Google Is Entering Its Janus Era

September 30, 2025

green-dino_thumbThis essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.

The Romans found the “god” Janus a way to demarcate the old from the new. (Yep, January is a variant of this religious belief: A threshold between old and new.

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Venice.ai imagines Janus as a statue.

Google is at its Janus moment. Let me explain.

The past at Google was characterized by processing a two or three word “query” and providing the user with a list of allegedly relevant links. Over time, the relevance degraded and the “pay to play” ads began to become more important. Ed Zitron identified Prabhakar Raghavan as the Google genius associated with this money-making shift. (Good work, Prabhakar! Forget those Verity days.)

The future is signaled with two parallel Google tactics. Let me share my thoughts with you.

The first push at Google is its PR / marketing effort to position itself as the Big Dog in technology. Examples range from Google’s AI grand wizard passing judgment on the inferiority of a competitor. A good example of this approach is the Futurism write up titled “CEO of DeepMind Points Out the Obvious: OpenAI Is Lying about Having PhD Level AI.” The outline of Google’s approach is to use a grand wizard in London to state the obvious to those too stupid to understand that AI marketing is snake oil, a bit of baloney, and a couple of measuring cups of jargon. Thanks for the insight, Google.

The second push is that Google is working quietly to cut what costs it can. The outfit has oodles of market cap, but the cash burn for [a] data centers, [b] hardware and infrastructure, [c] software fixes when kids are told to eat rocks and glue cheese on pizza (remember the hallucination issues?), and [d] emergency red, yellow, orange, or whatever colors suits the crisis convert directly into additional costs. (Can you hear Sundar saying, “I don’t want to hear about costs. I want Gmail back online. Why are you still in my office?)

As a result of these two tactical moves, Google’s leadership is working overtime to project the cool, calm demeanor of a McKinsey-type consultant who just learned that his largest engagement client has decided to shift to another blue-chip firm. I would consider praying to Janus if that we me in my consulting role. I would also think about getting reassigned to project involving frequent travel to Myanmar and how to explain that to my wife.

image

Venice.ai puts a senior manager at a big search company in front of a group of well-paid but very nervous wizards.

What’s an example of sending a cost signal to the legions of 9-9-6 Googlers? Navigate to “Google Isn’t Kidding Around about Cost Cutting, Even Slashing Its FT subscription.” [Oh, FT means the weird orange newspaper, the Financial Times.] The write up reports as actual factual that Google is dumping people by “eliminating 35 percent of managers who oversee teams of three people or fewer.” Does that make a Googler feel good about becoming a Xoogler because he or she is in the same class as a cancelled newspaper subscription. Now that’s a piercing signal about the value of a Googler after the baloney some employees chew through to get hired in the first place.

The context for these two thrusts is that the good old days are becoming a memory. Why? That’s easy to answer. Just navigate to “Report: The Impact of AI Overviews in the Cultural Sector.” Skip the soft Twinkie filling and go for the numbers. Here’s a sampling of why Google is amping up its marketing and increasing its effort to cut what costs it can. (No one at Google wants to admit that the next big thing may be nothing more than a repeat of the crash of the enterprise search sector which put one executive in jail and others finding their future elsewhere like becoming a guide or posting on LinkedIn for a “living.”)

Here are some data and I quote from “Report: The Impact…”:

  • Organic traffic is down 10% in early 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. On the surface, that may not sound bad, but search traffic rose 30% in 2024. That’s a 40-point swing in the wrong direction.
  • 80% of organizations have seen decreases in search traffic. Of those that have increased their traffic from Google, most have done so at a much slower rate than last year.
  • Informational content has been hit hardest. Visitor information, beginner-level articles, glossaries, and even online collections are seeing fewer clicks. Transactional content has held up better, so organizations that mostly care about their event and exhibition pages might not be feeling the effect yet.
  • Visibility varies. On average, organizations appear in only 6% of relevant AI Overviews. Top performers are achieving 13% and they tend to have stronger SEO foundations in place.

