[steelframe]

I'd like to take a dig into this notion of "purpose" and "primary goal." To me, LLMs are a phenomenon. They have not intrinsic purpose or goal -- they just are.

Purposes and goals come from you and me. An LLM is a tool, and we get to decide what the tool is good for or how to use it.

If you want "a smart creative," there's nothing wrong with that. It's as good a purpose or goal as any.

However for me I don't want an LLM to try to be "a smart creative." I instead want it to give me cold, hard facts in precisely the format I want them, in precisely the context I am interested in, and with precisely the conciseness that I require to make a specific decision or learn a specific thing. Traditional web search can eventually get me what I want, but I have to sift through the cruft and make associations among a plethora of content to get to the meat of what I want.

I've found that using a good web search (Kagi) together with an LLM processing the results has given me information I needed and then pointed to the sources so I can validate those statements. I wouldn't exactly characterize those results as a "simple" summary. They're usually synthesizing a variety of sources to generate something that no one source had, exactly.