Where the answers come from
The front page says an answer is drawn from management books. This is which ones, how they are used, and — the part that matters more — what is not in there.
These twelve books
Not a changing library. These, and nothing else.
- High Output Management — Andrew S. Grove
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things — Ben Horowitz
- Creativity, Inc. — Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace
- Amp It Up — Frank Slootman
- Team of Teams — General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell
- The Ride of a Lifetime — Robert Iger
- Eleven Rings — Phil Jackson and Hugh Delehanty
- Extreme Ownership — Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
- Turn the Ship Around! — L. David Marquet
- Shoe Dog — Phil Knight
- Never Split the Difference — Chris Voss and Tahl Raz
- No Rules Rules — Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer
They were cut up by hand
The twelve books are split into 4,614 passages — about a million words in total. A person read every one of them and decided where it ended. Not a script splitting on paragraph breaks or word counts: a passage ends where the thought ends, which is why one is two sentences and another is two pages.
It is the slowest possible way to do it and it is the reason a passage is worth reading on its own, out of the book it came from.
An answer is built from the passages it actually used
When you describe a situation, the product searches those 4,614 passages, picks the ones that bear on it, and writes the answer from them. It then tells you which ones. Every source-backed claim carries a marker, and the sources sit under the answer.
Each one opens. You get the passage itself, in the publisher's own words, with the book, the writer and the chapter it came from — and the passages either side of it, so you can see what came before the sentence being quoted at you.
This is the part to be suspicious of elsewhere, so it is the part built to be checked. A reference the product cannot resolve to a real passage is an error that stops the answer, not a footnote nobody follows.
And nothing else is in there
There is no web search. The product does not look anything up while it answers you. It cannot read a blog post, a news story or a page about your company, because it has no way to reach one.
General knowledge is never presented as a book's. The model writing the answer knows a great deal that is not in these twelve books, and some of an answer is inevitably that. What it may not do is attach a book to it. A sentence with a source marker traces to a real passage in a real book, or it does not ship.
So the honest description is narrow: this is twelve good books, read closely, searched properly, and quoted accurately. It is not everything written about management, and it will not know anything about your company that you have not told it.
Try it with one question — no account — and open the passages behind whatever it tells you.