My view of this is typical dinobaby. You Millennials, GenX, Y, Z, and Gen AI people will have a different view. (Let many flowers bloom.):

  1. Google is for the first time in its colorful history faced with problems in its advertising machine. Yeah, it worked so well for so long, but obviously something is creating change at the Google
  2. The mindless AI hyperbole has not given way to direct criticism of a competitor who has a history of being somewhat unpredictable. Nothing rattles the cage of big time consultants more than uncertainty. OpenAI is uncertainty on steroids.
  3. The impact of Google’s management methods is likely to be a catalyst for some volatile compounds at the Google. Employees and possibly contractors may become less docile. Money can buy their happiness I suppose, but the one thing Google wants to hang on to at this time is money to feed the AI furnace.

Net net: Google is going to be an interesting outfit to monitor in the next six months. Will the European Union continue to send Google big bills for violating its rules? Will the US government take action against the outfit one Federal judge said was a monopoly? Will Google’s executive leadership find itself driven into a corner if revenues and growth stall and then decline? Janus, what do you think?

Stephen E Arnold, September 30, 2025

Spelling Adobe: Is It Ado-BEEN, Adob-AI, or Ado-DIE?

September 29, 2025

green-dino_thumbThis essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.

Yahoo finance presented an article titled “Morgan Stanley Warns AI Could Sink 42-Year-Old Software Giant.” The ultimate source may have been Morgan Stanley. An intermediate source appears to be The Street. What this means is that the information may or may not be spot on. Nevertheless, let’s see what Yahoo offers as financial “news.”

image

The write up points out that generative AI forced Adobe to get with the smart software program. The consequence of Adobe’s forced march was that:

The adoption headlines looked impressive, with 99% of the Fortune 100 using AI in an Adobe app, and roughly 90% of the top 50 accounts with an AI-first product.

Win, right? Nope. The article reports:

Adobe shares have tanked 20.6% YTD and more than 11% over six months, reflecting skepticism that AI features alone can push its growth engine to the next level.

Loss, right? Maybe. The article asserts:

Although Adobe’s AI adoption is real, the monetization cadence is lagging the marketing sizzle. Also, Upsell ARPU and seat expansion are happening. Yet ARR growth hasn’t re-accelerated, which raises some uncomfortable questions for the Adobe bulls.

Is the Adobe engine of growth and profit emitting wheezes and knocks? The write up certainly suggests that the go-to tool for those who want to do brochures, logos, and videos warrants a closer look. For example:

  1. Essentially free video creation tools with smart software included are available from Blackmagic, the creators of actual hardware and the DaVinci video software. For those into surveillance, there is the “free” CapCut
  2. The competition is increasing. As the number of big AI players remains stable, the outfits building upon these tools seems to be increasing. Just the other day I learned about Seedream. (Who knew?)
  3. Adobe’s shift to a subscription model makes sense to the bean counters but to some users, Adobe is not making friends. The billing and cooing some expected from Adobe is just billing.
  4. The product proliferation with AI and without AI is crazier than Google’s crypto plays. (Who knew?)
  5. Established products have been kicked to the curb, leaving some users wondering when FrameMaker will allow a user to specify specific heights for footnotes. And interfaces? Definitely 1990s.

From my point of view, the flurry of numbers in the Yahoo article skip over some signals that the beloved golden retriever of arts and crafts is headed toward the big dog house in the CMYK sky.

Stephen E Arnold, September 29, 2025

Jobs 2025: Improving Yet? Hmmm

September 26, 2025

green-dino_thumbThis essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.

Computerworld published “Resume.org: Turmoil Ahead for US Job Market As GenAI Disruption Kicks Up Waves.” The information, if it is spot on, is not good news.

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A 2024 college graduate ponders the future. Ideas and opportunities exist. What’s the path forward?

The write up says:

A new survey from Resume.org paints a stark picture of the current job market, with 50% of US companies scaling back hiring and one in three planning layoffs by the end of the year.

Well, that’s snappy. And there’s more:

The online resume-building platform surveyed 1,000 US business leaders and found that high-salary employees and those lacking AI skills are most at risk. Generational factors play a role, too: 30% of companies say younger employees are more likely to be affected, while 29% cite older employees. Additionally, 19% report that H-1B visa holders are at greater risk of layoffs.

