Last month, OpenAI released Deep Research, which is “designed to perform in-depth, multi-step research”.  Deep Research sounds like a wonderful tool, though not without its drawbacks. The Economist explains:

“OpenAI’s model can handle straightforward questions—“what was France’s unemployment rate in 2023?”—without breaking step… When it comes to data questions requiring more creativity, however, the model struggles…[and it] has even greater difficulty with more complex questions…[One issue] is the tyranny of the majority. Deep Research is trained on an enormous range of public data. For many tasks, this is a plus. It is astonishingly good at producing detailed, sourced summaries…

Yet the sheer volume of content used to train the model creates an intellectual problem. Deep Research tends to draw on ideas that are frequently discussed or published, rather than the best stuff. Information volume tyrannises information quality. It happens with statistics: Deep Research is prone to consulting sources that are easily available (such as newspapers), rather than better data that may be behind a paywall or are harder to find…In other words, those using Deep Research as an assistant risk learning about the consensus view, not that of the cognoscenti. 

[Another] problem with employing Deep Research as an assistant is the most serious. It is not an issue with the model itself, but how it is used. Ineluctably, you find yourself taking intellectual shortcuts. Paul Graham, a Silicon Valley investor, has noted that AI models, by offering to do people’s writing for them, risk making them stupid. “Writing is thinking,” he has said. “In fact there’s a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.” The same is true for research. For many jobs, researching is thinking: noticing contradictions and gaps in the conventional wisdom. The risk of outsourcing all your research to a supergenius assistant is that you reduce the number of opportunities to have your best ideas.“

- The danger of relying on OpenAI’s Deep Research/The Economist February 13, 2025

Google AI Overviews are quickie summaries of search results that synthesize information from multiple sources. As with Deep Research, AI Overviews are a wonderful tool but shouldn’t be considered the final word on a topic or query. They are, however, a good place to begin an exploration.

With that in mind, I’ll start subsequent Survive and Thrive posts with an AI Overview on the topic under consideration and then proceed to whatever more I’ve found out in my own explorations.

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Next: How to Survive and Thrive in a Warmer World, Part II: Unpredictable Weather