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ChatGPT and LLMs can do anything, so what can you do with them? How do you know? Do we move to chat bots as a magical general-purpose interface, or do we unbundle them back into single-purpose software?
a year ago

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More from Essays - Benedict Evans

GenAI’s adoption puzzle

Generative AI chatbots might be a life-changing transformation in the nature of computing, that can replace all software, but so far, most of its users only pick it up every week or two, and far fewer have made it part of their lives. Is that a time problem or a product problem?

5 days ago 13 votes
What kind of disruption?

Software ate the world. Uber and Airbnb didn’t sell software - they disrupted and redefined markets. But what kind of disruption are we talking about ?

2 months ago 26 votes
Apple innovation and execution

It matters that Apple’s new Siri will be late, and it matters more that Apple didn’t realise. Is it more than that?

2 months ago 30 votes
The Deep Research problem

OpenAI’s Deep Research is built for me, and I can’t use it. It’s another amazing demo, until it breaks. But it breaks in really interesting ways.

3 months ago 38 votes
Are better models better?

Every week there’s a better AI model that gives better answers. But a lot of questions don’t have better answers, only ‘right’ answers, and these models can’t do that. So what does ‘better’ mean, how do we manage these things, and should we change what we expect from computers?

4 months ago 57 votes

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