Allegedly accurate data demand a chart. How’s this one?

image

What’s interesting is the younger, dinobabies, and H1B visa holders are safer in their jobs that those who [a] earn a lot of money (excepting the CEO and other carpetland dwellers), employees with no AI savvy, the most recently hired, and entry level employees.

Is there a bright spot in the write up? Yes, and I have put in bold face the  super good news (for some):

Experis parent company ManpowerGroup recently released a survey of more than 40,000 employers putting the US Net Employment Outlook at +28% going into the final quarter of 2025. … GenAI is part of the picture, but it’s not replacing workers as many fear, she said. Instead, one-in-four employers are hiring to keep pace with tech. The bigger issue is an ongoing skills gap — 41% of US IT employers say complex roles are hardest to fill, according to Experis.

Now the super good news applies to job seekers who are able to do the AI thing and handle “complex roles.” In my experience, complex problems tumble into the email of workers at every level. I have witnessed senior managers who have been unable to cope with the complex problems. (If these managers could, why would they hire a blue chip consulting firm and its super upbeat, Type A workers? Answer: Consulting firms are hired for more than problem solving. Sometimes these outfits are retained to push a unit to the sidelines or derail something a higher up wants to stop without being involved in obtaining the totally objective data.)

Several observations:

  1. Bad things seem to be taking place in the job market. I don’t know the cause but the discharge from the smoking guns is tough to ignore
  2. AI AI AI. Whether it works or not is not the question. AI means cost reduction. (Allegedly)
  3. Education and intelligence, connections, and personality may not work their magic as reliably as in the past.

As the illustration in this blog post suggests, alternative employment paths may appear viable. Imagine this dinobaby on OnlyFans.

Stephen E Arnold, September 26, 2025

Modern Management Method and Modern Pricing Plan

September 25, 2025

Dino 5 18 25Sadly I am a dinobaby and too old and stupid to use smart software to create really wonderful short blog posts.

Despite the sudden drop in quantity and quality in my newsfeed outputs, one of my team spotted a blog post titled “Slack Is Extorting Us with a $195K/Year Bill Increase.” Slack is, I believe, a unit of Salesforce. That firm is in the digital Rolodex business. Over the years, Salesforce has dabbled with software to help sales professionals focus. The effort was part of Salesforce’s attention retention push. Now Salesforce is into collaborative tools for professionals engaged in other organizational functions. The pointy end of the “force” is smart software. The leadership of Salesforce has spoken about the importance of AI and suggested that other firms’ collaboration software is not keeping up with Slack.

image

A forward-leaning team of deciders reaches agreement about pricing. The alpha dog is thrilled with the idea of a price hike. The beta buddies are less enthusiastic. But it is accounting job to collect on booked but unpaid revenue. The AI system called Venice produced this illustration. 

The write up says:

For nearly 11 years, Hack Club – a nonprofit that provides coding education and community to teenagers worldwide – has used Slack as the tool for communication. We weren’t freeloaders. A few years ago, when Slack transitioned us from their free nonprofit plan to a $5,000/year arrangement, we happily paid. It was reasonable, and we valued the service they provided to our community.

The “attention” grabber in this blog post is this paragraph:

However, two days ago, Slack reached out to us and said that if we don’t agree to pay an extra $50k this week and $200k a year, they’ll deactivate our Slack workspace and delete all of our message history.

I think there is a hint of a threat to the Salesforce customer. I am probably incorrect. Salesforce is popular, and it is owned by a high profile outfit embracing attention and AI. Assume that the cited passage reflects how the customer understood the invoice and its 3,000 percent plus increase and the possible threat. My question is, “What type of management process is at work at Salesforce / Slack?”

Here are my thoughts. Please, remember that I am a dinobaby and generally clueless about modern management methods used to establish pricing.

