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GPT-5 Thinking in ChatGPT (a.k.a. Research Goblin) is good at search
simonwillison.net
"Do deep internet research and thinking to present as much evidence in favor of the idea that JRR Tolkein's Lord of the Rings trilogy was inspired by Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast series."
https://chatgpt.com/share/68bcd796-bf8c-800c-ad7a-51387b1e53...
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Simon's writing is consistently either highly practical, or extremely high quality, or both. What's your reference frame to call it "bad" - your own comments?
This is fine. He is his own person and can write about whatever he wants and work with whoever he wants, but the days when I'd eagerly read his blog to get a finger of the pulse of all of the main developments in the main labs/models has passed, as he seems to only really cover OpenAI these days, and major events from non-OpenAI labs/models don't seem to even get a mention even if they're huge (e.g. nano banana).
That's fine. It's his blog. He can do what he wants. But to me personally he feels like an OpenAI mouthpiece now. But that's just my opinion.
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Simon's writing is consistently either highly practical, or extremely high quality, or both. What's your reference frame to call it "bad" - your own comments?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Simon's writing is consistently either highly practical, or extremely high quality, or both. What's your reference frame to call it "bad" - your own comments?
FWIW I take his writings with a hefty pinch of salt these days. It seems incredibly concentrated on OpenAI to the detriment of anything else. This was only cemented when he ended up appearing on some OpenAI marketing video. This is fine. He is his own person and can write about whatever he wants and work with whoever he wants, but the days when I'd eagerly read his blog to get a finger of the pulse of all of the main…
> he feels like an OpenAI mouthpiece now
That seems a little harsh. But, I felt the same about older blogs I used to read such as CodingHorror. They just aren’t for me anymore after diverging into other topics.
I really liked this article and the coining of the term “Research Goblin”. That is how I use it too sometimes. Which is also how I used to use Google.
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I find it informative that search works so well. I knew it works well, but this feels like step above whatever Gemini can do, which is my go to workhorse for chatbots.
Slightly off topic but chatGPT’s refusal to visually identify people, including dead historical personalities, has been a big let down for me. I can paste in an image of JFK and it will refuse to tell me who it is.