>It's probably great for lots of things but it doesn't seem very good for recent news.
You are missing the point here. The LLM is just the “reasoning engine” for agents now. Its corpus of facts are meaningless, and shouldn’t really be relied upon for anything. But in conjunction with a tool calling agentic process, with access to the web, what you described is now trivially doable. Single shot LLM usage is not really anything anyone should be doing anymore.
I'm just discussing the GP's topic of casual use. Casual use implies heading over to an already-hosted prompt and typing in questions. Implementing my own 'agentic process' does not sound very casual to me.
That’s all fine and dandy, but if you google anything related to llm agents, you get 1000 answers to 100 questions, companies hawking their new “visual programming” agent composers, and a ton of videos of douchebags trying to be the Steve Jobs of AI. The concept I’m sure is fine, but execution of agentic anything is still the Wild Wild West and nobody knows what they’re really doing.
Indeed there is a mountain of snake oil out there at this point, but the underlying concepts are extremely simple, and can be implemented directly without frameworks.
You are missing the point here. The LLM is just the “reasoning engine” for agents now. Its corpus of facts are meaningless, and shouldn’t really be relied upon for anything. But in conjunction with a tool calling agentic process, with access to the web, what you described is now trivially doable. Single shot LLM usage is not really anything anyone should be doing anymore.