  1. Salesforce has put pressure on Slack to improve its revenue quickly. The Slack professionals knee jerked and boosted bills to outfits likely to pay up and keep quiet. Thus, the Hack Club received a big bill. Do this enough times and you can demonstrate more revenue, even though it may be unpaid. Let the bean counters work to get the money. I wonder if this is passive resistance from Slack toward Salesforce’s leadership? Oh, of course not.
  2. Salesforce’s pushes for attention and AI are not pumping the big bucks Salesforce needs to avoid the negative consequences of missing financial projections. Bad things happen when this occurs.
  3. Salesforce / Slack are operating in a fog of unknowing. The hope for big payoffs from attention and AI are slow to materialize. The spreadsheet fever that justifies massive investments in AI is yielding to some basic financial realities: Customers are buying. Sticking AI into communications is not a home run for Slack users, and it may not be for the lucky bean counters who have to collect on the invoices for booked but unpaid revenue.

The write up states:

Anyway, we’re moving to Mattermost. This experience has taught us that owning your data is incredibly important, and if you’re a small business especially, then I’d advise you move away too.

Salesforce / Slack loses a customer and the costs associated with handling data for what appears to be a lower priority and lower value customer.

Modern management methods are logical and effective. Never has a dinobaby learned so much about today’s corporate tactics than I have from my reading about outfits like Salesforce / and Slack.

Stephen E Arnold, September 25, 2025

Fixing AI Convenience Behavior: Lead, Collaborate, and Mindset?

September 24, 2025

green-dino_thumb_thumbThis essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.

I read “AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity.” Six people wrote the article for the Harvard Business Review. (Whatever happened to independent work?)

The write up reports:

Employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers.

Let’s consider this statement in the context of college students’ behavior when walking across campus. I was a freshman in college in 1962. The third rate institution had a big green area with no cross paths. The enlightened administration put up “keep off the grass” signs.

What did the students do? They walked the shortest distance between two points. Why? Why go the long way? Why spend extra time? Why be stupid? Why be inconvenienced?

image

The cited write up from the estimable Harvard outfit says:

But while some employees are using this ability [AI tools] to polish good work, others use it to create content that is actually unhelpful, incomplete, or missing crucial context about the project at hand. The insidious effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work. In other words, it transfers the effort from creator to receiver.

Yep, convenience. Why waste effort?

The fix is to eliminate smart software. But that won’t happen. Why? Smart software provides a way to cut humanoids from the costs of running a business. Efficiency works. Well, mostly.

The write up says:

we jettison hard mental work to technologies like Google because it’s easier to, for example, search for something online than to remember it. Unlike this mental outsourcing to a machine, however, workslop uniquely uses machines to offload cognitive work to another human being. When coworkers receive workslop, they are often required to take on the burden of decoding the content, inferring missed or false context.

And what about changing this situation? Did the authors trot out the old chestnuts from Kurt Lewin and the unfreeze, change, refreeze model? Did the authors suggest stopping AI deployment? Nope. The fix involves:

  1. Leadership
  2. Mindsets
  3. Collaboration

Just between you and me, I think this team of authors is angling for some juicy consulting assignments. These will involve determining who, how much, what, and impact of using slop AI. Then there will be a report with options. The team will implement “options” and observe the results. If the process works, the client will sign a long=term contract with the team.

Keep off the grass!

Stephen E Arnold, September 24, 2025

A Googler Explains How AI Helps Creators and Advertisers in the Googley Maze

September 24, 2025

Dino 5 18 25_thumbSadly I am a dinobaby and too old and stupid to use smart software to create really wonderful short blog posts.

Most of Techmeme’s stories are paywalled. But one slipped through. (I wonder why?) Anyhow, the article in question is “An Interview with YouTube Neal Mohan about Building a Stage for Creators.” The interview is a long one. I want to focus on a couple of statements and offer a handful of observations.

The first comment by the Googler Mohan is this one:

Moving away from the old model of the cliché Madison Avenue type model of, “You go out to lunch and you negotiate a deal and it’s bespoke in this particular fashion because you were friends with the head of ad sales at that particular publisher”. So doing away with that model, and really frankly, democratizing the way advertising worked, which in our thesis, back to this kind of strategy book, would result in higher ROI for publishers, but also better ROI for advertisers.

The statement makes clear that disrupting advertising was the key to what is now the Google Double Click model. Instead of Madison Avenue, today there is the Google model. I think of it as a maze. Once one “gets into” the Google Double Click model, there is no obvious exit.

image

The art was generated by Venice.ai. No human needed. Sorry freelance artists on Fiverr.com. This is the future. It will come to YouTube as well.

