SearchResearch (8/11/26): What can your AI system do? (2/2)

Knowing what your tools can do... 

... is an important bit of knowledge if you're going to be using sophisticated tools. Taking a cue from yesterday's post, your mental model of the tools you have needs to be fairly accurate, predictive, and in these days of constant and continual change, fairly up-to-date.  

Here are a few things that you MIGHT not know your LLM can do.  

1. Filetype conversions:  

Did you know that some LLMs can convert some files?  

ChatGPT and Claude - can convert: m4a files to mp3; JPG to PNG; MP4 to animated GIF; WAV to MP3... etc etc.  (FWIW, Gemini currently cannot do any of these conversions.)  Just upload a file to Claude or ChatGPT and then say some version of: 

  [convert this file to PNG] 

Here's an example using Claude to convert a JPG to a GIF.  

Note that you can also use this trick to convert video files into animated GIFs.  (This is my most common use case!)  

2. Summaries of current topics:  

ChatGPT - create and email a periodic summaries on topics of interest. (See their documentation here: Scheduled tasks in ChatGPT)  Here's how I set up one for me on a few topics of interest.   

And the result that gets sent to your email looks like this with each section supplied with the latest info scraped from the web and summarized for you:  

To re-find all of your emails from ChatGPT, search for [from:chatgpt] in your Gmail search bar.  

3. Transform YouTube videos into blog posts: 

Gemini and ChatGPT will let you a YouTube URL to extract transcripts, build chapter breakdowns, or completely rewrite the video content into a formatted blog post.  Here's an example:  

[please convert this youtube video into a blog post for me  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emc742B-Llc ]

A nice summary of the existing video content with links to particular points in the video. This is useful when you find a video that you need to search purely for information purposes and you don’t feel like sitting through 32 minutes to get one bit of information. (You could look at the transcript and do a search, but this actually gets you to that place AND shows you the visual context. Incredibly handy.)  You could also say something like “give me a short bulleted summary of the high points.”  OR.. If you’ve got something super-particular you’re seeking, you can also just ask Gemini about it: 

“What does this person say about HCI?”

“Does the interview reveal anything about possible failures of UX design in AI systems?”

You get the idea. 

4. Email summary analysis:   

Gemini - Try this query in regular Gemini:

 [Based on my emails and calendar, what are the main things
   competing for my attention this week?]  

Of course, you'll have to be logged into your Google account for this to work.  

Here's what the output looks like (with names blurred out). You can see it picked up on a few things that I still need to do and noticed a conflict on Friday between 2 meetings.  

Notice the helpful suggested action item buttons at the bottom.  Clicking on them creates draft responses that were correct and helpful.  

(FWIW, I tried this in Claude, but got stuck in an endless cycle of trying to give permission to Claude for my calendar access.  I gave up after a while.)  

5. Photo summary analysis:  

Again with Gemini... 

 [ What patterns do you notice in my photos from the last month? ] 

And below this was a selection of 4 images that were fairly representative of what I did this month and the people I was hanging around with during the first two weeks of August.  

SearchResearch Lessons

The deep point of this post is that an important part of your mental model of AIs is knowing what it can do.  

That is, what is your AI capable of doing for you? 

A couple of things worth noticing: 

1. What the AIs can do keeps changing with each version update.  It's true that Gemini can't (or won't) do filetype conversions... but maybe the next version will.  You have to keep track of the capabilities not just by company, but also by version. 

2. The AIs will also LOSE capabilities.  This happens with search engines, photo editing apps... and it will happen with AIs as well. Don't be surprised when this happens.  (Just remember that I told you so...)  

3. Capabilities also sometimes drop out for a while.  AI as a service lives on the bleeding and jagged edge of capability. Behaviors that you count on might just disappear for a while and then come back.  It's not your fault, but usually the side effect of some deep technical issue way inside the guts of your AI.  As Douglas Adams would say, Don't Panic, but search for another way to do the same thing.  

So.. you need to stay up on what works and what doesn't work.  

If you've found a surprising capability in one of your favorite AIs, let us know by leaving a comment in the thread. Knowledge is best when shared! 

Stay tuned. 

Keep searching.