What worked reasonably well for me is “deep research”.
Even when summarizing the content of the sources, it fucks up and says something factually incorrect that the source never stated. But it is pretty good at understanding what you are looking for and giving a list of relevant links to read. Somehow google is worse with that and gives many irrelevant results.
Today for example, I tried using google to find a lithium battery of specific size and capacity and the results were not what I was looking for. Since I didn’t know the technical terms I just explained it in colloquial english “regular smartphone battery, but a footprint of 5x5cm” and it converted it to good search terms “single cell 3.7V lipo 105050/125050/135050” (which I then also used in my own search) and also provided a bunch of links to webshops that had those exact batteries!
I would have never known that I need to search for the conventional numerals that describe it’s size or that there is a difference with the charging controller between single cell and multi cell. (It gave me a source to that claim and I used that to read up on the matter)
Just googling my query only returned random non 5x5cm batteries, some multicell, some videocorder batteries etc. without any link to the difference or explanation of the tech terms or standards.
Ah-ha, now there’s an interesting use case. I’ve had occasion in the past to work on PCB design - to be clear I didn’t do the design myself, I have no idea wtf I’m doing there, but I’m capable of reading spec sheets and soldering - and when I had to sub in components, I managed to find what I needed by filtering down for specs on DigiKey using their search. I think an LLM could have saved me a bit of time there if I could’ve just fed it the BOM and asked for alternatives, and over the course of all the subs I had to do for the particular project I’m thinking of (it was during Chinese New Year so it was tough getting answers from suppliers) that would have added up.
What worked reasonably well for me is “deep research”.
Even when summarizing the content of the sources, it fucks up and says something factually incorrect that the source never stated. But it is pretty good at understanding what you are looking for and giving a list of relevant links to read. Somehow google is worse with that and gives many irrelevant results.
Today for example, I tried using google to find a lithium battery of specific size and capacity and the results were not what I was looking for. Since I didn’t know the technical terms I just explained it in colloquial english “regular smartphone battery, but a footprint of 5x5cm” and it converted it to good search terms “single cell 3.7V lipo 105050/125050/135050” (which I then also used in my own search) and also provided a bunch of links to webshops that had those exact batteries!
I would have never known that I need to search for the conventional numerals that describe it’s size or that there is a difference with the charging controller between single cell and multi cell. (It gave me a source to that claim and I used that to read up on the matter)
Just googling my query only returned random non 5x5cm batteries, some multicell, some videocorder batteries etc. without any link to the difference or explanation of the tech terms or standards.
Ah-ha, now there’s an interesting use case. I’ve had occasion in the past to work on PCB design - to be clear I didn’t do the design myself, I have no idea wtf I’m doing there, but I’m capable of reading spec sheets and soldering - and when I had to sub in components, I managed to find what I needed by filtering down for specs on DigiKey using their search. I think an LLM could have saved me a bit of time there if I could’ve just fed it the BOM and asked for alternatives, and over the course of all the subs I had to do for the particular project I’m thinking of (it was during Chinese New Year so it was tough getting answers from suppliers) that would have added up.