Accounting

The other day, I did another experiment with Generative A.I., this time around a question that I'd been looking to answer for some time.

I asked "A.I.": "How many grocery stores are there in Washington State?"

In keeping with the original experiment, I asked the Usual Suspects: Bing, Copilot, ChatGPT and Gemini. Alexa had been included in the original experiment, but I don't own an Alexa-enabled device and don't want the application on my phone, so it was excluded. In it's place, I added Perplexity, which I'd just heard about recently. I also asked Google, which was part of the original experiment, but had been excluded from my trials, as it's primarily a search engine. (This time, as expected, Google simply give me a list of web links. I was curious if it would present any inline answers, but it didn't.)

When the question first occurred to me, several months ago, I'd asked Bing, and it didn't really give me an answer, but it did offer some not-particularly helpful links. This time both Bing and Copilot appeared to dodge the question. Rather than even attempt to answer the question as asked, they focused on "notable" local stores, providing what seemed like ad copy for Trader Joe's, Grocery Outlet and Haggen. The wording was different between the two, with Copilot being more verbose, but they offered (unsurprisingly) fundamentally the same answer.

ChatGPT flat-out admitted that it didn't have the information, and offered places where I might be able to find current statistics. (But, since it's not a search engine, no direct links.)

Perplexity gave an interesting answer, informing me of how many independent grocers and food co-ops were in the State in 2019. It also gave the number of Kroger and Albertson's stores in the state that would be sold to C&S Wholesale Grocers if the merger were to go through. But it said "The state is also home to various top grocery chains like Amazon Go Grocery, Safeway, and Haggen," so its clarity and timeliness may need to be updated.

Gemini offered a verbose and nuanced answer, noting that how many stores qualify depends on the definition of "grocery store," and offered a range "between several hundred and a few thousand." But it was able to find a source that gave a definitive number (2,313, if you're curious), explained how they arrived at that number, and noted the potential shortcomings of that methodology. (It also took a moment to plug Google Maps and search {natch}, but that can be forgiven.)

In the end, finding specific information that someone else hasn't already packaged up and put out there is still outside the capabilities of "A.I." The various systems mostly fell back on behaving like search engines. The information they gave me was well-presented, but there was no attempt to problem solve. I can think of a few ways that I'd come up with a count, if I could access information as quickly as modern computerized systems do.