---
id: weekly-thing-gpt
title: Weekly Thing GPT
summary: A custom ChatGPT loaded with the first 310 issues of the Weekly Thing, my first way to ask the archive a question.
collection: Publishing
status: retired
url: https://www.thingelstad.com/2025/02/25/weekly-thing-gpt.html
started: 2025-02-25
topics:
  - agents
  - archives
sources:
  - kind: website
    url: https://www.thingelstad.com/2025/02/25/weekly-thing-gpt.html
    role: reference
connections:
  - to: weekly-thing
    label: answered from
    detail: The GPT was loaded with all 310 issues of the Weekly Thing published by February 2025.
    source: https://www.thingelstad.com/2025/02/25/weekly-thing-gpt.html
  - to: thingy
    label: was succeeded by
    detail: When Thingy launched in May 2026, I compared the two. The GPT “was grade school level. Thingy is much smarter!”
    source: https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/347/
    kind: lineage
page: https://thingelstad.xyz/things/weekly-thing-gpt/
---

# Weekly Thing GPT

A custom ChatGPT loaded with the first 310 issues of the Weekly Thing, my first way to ask the archive a question.

On February 25, 2025, I [made a custom GPT](https://www.thingelstad.com/2025/02/25/weekly-thing-gpt.html) that anyone with a ChatGPT account could use, “loaded with all 310 issues of the Weekly Thing published so far.” I suggested questions such as “What is the Weekly Thing view on social media?”, “What is worse, Facebook or TikTok?”, and “Show me a list of articles on X along with the issue they were in,” and announced it in [Weekly Thing 311](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/311/).

It had limits. In March 2025 I showed it [answering wrongly](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/313/) when asked which issue the Fortune first appeared in. Fourteen months later I launched Thingy, which searches the archive and cites its sources, and compared the two in [Weekly Thing 347](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/347/): the GPT “was grade school level. Thingy is much smarter!” The GPT’s link no longer works.