(20 Mar 2023) Arron Tay shared his speculation on the possible impact of LLMs on academic libraries.
“I’m going to focus on one specific area I have some expertise in, the implications of large language models (LLMs) on information retrieval and Q&A (Question and answer tasks) where LLMs are used in search engines to extract and summarise answers from top ranked documents.
I argue this new class of search engines represent a brand-new search paradigm that will catch on and change the way we search, obtain and verify answers.
We have essentially the long promised Semantic Search over documents, where instead of the old search paradigm of showing 10 blue links to possible relevant documents, we can now extract answers directly from webpages and even journal articles, particularly Open Access papers.
What implications will this have for library services like reference and information literacy? Will this give an additional impetus to the push for Open Access? How will this new search paradigm affect relationships between content owners like Publishers and discovery and web search vendors?”
Find out more from his blog here.