Here’s the second I noted:

everything that we build is in service of people that are creative people, and I use the term “creator” writ large. YouTubers, artists, musicians, sports leagues, media, Hollywood, etc., and from that vantage point, it is really exceedingly clear that these AI capabilities are just that, they’re capabilities, they’re tools. But the thing that actually draws us to YouTube, what we want to watch are the original storytellers, the creators themselves.

The idea, in my interpretation, is that Google’s smart software is there to enable humans to be creative. AI is just a tool like an ice pick. Sure, the ice pick can be driven into someone’s heart, but that’s an extreme example of misuse of a simple tool. Our approach is to keep that ice pick for the artist who is going to create an ice sculpture.

Please, read the rest of this Googley interview to get a sense of the other concepts Google’s ad system and its AI are delivering to advertisers and “creators.”

Here’s my view:

  1. Google wants to get creators into the YouTube maze. Google wants advertisers to use the now 30 year old Google Double Click ad system. Everyone just enter the labyrinth.
  2. The rats will learn that the maze is the equivalent of a fish in an aquarium. What else will the fish know? Not too much. The aquarium is life. It is reality.
  3. Google has a captive, self-sustaining ecosystem. Creators create; advertisers advertise because people or systems want the content.

Now let me ask a question, “How does this closed ecosystem make more money?” The answer, according to Googler Mohan, a former consultant like others in Google leadership, is to become more efficient. How does one become more efficient? The answer is to replace expensive, popular creators with cheaper AI driven content produced by Google’s AI system.

Therefore, the words say one thin: Creator humans are essential. However, the trajectory of Google’s behavior is that Google wants to maximize its revenues. Just the threat or fear of using AI to knock off a hot new human engineered “content object” will allow the Google to reduce what it pays to a human until Google’s AI can eliminate those pesky, protesting, complaining humans. The advertisers want eyeballs. That’s what Google will deliver. Where will the advertisers go? Craigslist, Nextdoor, X.com?

Net net: Money is more important to Google than human creators. I know I am a dinobaby and probably incorrect. That’s how I see the Google.

Stephen E Arnold, September 24, 2025

Titanic AI Goes Round and Round: Are You Dizzy Yet?

September 23, 2025

green-dino_thumbThis essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.

I read “Nvidia to Invest Up to $100 Billion in OpenAI, Linking Two Artificial Intelligence Titans.” The headline makes an important point. The words “big” and “huge” are not sufficiently monumental. Now we have “titans." As you may know, a “titan” is a person of great power. I will leave out the Greek mythology. I do want to point out that “titans” were the kiddies produced by Uranus and Gaea. Titans were big dogs until Zeus and a few other Olympian gods forced them to live in what is now Newark, New Jersey.

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An AI-generated diagram of a simple circular deal. Regulators and and IRS professionals enjoy challenges. What are those people doing to make the process work? Thanks, MidJourney.com. Good enough.

The write up from the outfit that it is into trust explains how two “titans” are now intertwined. No, I won’t bring up the issue of incestuous behavior. Let’s stick to the “real” news story:

Nvidia will invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI and supply it with data center chips… Nvidia will start investing in OpenAI for non-voting shares once the deal is finalized, then OpenAI can use the cash to buy Nvidia’s chips.

I am not a finance, tax, or money wizard. On the surface, it seems to me that I loan a person some money and then that person gives me the money back in exchange for products and services. I may have this wrong, but I thought a similar arrangement landed one of the once-famous enterprise search companies in a world of hurt and a member of the firm’s leadership in prison.

Reuters includes this statement:

Analysts said the deal was positive for Nvidia but also voiced concerns about whether some of Nvidia’s investment dollars might be coming back to it in the form of chip purchases. "On the one hand this helps OpenAI deliver on what are some very aspirational goals for compute infrastructure, and helps Nvidia ensure that that stuff gets built. On the other hand the ‘circular’ concerns have been raised in the past, and this will fuel them further," said Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon.

