A.I. integration?

[danzac]

Wondering about people's (and Jon's) thoughts on possible AI integrations in the future. Specifically, I've been introduced to ChatPDF (https://aieducator.tools/tool/https_www ... ator_tools) and impressed with how it can help interact with PDFs. It would be amazing to have this kind of AI technology easily accessible within Bookends in the future.

[iandol]

Hm, having recently played with a variety of large language models online and locally[1], I find them of limited use for interpretation of most topics in my field of study (Neuroscience). I'm sure they will improve to a certain extent, but I have ben shocked at how confident they sound for partial facts that are clearly wrong given the current consensus in my field. Things that are right are interspersed with things that are wrong in a coherent narrative I've shared these concerns with my students as I do worry about their use for education at present...

Technically, the online tools all use APIs so BE could certainly wrap some APIs in its browser, but the bigger issue at present is stabilty: things are moving so fast in this field tools around now may not be in two months time! I'm sure ChatGPT should be the most stable, though their API is not free and probably has a bunch of legalese Jon would have to deciper...

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[1] gpt4all is a really nice locally run macOS tool with several free (but stripped down) LLM models to play with: https://gpt4all.io/index.html -- note these stripped down models (~13billion parameters) can't compete with the online ones (~150billion? parameters), though new models (see Orca from Microsoft research) are coming incredibly close...

[Jon]

I second iandol. I've played a bit with ChatGPT, asking basic science questions about topics if which I have a good grasp. The answers were impressive in their breadth but terribly disappointing in their depth. There is no actual cognitive ability (of course), and what you get is a hodgepodge of information without context. Remember, it collects its "knowledge" from the Internet, which we all know is always accurate and truthful. Garbage in, garbage out.

I tried ChatPDF, and what was spit back were comments in the summary like "Welcome to this helpful PDF file..." and "In this file, you will find valuable information about the use of...". Yikes. And the questions that were proposed led to summaries of sections of the introduction, results, and discussion (without any caveats, just the simple assertion that the answer is the "truth").

But to answer the question, it is obvious that generative AI is improving rapidly, and I imagine that it will prove useful in carefully controlled and standardized conditions, but by the time it becomes a reliable general purpose research tool we may all be interacting with it and each other via our Apple Vision Pros.

Finally, as iandol said, things are moving very fast, and today's bee's knees is tomorrow's AOL Online. Also, I don't really see why one would need any sort of formal integration. You can use ChatPDF within Bookends right now (I just did). Open the link in Bookends Browser and drag and drop a PDF attachment (all within Bookends, dragging the PDF proxy icon the the left of the PDF name in the PDF toolbar). The results are in Bookends Browser, and you can query them, copy the results, etc., all without leaving Bookends.

Jon
Sonny Software

[danzac]

Thanks for the responses all. It is helpful to know how I can potentially use ChatPDF in Bookends. In my mind, it was (perhaps in the future once it gets better), a simple way to ask questions about the specific PDF that is being read without having to upload or leave the reading space

[Jon]

Tools for generative AI will always have to do this via the Internet -- your local computational power and data storage is dwarfed by what is available remotely. Any such tools that could be used without Internet access would be primitive compared to whatever is the state of the art.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Nhaps]

I’ve been using Google’s NotebookLM with success, outside BE. It is an AI that works with uploaded PDFs and you have to create an account. It’s incredible what it can do (with the questions you ask)

[DrJJWMac]

> Remember, it collects its "knowledge" from the Internet, which we all know is always accurate and truthful. Garbage in, garbage out.

For the specific case mentioned, the AI is (presumably) parsing only within the journal article, it is not parsing through information on the Internet of things. So here specifically, the danger is less about whether any given journal article contains garbage. It is more that habits formed by using AI to collect lots of (good) knowledge over lots of (good) journal articles can pale in comparison to the training required to parse an existing knowledge base rapidly and efficiently in order to appreciate the larger context behind it as well as to gain confidence on the best directions to advance successfully from it.

The danger is about being given lots of chaff with perhaps a few kernels of wheat, and being left feeling good about getting lots of stuff so quickly. Alternatively said, the danger with AI is that it is mostly like fast food, giving you lots of sugar and carbs with little substance while drawing you back to another visit after the sugar high. Or by perspective from a few decades in training ... I can skim a journal article, collect the initial key insights that I need to understand where its report sits within my current understanding in the field of study, and decide the utility of going deeper in the journal article faster than I can feed that same article to an AI chat, ask questions, collect the answers, re-read its answers, sort out the chaff from the wheat, and figure out whether the AI report gives me any reason to dig deeper in the specific article itself.

All this being said, at some point, I will need to summarize specific content over a review set, such as to determine what relative fraction of journal articles in a set of a few hundred have specified a study using condition X. This is where I will be motivated to apply an AI tool. I do not expect that BE should provide me with an in-built ability to do use AI for this level of parsing.