Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GPT-5 Thinking in ChatGPT (a.k.a. Research Goblin) is good at search

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 268 posts

Re: GPT-5 Thinking in ChatGPT (a.k.a. Research Goblin) is good at search

#61

Post by Lerc »

gdbsjjdn wrote: post #19
BoredPositron wrote: post #3

[flagged]

As someone who is AI skeptical, there's so many breathless posts like "Jizz-7 Thinking (Good) (Big Balls) can order my morning coffee!" which are a lot of words talking about one person's subjective experience of using some LLM to do one specific thing.

Could you post a selection? It would be intersting to gauge what you mean by breathless.

People posting their subjective experience is precisely what a lot of these pieces should be doing, good or bad, their experience is the data they have to contribute.

Re: GPT-5 Thinking in ChatGPT (a.k.a. Research Goblin) is good at search

#62

Post by morning-coffee »

simonw wrote: post #55
morning-coffee wrote: post #50

[flagged]

I don't buy that my curiosity has a meaningful energy usage impact. I can accept that these questions are more intense than simpler prompts - running dozens of prompts in a chain to answer a single question. Best estimates I've seen are that a single prompt is equivalent to running an oven for a few seconds. I'm OK with my curiosity running an oven for a full minute! Here are my collected notes on AI energy usage: ht…

My question regrettably left out an unstated extrapolation I was inferring... what happens when we all "just google-ai it" when we're bored?

Of course I don't think the energy usage of your individual questions is an issue. I also appreciate your data gathering and reporting of it. I didn't mean to come across as critical of your personal use of AI to gather and report this data.

Again, it's the collective effects I'm more worried about. I'm hoping that, collectively, we're all gaining some value from the growing energy expenditures required to obtain it: https://apnews.com/article/climate-google-environmental-repo...

Re: GPT-5 Thinking in ChatGPT (a.k.a. Research Goblin) is good at search

#63

Post by simonw »

morning-coffee wrote: post #62
simonw wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy that my curiosity has a meaningful energy usage impact. I can accept that these questions are more intense than simpler prompts - running dozens of prompts in a chain to answer a single question. Best estimates I've seen are that a single prompt is equivalent to running an oven for a few seconds. I'm OK with my curiosity running an oven for a full minute! Here are my collected notes on AI energy usage: ht…

My question regrettably left out an unstated extrapolation I was inferring... what happens when we all "just google-ai it" when we're bored? Of course I don't think the energy usage of your individual questions is an issue. I also appreciate your data gathering and reporting of it. I didn't mean to come across as critical of your personal use of AI to gather and report this data. Again, it's the collective effects I'…

Something I found thought-provoking was this comment about Jevons: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/11/datarama/

Basically: if something useful gets cheaper, people may end up using it way more such that the total energy usage increase is materially large.

I do think there's a risk of that happening here: an AI-assisted search is inevitably more expensive than a single web search (since it runs potentially dozens of additional searches on top of the LLM inference cost).

I could counter that and say that now I can resolve a complex question in 30s with a single typed prompt, where beforehand I might have spent 10 minutes running my laptop and running dozens of searches by hand, for a net increase in spent energy.

... but actually, for trivial curiosity questions I just wouldn't have bothered looking for an answer at all.

I value curiosity deeply though, so maybe it's worth the world burning a few more gigawatts if the result is a more curious population?

Re: GPT-5 Thinking in ChatGPT (a.k.a. Research Goblin) is good at search

#64

Post by TiredOfLife »

BoredPositron wrote: post #35
ascorbic wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work.

I asked why it's popping up over and over again in new today. I wouldn't have commented otherwise.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News : "Hacker News (HN) is a social news website"

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_news_website : "A social news website is a website that features user-posted stories. Such stories are ranked based on popularity, as voted on by other users of the site or by website administrators."

The article was recently published, users on HN submitted the article. Other users thought it interesting and upvoted. Earth has different time zones (I understand it's difficult for americans to grasp) and so different people are active at different times.

Re: GPT-5 Thinking in ChatGPT (a.k.a. Research Goblin) is good at search

#65

Post by TiredOfLife »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #36
BoredPositron wrote: post #3

[flagged]

HN is very cult-of-personality based. People see SimonW they upvote without reading, while at the same time a much better article could be posted on the same topic and get zero traction. Not trying to single Simon out here, I generally find his posts good, just a statement of the herdthink and cognitive laziness of this community (and humans in general, to be fair).

It's not personality, but source. Like i see a post from The Register or Ars Technica I know that it will be at best completely wrong. While posts from simonwilson (for a long time I thought it was like Anandtech. A group of people posting under one domain) are usually good

Re: GPT-5 Thinking in ChatGPT (a.k.a. Research Goblin) is good at search

#66

Post by [deleted] »

TiredOfLife wrote: post #64
BoredPositron wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked why it's popping up over and over again in new today. I wouldn't have commented otherwise.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News : "Hacker News (HN) is a social news website" From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_news_website : "A social news website is a website that features user-posted stories. Such stories are ranked based on popularity, as voted on by other users of the site or by website administrators." The article was recently published, users on HN submitted the article. Other users t…

[deleted]

Re: GPT-5 Thinking in ChatGPT (a.k.a. Research Goblin) is good at search

#69

Post by edverma2 »

From GPT-5-Pro with Deep Research selected:

> FWIW Deep Research doesn’t run on whatever you pick in the model selector. It’s a separate agent that uses dedicated o‑series research models: full mode runs on o3; after you hit the full‑mode cap it auto‑switches to a lightweight o4‑mini version. The picker governs normal chat (and the pre‑research clarifying Qs), not the research engine itself.

Post reply on HN