Deep Research and Knowledge Value
Description
“When did you feel the AGI?”
This is a question that has been floating around AI circles for a while, and it’s a hard one to answer for two reasons. First, what is AGI, and second, “feel” is a bit like obscenity: as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said in Jacobellis v. Ohio, “I know it when I see it.”
I gave my definition of AGI in AI’s Uneven Arrival:
What o3 and inference-time scaling point to is something different: AI’s that can actually be given tasks and trusted to complete them. This, by extension, looks a lot more like an independent worker than an assistant — ammunition, rather than a rifle sight. That may seem an odd analogy, but it comes from a talk Keith Rabois gave at Stanford…My definition of AGI is that it can be ammunition, i.e. it can be given a task and trusted to complete it at a good-enough rate (my definition of Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) is the ability to come up with the tasks in the first place).
The “feel” part of that question is a more recent discovery: DeepResearch from OpenAI feels like AGI; I just got a new employee for the shockingly low price of $200/month.
Deep Research Bullets
OpenAI announced Deep Research in a February 2 blog post:
Today we’re launching deep research in ChatGPT, a new agentic capability that conducts multi-step research on the internet for complex tasks. It accomplishes in tens of minutes what would take a human many hours.
Deep research is OpenAI’s next agent that can do work for you independently — you give it a prompt, and ChatGPT will find, analyze, and synthesize hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report at the level of a research analyst. Powered by a version of the upcoming OpenAI o3 model that’s optimized for web browsing and data analysis, it leverages reasoning to search, interpret, and analyze massive amounts of text, images, and PDFs on the internet, pivoting as needed in reaction to information it encounters.
The ability to synthesize knowledge is a prerequisite for creating new knowledge. For this reason, deep research marks a significant step toward our broader goal of developing AGI, which we have long envisioned as capable of producing novel scientific research.
It’s honestly hard to keep track of OpenAI’s AGI definitions these days — CEO Sam Altman, just yesterday, defined it as “a system that can tackle increasingly complex problems, at human level, in many fields” — but in my rather more modest definition Deep Research sits right in the middle of that excerpt: it synthesizes research in an economically valuable way, but doesn’t create new knowledge.
I already published two examples of Deep Research in last Tuesday’s Stratechery Update. While I suggest reading the whole thing, to summarize:
First, I published my (brief) review of Apples recent earnings, including three observations:
- It was notable that Apple earned record revenue even though iPhone sales were down year-over-year, in the latest datapoint about the company’s transformation into a Services juggernaut.
- China sales were down again, but this wasn’t a new trend: it actually goes back nearly a decade, but you can only see that if you realize how the Huawei chip ban gave Apple a temporary boost in the country.
- While Apple executives claimed that Apple Intelligence drove iPhone sales, there really wasn’t any evidence in the geographic sales numbers supporting that assertion.
Second, I published a Deep Research report using a generic prompt:
I am Ben Thompson, the author of Stratechery. This is important information because I want you to understand my previous analysis of Apple, and the voice in which I write on Stratechery. I want a research report about Apple's latest earnings in the style and voice of Stratechery that is in line with my previous analysis.Third, I published a Deep Research report using a prompt that incorporated my takeaways from the earnings:
I am Ben Thompson, the author of Stratechery. This is important information because I want you to understand my previous analysis of Apple, and the voice in which I write on Stratechery. I want a research report about Apple's latest earnings for fiscal year 2025 q1 (calendar year 2024 q4). There are a couple of angles I am particularly interested in:- First, there is the overall trend of services revenue carrying the companies earnings. How has that trend continued, what does it mean for margins, etc.- Second, I am interested in the China angle. My theory is that Apple's recent decline in China is not new, but is actually part of a longer trend going back nearly a decade. I believe that trend was arrested by the chip ban on Huawei, but that that was only a temporary bump in terms of a long-term decline. In addition, I would like to marry this to deeper analysis of the Chinese phone market, the distinction between first tier cities and the rest of China, and what that says about Apple's prospects in the country.- Third, what takeaways are there about Apple's AI prospects? The company claims that Apple Intelligence is helping sales in markets where it has launched, but isn't this a function of not being available in China?Please deliver this report in a format and style that is suitable for Stratechery.
You can read the Update for the output, but this was my evaluation:
The first answer was decent given the paucity of instruction; it’s really more of a summary than anything, but there are a few insightful points. The second answer was considerably more impressive. This question relied much more heavily on my previous posts, and weaved points I’ve made in the past into the answer. I don’t, to be honest, think I learned anything new, but I think that anyone encountering this topic for the first time would have. Or, to put it another way, were I looking for a research assistant, I would consider hiring whoever wrote the second answer.
In other words, Deep Research isn’t a rifle barrel, but for this question at least, it was a pretty decent piece of ammunition.
DeepResearch Examples
Still, that ammunition wasn’t that valuable to me; I read the transcript of Apple’s earnings call before my 8am <a href="https://dithering.passport.online/member/episode/apple-earnin
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