A Thing Gemini Might be Good at, and a Weird feature of SearchGPT
The Thing Gemini Advanced Might be Good at
I haven’t been very impressed with Gemini so far. Most times that I’ve pitted it against two or three other GenAI chatbots it has not done well, and it has very rarely offered a Top 2 response if I use a wider group of bots.
Over the weekend I found a thing it shows some promise at. I was thinking about how NotebookLM has suddenly become great over recent weeks -or at least that’s when I started noticing it. NotebookLM works especially well with uploaded content, and Gemini Advanced recently added this feature (it may not be so recent, but it recently caught my eye in the Android app) - so I thought I’d see how it does and whether it can do anything even close to as well as NotebookLM.
Gemini has not been great with every document I uploaded to it, but it gave a very good result on an upload of a PDF export of some of my notes on my favorite book I’ve read about generative AI and the current state of AI and human interaction in general: Co-intelligence, by Ethan Mollick.
Here’s my prompt to Gemini and the initial chunk of its response:
That’s pretty good. The 7 striking ideas it came up with were even better; I wouldn’t argue with any of them:
I like the Learn More dropdown throughout its response, so you can dig deeper on any of those sections:
I’m going to feed more uploads to Gemini and see if I can get some more good results.
The Weird “Feature” of SearchGPT
I’ve mentioned this before in a sort of mentioned in passing small way, but I think it’s worth another mention. This is what SearchGPT’s search history looks like:
That’s not the wrong screenshot. It’s more of a cheap trick here. There is no search history in SearchGPT. That feels odd and wrong to me in a “new school” search engine, or search engine alternative. A search engine alternative that’s a GPT highlighted within ChatGPT - and reportedly soon to be fully integrated into it. ChatGPT and pretty much all the leading GenAI apps allow us to save the history of our interactions with them, and delete any single interaction or all of them. Perplexity, the original alternative search engine - or “answer engine” I think its founder calls it - does the same. You can save your search queries, add them to collections (categories), and delete history when you want to.
Hopefully search query history - as at least an option - will come to SearchGPT soon / when it’s integrated into ChatGPT.