0 sats \ 3 replies \ @gmd 11 Jan \ on: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions tech
A bit bearish on google tbh.
I find myself using my pinned ChatGPT tab more and more often and google search less often, especially just to answer stupid questions in natural language that pop up in my head. I don't think they'll be able to monetize LLM results with spam nearly as well as they do SERPs currently
Google is gonna be one of the best while-we're-watching illustrations of (or refutations of) disruption theory in recent memory. They are very close to the best there is at assorted LLM stuff. They wrote the foundational paper. They have the infra, they have the training data, they have access to everything, they've indexed everything already.
And yet they have this money-printing business model. And they are, at this point, a mature company, with all that comes with that.
They've been in the process of destroying themselves in the typical way, with search getting worse but nobody being able to do much about it because the incentives are the same for everybody, and quasi-monopoly status, all of it. But LLM ~search is clearly positioned to be so much better. Google should be the ones to own it and it shouldn't be close. But is it possible?
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I just don't think you can ad-spam LLM results as effectively as traditional search results, because they're so much better at giving you the answer you want. Vs normal search you ask a question and you're forced to dig through a few links and back out when you inevitably can't find what you're looking for.
Although maybe the GPU economics won't work unless you ad-spam and the other services will offer similar amounts of spam down the road... will be interesting to watch for sure.
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We could be in a situation, again for a while, where "really good advertising" becomes isomorphic to "useful information." I can see it in most of my GPT interactions -- I would welcome links to books, products, courses, etc., relevant to the "discussion" I'm having w/ the LLM. Seems feasible to do, but we shall see.
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