Sunday, November 23, 2025
Top story
Benedict Evans
AI, networks and Mechanical Turks
Explores how LLMs fundamentally alter the economics of building search and recommendation systems, questioning whether companies can now compete without network effects or massive data moats.
Focus on LLM capability as potential replacement for user-generated data signals
The briefs
OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT's use cases into commerce and consumer decision-making, signaling a push to deepen product stickiness and monetization beyond conversation. This positions ChatGPT as a discovery and comparison tool competing directly with search and retail platforms.
ChatGPT shopping research feature launched Nov 24, 2025
GPT-5 demonstrates concrete capability gains in mathematical reasoning and scientific problem-solving—a key benchmark for enterprise and research applications. This signals where frontier models are delivering tangible value beyond benchmarks.
GPT-5 collaborated with UCLA Professor Ernest Ryu on optimization theory problem