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Introducing deep research

openai.com

411–420 of 445 posts

Re: Introducing deep research

#411

I just gave it a whirl. Pretty neat, but definitely watch out for hallucinations. For instance, I asked it to compile a report on myself (vain, I know.) In this 500-word report (ok, I'm not that important, I guess), it made at least three errors. It stated that I had 47,000 reputation points on Stack Overflow -- quite a surprise to me, given my minimal activity on Stack Overflow over the years. I popped over to the l…

"Pretty neat, but definitely watch out for hallucinations." We'd never hire someone who just makes stuff up (or at least keep them employed for long). Why are we okay with calling "AI" tools like this anything other than curious research projects? Can't we just send LLMs back to the drawing board until they have some semblance of reliability?

LLM are "great" in some use cases, "ok" in others, and "laughable" in more.

Some people might find $500 worth of value, in their specific use case, in those "great" and "ok" categories, where they get more value than "lies" out of it.

A few verifiable lies, vs hours of time, could be worth it for some people, with use cases outside of your perspective.

Re: Introducing deep research

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just verify the output? It’s faster than generating the entire thing yourself. Why do you need perfection in a productivity tool?

At that point why not just... I dunno, do the research yourself?

Perhaps because the time to proofread/correct is less than to do it from scratch? That would still make it a valuable tool

Re: Introducing deep research

#415

I just gave it a whirl. Pretty neat, but definitely watch out for hallucinations. For instance, I asked it to compile a report on myself (vain, I know.) In this 500-word report (ok, I'm not that important, I guess), it made at least three errors. It stated that I had 47,000 reputation points on Stack Overflow -- quite a surprise to me, given my minimal activity on Stack Overflow over the years. I popped over to the l…

"Pretty neat, but definitely watch out for hallucinations." We'd never hire someone who just makes stuff up (or at least keep them employed for long). Why are we okay with calling "AI" tools like this anything other than curious research projects? Can't we just send LLMs back to the drawing board until they have some semblance of reliability?

This doesn’t make LLMs worthless, you just need to structure your processes around fallibility. Much like a well designed release pipeline is built with the expectation that devs will write bugs that shouldn’t ship.

Re: Introducing deep research

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that point why not just... I dunno, do the research yourself?

Perhaps because the time to proofread/correct is less than to do it from scratch? That would still make it a valuable tool

How?

It's given you some information and now you have to seek out a source to verify that it's correct.

Finding information is hard work. It's why librarian is a valuable skilled profession. What you've done by suggesting that I should "verify" or "proofread" what a glorified, water-wasting Markov chain has given me now entails me looking up that information to verify that it's correct. That's...not quite doubling the work involved but it's adding an unnecessary step.

I could have searched for the source in the first instance. I could have gone to the library and asked for help.

We spent time coming up with a question ("prompt engineering"! hah!), we used up a bunch of electricity for an answer to be generated and now you...want me to search up that answer to find the source? Why did we do the first step?

People got undergraduate degrees - hell, even PhDs - before generative AI.

Look up the tweet from someone who said "Sometimes when coming up with a good prompt for ChatGPT, I sometimes come up with the answer myself without needing to submit".

Re: Introducing deep research

#417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to explain how something that cannot be copyrighted and was not generated by a human is “intellectual property“? Or are you just parroting a narrative?

Trade secrets are protected by the law. It doesn’t require copyright.

Explain the trade secrets contained in non-copyrightable AI outputs and the reasonable efforts OpenAI takes to keep its AI output “secret”. Or are you confused about what a “trade secret” actually is?

Re: Introducing deep research

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if this was posted as humour, but I don't feel that way. In today's world, where I certainly would consider taking the blue pill, I'm having a blast with LLMs! It has helped me learn stuff incredibly faster. Especially I find them useful for filling the gaps of knowledge and exploring new topics in my own way and language, without needing to wait an answer from a human (that could also be wrong). Why does it…

>It has helped me learn stuff incredibly faster. Especially I find them useful for filling the gaps of knowledge and exploring new topics in my own way and language and then you verify every single fact it tells you via traditional methods by confirming them in human-written documents, right? Otherwise, how do you use the LLM for learning? If you don't know the answer to what you're asking, you can't tell if it's lyi…

Saying you need to verify "literally everything" both overestimates the frequency of hallucinations and underestimates the amount of wrong found in human-written sources. e.g. the infamous case of Google's AI recommending Elmer's glue on pizza was literally a human-written suggestion first: https://www.reddit.com/r/Pizza/comments/1a19s0/my_cheese_sli...

Re: Introducing deep research

#419
What a coincident of releasing deep research for your product when one of your main competitors has DeepSeek R1 as their best performant version /s

Seriously, for the past 20+ years it's hard to imagine doing research without Google platform namely Google Search, Scholar, Patent and Book, but now it seems agent AI based on LLM is the way to. In twenty years in the future it will be hard to imagine that doing research without them. But as many people already pointed out Google probably the best company by far to perform this emerging AI based research. In data eco-system terms (refer to any book on data engineering), Google has already perform has the most important data preparation and data engineering upstream activities including data ingestion and transformation. Now given their vast amount of processed data they can just serve it to downstream data analytics or AI for performing research with minimum error/hallucinations as possible. According to Google there is no moat for any companies against open source LLM, but if any company that can has the moat it will be Google itself.

Re: Introducing deep research

#420

Would formalizing Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem be considered deep research? Is it able to formalize it in say metamath's set.mm? Or is the position of OpenAI that Wiles' proof is incomplete?

ah yes, when you get downvoted for asking Questions, not even Claims.
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