GPT Academic

GPT Academic is an open-source LLM interface with 71,000+ stars on GitHub, purpose-built for academic work — reading, polishing and translating papers with large language models.

Overview

General chatbots make scholars bend their workflow to the tool; GPT Academic bends the tool to the workflow. It provides a practical, modular interface to GPT, GLM and many other LLMs, optimized for the tasks researchers actually do all day: reading papers, polishing prose, translating PDF and LaTeX documents while preserving formatting, and summarizing long technical texts. A system of customizable shortcut buttons and function plugins turns repeated prompts into one-click operations, and the same plugin system can analyze whole code projects in Python, C++ and other languages. It can query multiple models in parallel, and it connects to a wide range of providers — including Qwen, DeepSeek, iFlytek Spark, ERNIE Bot, Llama and Claude — as well as locally deployed open models. The GPL-3.0 project, born in the early ChatGPT era, remains maintained, with repository updates in January 2026.

Key Features

• Paper workflows – reading assistance, polishing and academic translation built in.
• PDF and LaTeX translation – translate and summarize papers while keeping structure.
• Shortcut buttons and plugins – turn repeated academic prompts into one-click functions.
• Code project analysis – explain and dissect Python, C++ and other codebases.
• Parallel multi-model queries – ask several LLMs at once and compare answers.
• Many providers, local options – major hosted APIs plus self-hosted open models.

💳 Pricing

GPT Academic is free and open source under the GPL-3.0 license. You pay only for any commercial LLM API keys you choose to plug in; local models cost nothing.

Who Is It For

Researchers, graduate students and academics who use LLMs daily for literature work and writing — particularly those working across Chinese and English academic ecosystems.