Where should I start (with AI-assisted research as my aim)?

I have no coding skills, but figure I need to develop some to achieve the types of things I want to do. At the same time, I’m overwhelmed by the range of advice and tutorials out there. My current interest is research automation (especially report writing), so I want the fastest pathway to being productive.

As an example, let’s say that I need to publish a monthly report on key developments and policies in Canadian housing markets. To do this, I’d monitor a bunch of websites, copy/paste articles that I find relevant to a Word document (either organize them under city sections, or have a separate file for each city). The word file (s) might run to 200 pages, with lots of overlapping news across different articles. Some news of little importance might also end up in the file.

My report needs to be 5-10 pages summarizing the key policies and market developments under a city-by-city outline. I guess I could feed this into ChatGPT, but I haven’t had good results with large files. I’ve read about Langchain, which it seems I’d need a Python foundation to use. I also tried out quivr.app (langchain based) - uploaded 5 documents and asked it to draft a report, but it seemed to draw heavily from one document without being comprehensive/systematic.

Longer-term, I’d like to automate the information collection process, which I guess will require some scraping setup.

Any advice on approaching this, what to study, resources, etc.? Are there solutions to this already out there? Longer-term, can this type of thing be done easily on Windows with co-pilot? Thank you.

Personally I would never trust ChatGPT with anything important. It is known to lie and make things up.

You could pretty easily scrape data from a word document though if you know what you’re looking for.

P.S Here is the biggest example of why you shouldn’t trust ChatGPT or LLMs. As long as it sounds right, it’ll tell you what you want to hear. Regardless of accuracy.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/new-york-lawyers-sanctioned-using-fake-chatgpt-cases-legal-brief-2023-06-22/

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 182 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.