“Persuasively Wrong"
The challenges of using LLMs in Research
One really substantial bottleneck in our research project is data collection. It takes years and an army of research assistants to painstakingly go through scattered, incomplete historical reports to gather data manually at scale for our global history database, Seshat. Collaborators of ours at the University of Hong Kong hired over 100 research assistants to work for years on a comprehensive archaeological database based on Chinese excavation reports. This is a level of resources we just can’t compete with.
