Ian Mulvany

February 16, 2024

Silverchair AI lab

Silver hair have announced an AI lab - https://www.silverchair.com/news/ai-lab-launches/, this is good news, and the kinds capabilities they are exploring - RAG search, summarisation, chat, are in may ways the low hanging fruit in this sector (not easy by any means, but the obvious areas to apply the technology). I think capabilities related to these will be table stakes soon for publishing companies.

I would be interested in knowing whether any of these feature types drives change in user behaviour or increase in likelihood of task completion for users.

Even more interestingly would be to find out if user behaviour changes. We know that stack overflow use has dropped off. I have heard that summarisation and experiments with chat in front of the pubmed corpus is still too error prone for prime time (though LLM capabilities and our understanding of how to orchestrate RAG are both advancing rapidly, so I predict this to change in the next 12 months).

We have been on this roundabout before with voice and chatbots, and neither really worked out before, but there is a definite feeling that this time is different.

I’d like to see progress on the following areas:

  • alt text for scientific images
  • Better tooling to help understand a corpus at scale
  • Better tooling to help non experts manage taxonomies
  • Better clarity around how to drive value from structured data, and how to create that structure.
I think another key area is how tools like these get applied directly in workflow, and what kinds of prompts are created within a specific organisation. In a way those are the points at which the broad technology meets the specific business processes, and making iteration at that layer easy is going to be critical.

My tags:

  • ai
  • publishing
Tags from OpenAI:

artificial intelligence, publishing, technology, user behaviour, workflow management, data structuring, task completion, voice and chatbots, scientific imagery, corpus analysis, taxonomy, business processes.

Linked Text: Chinese: 银发公司已经宣布了一个AI实验室的建立。他们正在探索的能力包括RAG搜索、文本摘要、聊天等,这些都是这个领域的低悬果。这类能力将很快成为出版公司必备的工具。寻求了解这些特性是否会引导用户行为的改变或提高任务完成的可能性。还有更有趣的是找出用户行为是否有所改变。希望在以下几个领域看到进展:科学图像的文本替代,更好的工具以协助了解大规模检索语料库,使非专业人士更好地管理分类法,如何从具有结构的数据中提取价值以及如何创建该结构的更明确指导等。

German: Silver Hair hat ein KI-Labor angekündigt. Sie erforschen Fähigkeiten wie RAG-Suche, Zusammenfassung, Chat, dies sind auf vielen Wegen die offensichtlichsten Bereiche, um die Technologie einzusetzen. Es wäre interessant zu wissen, ob diese Funktionen eine Verhaltensänderung bei den Benutzern bewirken oder die Wahrscheinlichkeit der Aufgabenerfüllung erhöhen. Weitere interessante Fragen wären, ob sich das Benutzerverhalten ändert. Es gibt bestimmte Bereiche, auf die ich Fortschritte sehen möchte: Alt-Text für wissenschaftliche Bilder, bessere Werkzeuge zum Verständnis eines Korpus in großem Maßstab, bessere Führung, wie man Wert aus strukturierten Daten gewinnt und wie man diese Struktur schafft.

Spanish: Silver Hair ha anunciado el lanzamiento de un laboratorio de IA. Están explorando capacidades como la búsqueda RAG, resumen, chat, que en muchos aspectos son las frutas al alcance de este sector. Sería interesante saber si alguno de estos tipos de características impulsa un cambio en el comportamiento del usuario o un aumento en la probabilidad de finalización de tareas. Sería aún más interesante descubrir si el comportamiento del usuario cambia. Me gustaría ver progresos en las siguientes áreas: texto alternativo para imágenes científicas, mejores herramientas para entender un corpus a escala, mejores herramientas para que los no expertos gestionen taxonomías, mejor claridad sobre cómo obtener valor de los datos estructurados y cómo crear esa estructura.




About Ian Mulvany

Hi, I'm Ian - I work on academic publishing systems. You can find out more about me at mulvany.net. I'm always interested in engaging with folk on these topics, if you have made your way here don't hesitate to reach out if there is anything you want to share, discuss, or ask for help with!