The problem with working in a hyper-competitive industry is that there’s maximum motivation to roll out new features, even when those features aren’t ready yet or adequately tested. OpenAI received a lot of praise for its Deep Research function through its $ 200-a-month model, but my experience with it found it to hallucinate heavily — i.e., make a lot of stuff up. And the ability to write a Ph.D.-level research paper becomes a lot less valuable if you can’t trust what it’s saying to be real.

A similar issue has existed with AI search tools, which use large-language models to search the web and bring back links for you. In theory, this is a fantastic function, but, as the Columbia Journalism Review recently noted, these tools don’t cite well, speculate frequently, invent links, and often summarise badly. OpenAI, Perplexity, and XAI know this — this article wasn’t news to them. But, rather than wait and make the product work well, they are incentivized to release quickly and early and then fix issue later.