Why Does a Chatbot Feel Unusable Without the Web?

Parag Agrawal says a chatbot feels unusable without the web because people now expect the model to be both smart and all-knowing. The first version of ChatGPT did not use the web. Go back to a model with no web access, he says, and 75 percent of what people do with these products feels unusable. A model that cannot give the date of the last Super Bowl breaks the expectation the product just taught.

Coding agents went through the same change. He remembers pasting documentation links into the interface so the agent could fetch the page and call an API that was not in its training data. He expects that habit to look primitive. Almost every application built on a model creates the expectation that it knows what is current, and that expectation has moved from a smart model to a model plus the web.