[Timsky]

It is excellent when just finding something is enough. Most often in my practice, I am dealing with questions that have no written-down answers, meaning the probability of finding a book/article that provides one is negligible. Instead, I am looking for indirect answers or proofs before I make a final engineering decision. Yet another problem is that the language itself changes over time. For instance, at the beginning of the 20th century, the integers were called integral numbers. IMHO, LLMs poorly handle such cases when considered as a substitute for search engines. For full-text vector search, I am using https://www.recoll.org/ a real time saver for me, especially for desktop search.

[scosman]

> GPT-5 is proving useful as a literature review assistant

> No, it does not.

> It is excellent when just finding something is enough.

[Timsky]

I meant that it obviously fits your needs but not mine

[signatoremo]

> No, it does not. It only produces a highly convincing counterfeit.

How could you say that with high confidence when you admitted it might be useful for others?

[Timsky]

Because this is precisely what the word counterfeit means, an imitation that deceives you. The functionality of counterfeit can be from 0% to 100%, depending on your luck. If you accidentally bought a fake iPhone, it can still make calls. Chat output is something that looks like a literature review, some collection of summaries of relevant papers. But the problem is that a review is not just text compression. It is also about rejecting low-quality research, considering the historical context, identifying contradictions, etc. No machine can do that analysis for you, yet. I have quite a confidence in that.