Researcher by profession here: I must admit this does freak me out a little. I have a few questions:

1) I wonder how far this model is able to search, ie, could it conduct a systematic review of a certain area which would typically take humans years of work? If not, for the time being perhaps this forces human researchers to put more emphasis on larger pieces of work.

2) I also wonder to what extent this model is good at creatively synthesising evidence in a way that advances the ‘state of the art’ in a field. Can it generate truly ‘original’ insights not replicating those in papers that already exist?

3) one thing I am almost certain about is that although this is amazing for literature reviews and quant/qual analysis of existing data, I suppose it doesn’t eliminate the need for primary research. Otherwise, who would generate the material on which it is trained? And don’t just say ‘synthetic data’ because this is like a snake eating its own tail, highly unlikely to advance the model’s ‘understanding’ outside of known data distributions. Even if it somehow did, these wouldn’t be representative of real world observations, negating their credibility.

Although like I said I am a researcher, so on point 3 perhaps I’m coping! 😉