“Circular” — That’s an interesting word. Some of the financial transaction my team and I examined during our Telegram (the messaging outfit) research used similar methods. One of the organizations apparently aware of “circular” transactions was Huione Guarantee. No big deal, but the company has been in legal hot water for some of its circular functions. Will OpenAI and Nvidia experience similar problems? I don’t know, but the circular thing means that money goes round and round. In circular transactions, at each touch point magical number things can occur. Money deals are rarely hallucinatory like AI outputs and semiconductor marketing.

What’s this mean to companies eager to compete in smart software and Fancy Dan chips? In my opinion, I hear my inner voice saying, “You may be behind a great big circular curve. Better luck next time.”

Stephen E Arnold, September 23, 2025

AI Poker: China Has Three Aces. Google, Your Play

September 19, 2025

animated-dinosaur-image-0062_thumb_t_thumb_thumbNo smart software involved. Just a dinobaby’s work. 

TV poker seems to be a thing on free or low cost US television streams. A group of people squint, sigh, and fiddle as each tries to win the big pile of cash. Another poker game is underway in the “next big thing” of smart software or AI.

Google released the Nano Banana image generator. Social media hummed. Okay, that looks like a winning hand. But another player dropped some coin on the table, squinted at the Google, and smirked just a tiny bit.

ByteDance Unveils New AI Image Model to Rival DeepMind’s Nano Banana” explains the poker play this way:

TikTok-owner ByteDance has launched its latest image generation artificial intelligence tool Seedream 4.0, which it said surpasses Google DeepMind’s viral “Nano Banana” AI image editor across several key indicators.

Now the cute jargon may make the poker hand friendly, there is menace behind the terminology. The write up states:

ByteDance claims that Seedream 4.0 beat Gemini 2.5 Flash Image for image generation and editing on its internal evaluation benchmark MagicBench, with stronger performance in prompt adherence, alignment and aesthetics.

Okay, prompt adherence, alignment (what the heck is that?), and aesthetics. That’s three aces right.

Who has the cost advantage? The write up says:

On Fal.ai, a global generative media hosting platform, Seedream 4.0 costs US$0.03 per generated image, while Gemini 2.5 Flash Image is priced at US$0.039.

I thought in poker one raised the stakes. Well, in AI poker one lowers the price in order to raise the stakes. These players are betting the money burned in the AI furnace will be “won” as the game progresses. Will AI poker turn up on the US free TV services? Probably. Burning cash makes for wonderful viewing, especially for those who are writing the checks.

What’s China’s view of this type of gambling? The write up says:

The state has signaled its support for AI-generated content by recognizing their copyright in late 2023, but has also recently introduced mandatory labelling of such content.

The game is not over. (Am I the only person who thinks that the name “nana banana” would have been better than “nano banana”?)

Stephen E Arnold, September 19, 2025

AI: The Tool for Humanity. Do Not Laugh.

September 19, 2025

Both sides of the news media are lamenting that AI is automating jobs and putting humans out of work. Conservative and liberals remain separated on how and why AI is “stealing” jobs, but the fear remains that humans are headed to obsoleteness…again. Humans have faced this issue since the start of human ingenuity. The key is to adapt and realize what AI truly is. Elizabeth Mathew of Signoz.io wrote: “I Built An MCP Server For Observability. This Is My Unhyped Take.”

If you’re unfamiliar with an MCP server it is an open standard that defines how LLMS or AI agents (i.e. Claude) uniformly connect external tools and data sources. It can be decoupled and used similar to a USB-C device then used for any agent.

After explaining some issues with MCP servers and why they are “schizophrenic”,

Mathew concludes with this:

“Ultimately, MCP-powered agents are not bringing us closer to automated problem-solving. They are giving us sophisticated hypothesis generators. They excel at exploring the known, but the unknown remains the domain of the human engineer. We’re not building an automated SRE; we’re building a co-pilot that can brainstorm, but can’t yet reason. And recognizing that distinction is the key to using these tools effectively without falling for the hype.”

She might be true from an optimistic and expert perspective, but that doesn’t prevent CEOs from implementing AI to replace their workforce or young adults being encouraged away from coding careers. Recent college graduates, do you have a job, any job?

Whitney Grace, September 19, 2025

AI Search Is Great. Believe It. Now!

