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

simonwillison.net

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

#111

Post by smohare »

Lerc wrote: post #61
gdbsjjdn wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[dead]

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

#112

Post by dontdoxxme »

650REDHAIR wrote: post #90
j_bum wrote: post #71

Is this the “Web Search”, “Deep Research”, or “Agent Mode” feature of ChatGPT? Navigating their feature set is… fun.

In my experience it’s “search Reddit and combine comments”.

There are searches where that is the best way for a human to get the answer too. It can also search the Internet Archive if you ask for historical details, so does it not just do what a good human researcher would do?

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

#113

Post by Jordan-117 »

It really is great. When I was still on Reddit, I made regular use of the "Tip of My Tongue" sub to track down obscure stuff I half-remembered from years ago. It mostly worked, but there were a few stubborn cases that went unsolved, even after pouring every ounce of my Google Fu into the endeavor. I recently took the text of these unsolved posts and submitted them to Deep Research -- and within an hour, it had cracked four of them, and put me on track to find a fifth myself. Even if the reasoning part isn't entirely up to par, there's still something really powerful about being able to rapidly digest dozens of search results and pull out relevant information based on a loose description. And now I can have that kind of search power on demand in just a few minutes, without having to deal with Reddit's spambots and post filters and hordes of users who don't read the question or follow the sub's basic rules.

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

#114

Post by gerdesj »

Oh FFS, "I've Chatted and stuff"

Your Exeter cavern quandary was not exactly sorted. https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/6/research-goblin/#histor...

They are quite old and very well documented, so how on earth could a LLM fuck up unless, a LLM is some sort of next token guesser ...

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

#115

Post by gerdesj »

psadri wrote: post #79

I do miss the earlier "heavy" models that had encyclopedic knowledge vs the new "lighter" models that rely on web search. Relying on web search surfaces a shallow layer of knowledge (thanks to SEO and all the other challenges of ranking web results) vs having ingested / memorized basically the entirety of human written knowledge beyond what's typically reachable within the first 10 results of a web search (eg: digiti…

"encyclopedic knowledge"

Have you just hallucinated that?

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

#116

Post by simonw »

gerdesj wrote: post #114

Oh FFS, "I've Chatted and stuff" Your Exeter cavern quandary was not exactly sorted. https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/6/research-goblin/#histor... They are quite old and very well documented, so how on earth could a LLM fuck up unless, a LLM is some sort of next token guesser ...

Which bit are you talking about it failing to solve? The diagram of the tunnels?

I made fun of its attempt at drawing a useless scatter chart.

That example wasn't meant to illustrate that it's flawless - just that it's interesting and useful, even when it doesn't get to the ideal answer.

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

#117

Post by losvedir »

bitexploder wrote: post #91
niklassheth wrote: post #89

I've also found it to be good at digging deep on things I'm curious about, but don't care enough to spend a lot of time on. As an example, I wanted to know how much sugar by weight is in a coffee syrup so I could make my own dupe. My searches were drowned out by marketing material, but ChatGPT found a datasheet with the info I wanted. I would've eventually found it too, but that's too much effort for an unimportant t…

Don’t sleep on Gemini Deep Research feature either. I use it for my car work and it beats ChatGPT’s offering at that price point every time.

I dunno, I use Deep Research from Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini, and Gemini is the only one that ignores my requests and always produces the most inane high school student wannabe management consultant "report" with introduction and restatement of the problem and background and all that. Its "voice" (the prose, I mean, not text to speech) is so irritating I've stopped using it.

The other ones will do the thing I want: search a bunch, digest the results, and give me a quick summary table or something.

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

#118

Post by beefnugs »

hamdingers wrote: post #96
psadri wrote: post #79

I do miss the earlier "heavy" models that had encyclopedic knowledge vs the new "lighter" models that rely on web search. Relying on web search surfaces a shallow layer of knowledge (thanks to SEO and all the other challenges of ranking web results) vs having ingested / memorized basically the entirety of human written knowledge beyond what's typically reachable within the first 10 results of a web search (eg: digiti…

I feel the opposite. Before I can use information from a model's "internal" knowledge I have to engage in independent research to verify that it's not a hallucination. Having an LLM generate search strings and then summarize the results does that research up front and automatically, I need only click the sources to verify. Kagi Assistant does this really well.

So does anyone have any good examples of it effectively avoiding the blogspam and SEO? Or being fooled by it? How often either way?

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

#119

Post by pamelafox »

I am giving it a go for parenting advice- “My 5 year old is suddenly very germ concious. Doesnt want to touch things, always washing hands. Do deep research, is this normal?” https://chatgpt.com/share/68be1dbd-187c-8012-98d7-83f710b12b...

The results look reasonable? It’s a good start, given how long it takes to hear back from our doctor on questions like this.

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

#120

Post by ants_everywhere »

Yeah this is what people are doing with LLMs every day. I don't quite get what is supposed to be different in the blog post.

HN is a bit weird because it's got 99 articles about how evil LLMs are and one article that's like "oh hey I asked an LLM questions and got some answers" and people are like "wow amazing".

Not that I mind. I assume Simon just wanted to share some cool nerdy stuff and there's nothing wrong with the blog post. It's just surprising that it's posted not once but twice on HN and is on the front page when there's so much anti-AI sentiment otherwise.

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