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by ahamilton454 332 days ago
This is one of the reasons I really like deep research. It always asks questions first and forces me to refine and better define what I want to learn about.

A simple UX change makes the difference between education and dumbing users of your service.

2 comments

Have you ever paid close attention to those questions though? Deep research can be really nifty, but I feel like the questions it asks are just there for the "cool factor" to make people think it is properly consider things.

The reason I think that is because it often ask about things I already took great care to explicitly type out. I honestly don't think those extra questions add much to the actually searching it does.

It doesn't always ask great questions, but even just the fact that it does makes me re-think what i am asking.

I definetly sometimes ask really specialized questions and in that case i just say "do the search" and ignore the questions, but a lot of times it helps me determine what i am really asking.

I suspect people with execellent communication abilities might find less utility from the questions

As a technical writer, I don't use Deep Research because it makes me worse at my job. Research, note-taking, and summarization are how I develop an understanding of a topic so I can write knowledgeably about it. The resulting notes are almost incidental. If I let an AI do that work for me, I get the notes but no understanding. Reading the document produced by the AI is not a substitute for doing the work.