September 18, 2025

Dino 5 18 25_thumbSadly I am a dinobaby and too old and stupid to use smart software to create really wonderful short blog posts.

Cheerleaders are necessary. The idea is that energetic people lead other people to chant: Stand Up, Sit Down, Fight! Fight! Fight! If you get with the program, you stand up. You sit down. You shout, of course, fight, fight, fight. Does it help? I don’t know because I don’t cheer at sports events. I say, “And again” or some other statement designed to avoid getting dirty looks or caught up in standing, sitting, and chanting.

Others are different. “GPT-5 Thinking in ChatGPT (aka Research Goblin) Is Shockingly Good at Search” states:

Don’t use chatbots as search engines” was great advice for several years… until it wasn’t. I wrote about how good OpenAI’s o3 was at using its Bing-backed search tool back in April. GPT-5 feels even better.

The idea is that instead of working with a skilled special librarian and participating in a reference interview, people started using online Web indexes. Now we have moved from entering a query to asking a smart software system for an answer.

Consider the trajectory. A person seeking information works with a professional with knowledge of commercial databases, traditional (book) reference tools, and specific ways of tracking down and locating information needed to answer the user’s question. When the user  was not sure, the special librarian would ask, “What specific information do you need?” Some users would reply, “Get me everything about subject X?” The special librarian would ask other questions until a particular item could be identified. In the good old days, special librarians would seek the information and provide selected items to the person with the question. Ellen Shedlarz at Booz, Allen & Hamilton when I was a lowly peon did this type of work as did Dominque Doré at Halliburton NUS (a nuclear outfit).

We then moved to the era of PCs and do-it-yourself research. Everyone became an expert. Google just worked. Then mobile phones arrived so research on the go was a thing. But keying words into a search box and fiddling with links was a drag. Now just tell the smart software your problem. The solution is just there like instant oatmeal.

The Stone Age process was knowledge work. Most people seeking information did not ask, preferring as one study found to look through trade publications in an old-fashioned in box or pick up the telephone and ask a person whom one assumed knew something about a particular subject. The process was slow, inefficient, and fraught with delays. Let’s be efficient. Let’s let software do everything.

Flash forward to the era of smart software or seemingly smart software. The write up reports:

I’ve been trying out hints like “go deep” which seem to trigger a more thorough research job. I enjoy throwing those at shallow and unimportant questions like the UK Starbucks cake pops one just to see what happens! You can throw questions at it which have a single, unambiguous answer—but I think questions which are broader and don’t have a “correct” answer can be a lot more fun. The UK supermarket rankings above are a great example of that. Since I love a questionable analogy for LLMs Research Goblin is… well, it’s a goblin. It’s very industrious, not quite human and not entirely trustworthy. You have to be able to outwit it if you want to keep it gainfully employed.

The reference / special librarians are an endangered species. The people seeking information use smart software. Instead of a back-and-forth and human-intermediated interaction between a trained professional and a person with a question, we get “trying out” and “accepting the output.”

I think there are three issues inherent in this cheerleading:

  1. Knowledge work is short circuited. Instead of information-centric discussion, users accept the output. What if the output is incorrect, biased, incomplete, or made up? Cheerleaders shout more enthusiastically until a really big problem occurs.
  2. The conditioning process of accepting outputs makes even intelligent people susceptible to mental short cuts. These are good, but accuracy, nuance, and a sense of understanding the information may be pushed to the side of the information highway. Sometimes those backroads deliver unexpected and valuable insights. Forget that. Grab a burger and go.
  3. The purpose of knowledge work is to make certain that an idea, diagnosis, research study can be trusted. The mechanisms of large language models are probabilistic. Think close enough for horseshoes. Cheering loudly does not deliver accuracy of output, just volume.

Net net: Inside each large language model lurks a system capable of suggesting glue cheese on pizza, the gray mass is cancer, and eat rocks.

What’s been lost? Knowledge value from the process of obtaining information the Stone Age way. Let’s work in caves with fire provided by burning books. Sounds like a plan, Sam AI-Man. Use GPT5, use GPT5, use GPT5.

Stephen E Arnold, September 18, 2025

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