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Comment by bushbaba | Hacker News Reader

ChatGPT has a real chance of disrupting Google Search. Heck I'd say OpenAI's generative art models could even disrupt google images search.

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Google has its own ChatGPT-like/LLM thing that is at least competitive. There's almost for sure a bunch of very legitimate reasons they haven't tried to mate search with that.

#1 from my perspective is that those systems... lie.

I suspect that the main problem with these systems is that Google doesn't know how it will affect Google revenue, i.e. if there's a possibility of destroying a lot of revenue without replacing it with larger revenue. I.e. it's what's known as an innovator's dilemma.

I don't think that's the main problem. They wouldn't invested money into Google Assistant, which directly hurts Google revenue. They also already give direct answers to questions on Google without ads.

Realistically, the main problem is scaling and costs/benefits. You have to remember Google is accessed by billions of people a day. Now imagine they serve a product like ChatGPT. You would be pissing off a lot of users with a product that is laggy, often crashes, requires a hourly rate limit just to protect your business from going bankrupt on computing costs. It's not really beneficial to Google to rush a model into their golden product that isn't ready for the scale it operates at.

But it is beneficial for a smaller competitor to slowly chip away. Meanwhile googles investors might rather the legacy company return value to shareholders with greater dividends/share repurchases. While the new competitor is given blank checks with investors not wanting to monetize too much just yet.

I would guess the bigger problem is that someone is going to get GoogleGPT to write Nazi propaganda and they don't want the reputational harm.

For a LLMs as search replacements there's a real big issue putting the 'Google' brand on something that could essentially replace wikipedia and be inaccurate yet trusted in unexpected ways. ( https://i.redd.it/40cnc2bluh6a1.png )

ChatGPT opened the box but there's a real reason to be hesitant

This holds for random blog posts too. Arguably, ChatGPT lies less in some cases because it aggregates multiple sources. (However, it doesn’t counter common misconceptions and blogs typically don’t either.)

How?

Most people that use Google images aren't looking for generative art. They are looking for images of real things that exist.

Dall-e is fun to play around with for a bit that about it lol.

No. But their systems can point me to all the images it has seen that has a pink Cadillac with a man in a black top hat. And if no image found is suitable you can then select any of the unsuitable images and have it altered to be suitable.

You underestimate the ability for these things to index data.

But most people don't seek a random image of "pink Cadillac with a man in a black top hat". They either search a specific picture they can describe that way (famous photo, specific guy to reference...) or don't know what it looks like and need a refence (and the uncanny, not-quite-right thing AIs tend to generate on unspecific prompts is totally useless). In both cases, AI-generated look alikes are the wrong answer to the question.

It might work for some use cases, but it would never replace the search function.

My impression is that a lot of people use Google Images for things they can drag into their slideshows and posters. In that case, it's probably fine to use generated art?

Are there ads on Google Images? Then Google doesn't care.

Yes, because would be very happy about people getting their images from Bing AI Images instead of them. :p

ChatGPT has almost no chance of disrupting Google's search in the short term, it's not even a search engine?

where I can find a video to learn about making hinanese chicken rice:

YouTube: There are many cooking channels that feature videos on how to make Hainanese chicken rice. Some popular ones include "Tasty," "Gordon Ramsay," and "Maangchi."

Yeah, I think people are just obsessed with talking about ChatGPT lately?

I thought so too, but then I tried it myself

The appeal of chatgpt at this point is twofold: SEO spammers haven't yet discovered how to manipulate it to their benefit, and Google can't inject ads into the returned results. In other words if it does return a useful result to you, it's where Google was when they were competing with Alta Vista and the like in their heyday.

I agree with you that there's a ton of hype about chatgpt, but if I can get useful and unadulterated answers from it, I will definitely pivot to searching there first. This is above and beyond the ability of chatgpt to seemingly generate tailored results to queries beyond simply returning a list of web pages ranked by relevance.

There are currently unsolved issues such as hallucination, query cost, scalability, fast model update with newly indexed data and toxicity that would need to be addressed for ChatGPT (or LaMDA - Google equivalent of OpenAI ChatGPT) to replace search functionality.

ChatGPT, like crypto-based finance and self-driving cars, is overhyped by people who only understand the technology superficially or seek to directly benefit from the hype (not to be confused with benefitting from the success of the technology itself).

But I don't fault Google. For a business that makes in the ballpark of $50B profit per annum, even something that has a 0.1% chance of disrupting you is worth throwing a few billion at.

Time will only tell but search is definitely Google's bread and butter core and they will do anything to prevent any real competitor that might capture significant market share from them.

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