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.
- Status
- Retired Deliberately ended.
- Dates
- Started Feb 25, 2025
- Where
- www.thingelstad.com/2025/02/25/weekly-thing-gpt.html
- Topics
- Agents Archives
On February 25, 2025, I made a custom GPT 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.
It had limits. In March 2025 I showed it answering wrongly 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: the GPT “was grade school level. Thingy is much smarter!” The GPT’s link no longer works.
Sources and evidence
Observed daily from GitHub, sitemaps, feeds, the Internet Archive, and Tinylytics. Evidence never sets a status.
Commits and publications per month, last twelve months.
Connections
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Weekly Thing GPT answered from Weekly Thing
The GPT was loaded with all 310 issues of the Weekly Thing published by February 2025. Source
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Weekly Thing GPT was succeeded by Thingy
When Thingy launched in May 2026, I compared the two. The GPT “was grade school level. Thingy is much smarter!” Source
History
-
launch
A GPT of the Weekly Thing
I make a custom ChatGPT loaded with all 310 Weekly Thing issues. Source