I used ChatGPt to identify an odd piece of hardware in my post-war AirBnB in Manhattan this week.

That could have never worked in Google Lens, but it worked great in ChatGPT.

Only an open-ended tool could do that.

Now that we have approaches like LLMs it's impossible to see how Google Lens's old approach of manually curating data for individual verticals could never have possibly ever worked in general.

It feels positively medieval!