ChatGPT Atlas

Try it yourself and ignore the hype. For certain things it can be really useful, just keep in mind that it's early days.

I recently used Comet to find out of print movies that were never released on DVD/Bluray, then find them on ebay, then find the best value, then provide me with a list to order. It felt like magic watching it work, and saved me many hours of either doing it myself or scripting it.

I did have to repeatedly break it into ever smaller tasks to get everything to fit within the context windows, but still... it might have been janky but it was janky magic.

Surely this is something you can do with simple searches...? Unless you're reaching the level of trying to buy dozens or hundreds of movies.

https://xkcd.com/1205/

But why? The AI can go off and search and I can do other stuff while it does.

The point is the multiply how much you can get done, simple searches still require me to be present and to do the work of compiling the list myself, this type of busy work seems much better suited to tools like this that take a sentence or 2 to kick off

This xkcd comic doesn't apply anymore due to AI making generating automation code trivial.

I'm mostly just curious how that experience differs from using chatgpt directly and having it run searches and present the results?

My brain can't work like that. When I'm pursuing things, I always await until the blocking operation is done, something about uninterrupted train of thought and avoiding context switching.

With LLMs we're all becoming managers. Good news is we'll get more done. Bad news is that we'll have to get way better at persisting mid-state process status (I sometimes ask my LLM "could you summarize what we were talking about and why"), tracking outstanding tasks (linear for our agents) and jumping between contexts.

I am also finding work is becoming more tiring. As I'm able to delegate all the rote stuff I feel like decision fatigue is hitting harder/faster as all I spend my time doing is making the harder judgement decisions that the LLMs don't do well enough yet.

Particularly tough in generalist roles where you're doing a little bit of a wide range of things. In a week I might need to research AI tools and leadership principles, come up with facilitation exercises, envision sponsorship models, create decks, write copy, build and filter ICP lists, automate outreach, create articles, do taxes, find speakers, select a vendor for incorporation, find a tool for creating and maintaining logos, fonts and design systems and think deeply about how CTOs should engage with AI strategically. I'm usually burned pretty hard by Friday night :(

This message is so alien to me... I fail to see the real world value of any task you described. Aren't we all fooling ourselves at this point?

everything AI is doable manually. the point is AI saves us mental toil (maybe).

If the movies were never released on DVD/Bluray, what is it that you are searching for on ebay? VHS?

You're discounting the mental effort that goes into describing what you want to an LLM and then verifying the output, which is only worth it if it actually saves you time. Doing a simple search for a few DVDs does not seem worth the effort to me.

You’d be surprised.

I consider myself extremely competent at getting niche results. Couldn’t for the life of me find a certain after market part for a home appliance.

I go ask Claude to find it and it comes back with exactly what I need. One of its queries hit a website with a poorly labeled product that it was able to figure out was exactly what I needed. That product was nested so deeply in results that I would have never found it on my own.

VHS, 16mm film, etc. I enjoy owning films that are basically unobtanium.

> hundreds of movies.

That was the goal, yes. In the end I only actually found about 10 I didn't already own, but the AI had to wade through a few hundred to find them.

It wasn't a few. There are literally thousands of films that never made the leap from VHS to DVD. My starting list was only a few hundred, but still it saved me hours.

I'm convinced it's some kind of SV-induced "culture of hyper-productivity", the only apparent goal is to be _more_ productive. Endlessly. There's no goal, or end-state, or reason, other than to just be productive. Downtime? Wasted productivity time! Hobbies? Wasted time unless you can monetise them! Get an AI to do it, and be _even more_ productive!

Similar experience. I searched all over for the install manual of my HVAC system (~25 years old at this point). Multiple days turned up nothing. Chatgpt gave me a link to a pdf that Im pretty sure was supposed to be private in about 30 seconds.