This is a common theme with LLMs (and LLM criticism).
The context: I was rushing for a train, I ran into Starbucks at the station for a coffee, I noticed they didn't have cake pops and the staff member didn't appear to know what they were.
I see three choices here:
1. Since I'm mildly curious about Starbucks and cake pop availability in the UK, I get on the train, open up my laptop and dedicate realistically a solid half hour or more to figuring out what's going on.
2. I fire off a research question at GPT-5 Thinking on my mobile phone.
3. I don't do any research at all and leave my mild curiosity unsaturated.
Realistically, I think the choices are between 2 and 3. I was never going to perform a full research project on this myself.
See also: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects, which I wrote in March 2023 and has aged extremely well. https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-developmen...
I do plenty of deep dive research projects myself into topics both useful and pointless - my blog is full of them!
Now I can take on even more.
The context: I was rushing for a train, I ran into Starbucks at the station for a coffee, I noticed they didn't have cake pops and the staff member didn't appear to know what they were.
I see three choices here:
1. Since I'm mildly curious about Starbucks and cake pop availability in the UK, I get on the train, open up my laptop and dedicate realistically a solid half hour or more to figuring out what's going on.
2. I fire off a research question at GPT-5 Thinking on my mobile phone.
3. I don't do any research at all and leave my mild curiosity unsaturated.
Realistically, I think the choices are between 2 and 3. I was never going to perform a full research project on this myself.
See also: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects, which I wrote in March 2023 and has aged extremely well. https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-developmen...
I do plenty of deep dive research projects myself into topics both useful and pointless - my blog is full of them!
Now I can take on even more.