‘I can’t actually keep working on a long, manual task like this in the background once a message turn ends’ — ChatGPT has a major limitation that needs to be addressed, and fast

The promise of AI is that it’s a timesaver. But while ChatGPT can do some incredible things that would take hours for you to do yourself, it also has some serious hidden limitations that it doesn’t warn you about until it’s too late.

One particular bugbear for me is that it will sometimes outright misrepresent what it’s capable of delivering, which is something you need to understand before trusting it with serious projects.

I found out this weekend that one thing ChatGPT absolutely cannot do is run background tasks. In fact, it can’t work in the background at all (unless you’re using Agent mode, but more on that later), despite repeatedly implying that it can.