So. Yesterday I had a need to, from my android phone, have ChatGPT et Al mobile app do something I THOUGHT was very simple. Read a publicly available Google spreadsheet (I gave it the /htmlview which in incognito I could see ALL the rows (maybe close to 1000 rows). None could do it. Not ChatGPT, not MS Copilot, not Claude app, not Gemini, not even GitHub copilot in a web tab. Some said I can’t even see that. Some could see it but couldn’t do anything with it. Some could see it but only the first 100 lines. All I wanted to do was have it ingest the entire thing and then spit me back out in a csv or txt any rows that mentioned 4K. Seemed simple but these things couldn’t even get past that first hurdle. Weirdly, I remembered I had the Grok app too and gave it a shot, and, it could do it. I guess it is more intelligent in it’s abilities to scrape/parse/whatever all kinds of different types of sites.
replyI’d guess this is the type of thing that might actually excel in your agent or these claw clones, because they literally can just do whatever bash/tool type actions on whatever VM or sandboxed environment they live on?
Yeah, I think this was an issue of Google blocking bot user agents more than the LLMs not being smart enough. A bot that can run curl (like mine) should read it no problem.
replyAh ok that actually makes sense as the reason. And I think I’ve seen that with even coding agents when they are trying to look up stuff on the web or URLs you give them, now that I think about it..
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