktus runs on its proprietary model, Eguana, built in partnership with Multimodal and trained on around 5 billion tokens of academic text.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
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Its toolset exceeds 40 specialized modules that cover essay writing, citation generation, summarization, and STEM problem-solving.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nWhat Is Caktus AI?<\/h2>\n
Caktus AI is an educational-focused generative AI platform built for students. It is trained only on scholarly sources across the internet.<\/p>\n
Therefore, it is a very suitable AI tool for students<\/a> and educators.<\/p>\n
Caktus AI was founded in 2022 by co-founders Tao Zhang and Harrison Leonard.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
![\"Caktus](\"\/assets\/caktus-ai-review\/caktus-ai-build-for-students-e1778015117557-1024x417.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
<\/p>\nAccording to its App Store listing, over 2.6 million users have downloaded Caktus AI, which is an impressive figure for a platform that\u2019s barely a few years old.<\/p>\n
The platform houses more than 40 specialized tools for different needs a student may face.<\/p>\n
We can roughly divide those tools into aspects:\u00a0<\/p>\n
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The writing suite includes an Essay Writer, Paragraph Generator, Personal Statement Builder, and a Text Summarizer.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
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A STEM assistant, which includes problem-solving tools for Physics, Chemistry, Math, and Coding. The Coding Assistant supports all popular programming languages ( Python, Java, C#, and JavaScript).<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
Caktus AI puts a lot of emphasis on integrity in AI, as stated on the website, \u201cevery feature encourages revision, comprehension, proper citation, and responsible academic use.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Tech Behind Caktus AI<\/h3>\n
At its inception, the founders\u00a0 launched a GPT-3-powered tool for students, however, the founders were quick to reach the conclusion that using off-the\u2010shelf models wasn\u2019t sustainable for their domain because they wanted to prioritize academic rigor.<\/p>\n
This realization also highlighted the importance of custom writing<\/a> solutions that could better align with specific academic standards and expectations.<\/p>\n
By December of that same year, they had partnered with Multimodal to build a proprietary model (named \u201cEguana\u201d) trained on academic data.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It is currently the world\u2019s best LLM for academic needs.<\/p>\n
A case study reports that approximately 5 billion tokens of academic text were used in training Caktus.<\/p>\n
Key Features of Caktus AI<\/h3>\n
Caktus AI isn\u2019t built for everyone, which is precisely its strength.<\/p>\n
It only targets students and academic writers and has a good list of features for this audience, such as:<\/p>\n
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It runs on models trained on millions of peer-reviewed papers and scholarly texts<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
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The text it produces includes verifiable references, which is a deliberate move to ensure that its generated text comes from real academic sources. It essentially reduces the \u201challucination<\/a>\u201d issue common to general AI writers.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
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It provides step-by-step problem solving for STEM queries<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
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It contains a unified workspace for study materials like notes, drafts, citations, and assignments<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
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Caktus\u2019s entire system is wired around responsible use of AI<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
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How Much Does Caktus AI Cost?<\/h3>\n
Is Caktus AI free? Unfortunately, Caktus AI does not offer any open-ended free plan.<\/p>\n
There used to be a small free trial for you to test the waters before you commit to a paid plan.<\/p>\n
The trial gave you 5,000 characters of free usage so you could explore how the tool writes, cites, and solves problems.\u00a0<\/p>\n
After that, you needed a paid plan to keep going. That free trial, however, has been discontinued.<\/p>\n
The pricing information is as follows:<\/p>\n
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The monthly plan is priced at $19.99\/month, which gives you full access to the platform without long-term commitment. If you get it for a year, you\u2019ll be paying around $240.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
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The annual plan is for $8.33\/month, billed $99.99 per year, which is a more cost-efficient route. It brings the per-month cost down by more than half compared to the monthly plan.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
There\u2019s no feature limitation between the two. So, the only real difference is how much you want to save and how long you plan to stick around.<\/p>\n
How Does It Work?<\/h2>\n
You\u2019ll need to create an account or log in before actually getting started with Caktus AI.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"\/assets\/caktus-ai-review\/join-caktus.webp\" "\\"\\"")
<\/p>\nOnce you\u2019re in, you land on a clean, focused dashboard that looks like a digital study desk.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"\/assets\/caktus-ai-review\/caktus-ai-dashboard-1024x407.webp\" "\\"\\"")
<\/p>\nThe Essay Writer is the natural place to begin for most users.<\/p>\n
Once you click on it, it requires you to select what you want written out of three options:\u00a0<\/p>\n
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An easy essay, the length of which is entirely decided by you, which also allows you to block or include citations<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
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A simple essay, which by default includes citations from scholarly sources\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
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A detailed essay, which includes citations from academic sources, and multiple other personalization options to control the tone and style of your essay.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0It requires you to type in a prompt and pick your citation style (APA, MLA, or Chicago).<\/p>\n
You can also upload your own readings or notes for it to reference, or search Caktus\u2019s internal database for credible sources.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"\/assets\/caktus-ai-review\/essay-writer-caktus-ai-1024x507.webp\" "\\"\\"")
<\/p>\nHere\u2019s what the dashboard shows when you click on \u2018Easy Essay\u2019:\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"\/assets\/caktus-ai-review\/easy-essay-dashboard-1024x487.webp\" "\\"\\"")
<\/p>\nAll you have to do is describe your topic and select how long you want to be. The moment you hit \u2018Generate,\u2019 the AI goes to work building a structured essay.\u00a0<\/p>\n
When writing a detailed essay, you also get to see some tone customization options:<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"\/assets\/caktus-ai-review\/tone-customizaion-options-1024x513.webp\" "\\"\\"")
<\/p>\nThe same dashboard gives you access to STEM assistants for math, physics, chemistry, etc.<\/p>\n
There are also plenty of other tools, like a summarizer, paragraph generator, AI detector, translator, and interview prep module, all living under the same roof.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"\/assets\/caktus-ai-review\/caktus-ai-other-tools-dashboard-1024x397.webp\" "\\"\\"")
<\/p>\nIs Caktus AI Flagged as AI-Generated Content?<\/h2>\n
To figure out whether content generated by Caktus AI can be flagged by AI detectors, let\u2019s conduct a quick AI detection test.<\/p>\n
Here is a thesis body paragraph generated through Caktus AI:<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"\/assets\/caktus-ai-review\/body-paragraph-caktus-ai-1024x606.webp\" "\\"\\"")
<\/p>\nNow, let\u2019s test this generated paragraph using Undetectable\u2019s AI detector which is ranked as one of the best AI detectors by ZDNet<\/a>.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"\/assets\/caktus-ai-review\/undetectable-ais-ai-detector-has-correctly-identified-the-content-generated-by-c.webp\" "\\"\\"")
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