I took part in the STM china symposium ahead of the STM meeting at Frankfurt this year. It was a fantastic meeting and I got a richer view into publishing knowledge china than I’ve ever had before, in such a short period of time. It was so fantastic to see so many representatives form china at the event. 

This is the slide I presented, with translation support from GPT. I hope it went over well. What I think I wrote in Chinese was:

1. The biggest waves often rise when we least expect them.
Much of the focus of work today is in AI within existing workflows. I think the biggest disruptions will come from changing expectations of ourselves in what we expect of what we can do with technology, and that will change researcher behaviour, but it is hard to say how exactly yet.
My motivation for believing this is grounded on increased rate of spend into AI, increased adoption, observing the rapid pace of improvment in coding models, and seeing that the facade of expertise needed to make computers do what you want is dissolving.


2. Machines are powerful, but they are not human; They can think, but they cannot feel.
They are beguiling, but not human, and not reasoning - at least not yet. But they are able to do a lot, and so a risk when using them is eroding our own expertese. Combing their power with our experience and expertise gives better results, but we should not build systems that blinding operate on our behalf.


3. Scholarly publishing is the nourishment of artificial intelligence
A the very pinnacle of knowledge there is not much training data, so even though our corpora are small (billions of words, compared to the trillions these systems are trained on, our corpora contain - truly veryfiie new knowledge. Knowledge that is written in the most unbiased way of any selection of the human corpus (not perfect, but better than anything else). I believe these two attributes will prove vital in the creation of better models, and so we should not undersell what we do or what we enable.


4. By sharing our experiences now, we are shaping the future.
There is a big hype, but what is actually creating value is probably less than what we speak of, and so it is important to stay clear eyed in the coming years. The best way to do that is to share our experiences openly and honestly.