Azeem Azhar

So even if this proposal works, it's going to require some changes to the way media owners and content creators think.

I mean, that's a really interesting dynamic that you have painted.

And of course, you're right.

Your local news and niche news, unless it's industry focused, has really struggled to find a business model since the mid-90s.

And I guess that's the story behind Reddit, because if you really want a review of how well a washing machine works after five years, however good Wirecutter in the New York Times is going to be, the seven discussions on Reddit will be more real, more visceral, more intimate to people's

real experiences.

I suppose what that then also does is it changes the nature of many of the intermediaries on the web who've evolved to take advantage of SEO.

A large part of the web has now become

How do we get around Google's algorithms in order to appear on the front page as opposed to how do we really deliver that insight to a Park City restaurant to the person who's looking for it?

There's a really interesting idea in there, which starts with the fact that LLMs don't get addicted to dopamine.

And so you can put this material in there.

And one of my experiences of using the different chatbots is that they are incredibly reasonable.

I mean, you can get them to be unreasonable.

You can push them in different directions, but they are this aggregate of human knowledge and their training and the reinforcement learning to get them to behave in particular ways.

But it's quite hard to get them to be extreme by the time they reach us.

Now, there's a question as to whether that will always be the case and whether as the companies get more and more powerful, whether the owners won't start to tune them in one direction or another.

But there is also this really important point that you've made, which is we can start to identify more clearly where there are gaps and opportunities.

And one of the things that struck me when I do deep research queries is that Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude will go out and look at 500, 600 websites

And I would have asked a really simple query that needs deep research.

And I'm thinking, an academic, a human wouldn't have gone to 600 websites to figure out when the bicycle boom in Peoria was and what the impacts were.