Hacker News Reader

Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

I think the OpenAI argument is overblown.

While I do agree that AI is going to bring a huge shake up to the search market, I still believe that Google is in the best position to fight this battle.

Realistically, given how fast the AI field improves month after month, do we think it will take long for Google to replicate a product similar to ChatGPT? I don't think so.

And then they are the company that's best suited to have this AI driven search in Android and Google search thus limiting the impact of this whole problem.

Sure, maybe Microsoft will deprive them of some developers that will look for information inside VS Code or their editor, and stuff like that, but overall I don't see Google going to suffer that much as long as they are able to answer the ChatGPT challenge in a meaningful time, something they should be easily able to do given their immense computational and data resources.

View on HN

This iteration of shake-up is not strictly about tech superiority, though. Google probably already has a repro of ChatGPT running in their datacenters.

Fundamentally, it's about product, and expectation shift. I am presently routinely having conversations, and for the first time in the history of the Internet, getting straight answers to moderately complex questions, and their follow-ups, in real time, from ChatGPT. Google's entire business model is "giving people pages on the Internet that might contain those answers", and some of those being paid for the user's clicks.

If I get the full answer, instantly, wrapped in 2 paragraphs of text.... where do the ads go? Editorials inside the answer? Why would I click them?

How do you verify that ChatGPT’s answer is accurate (it often enough isn’t), if not by googling?

You could use any search engine, and just gather 'decent' results -- scrape the first 3 results and compare using a new instance of a language model to tell you what's inaccurate in the first one based off the fine tuning data.

I'm wondering what happens when most people start using chat bots and stop using search. There'd need to be a big shift from using user's navigation as a signal and for search engine to determine the quality and authority of the content.

How would the next gen web be? Would people even create webpages anymore? How would these be funded if people aren't navigating to these sites and just using chatbots.

Google's already given up on search, google any programming topic and you get stackoverflow-scraped spam everywhere even BEFORE the stackoverflow post it was scraped from. Google's no better than altavista circa 1997 at this point imho. Brave search is better for most things, and if it misses then consult google, etc.

Yeah, if I can't trust the intial answer, I also can't trust any of the refinements. It will be a long way before you can get a similar level of assurance by asking a number of different language models as you can get now by looking at various sources around the web.

what if you google something, then check the links that google brings up that seem most likely to help you, it remembers that (reinforcement learning), 10 other people search almost the same phrase and pick maybe 60% of your links, after 100% and maybe a decent idea of which links are the best, it'll just return the links along w/ a summary of the details from each of them, without overlap, so maybe one page has top 4 x, and the other top 3, and another top5, well it'll give you a venn diagram summary of those 3 pages and maybe of the 12 listings, 3 are common so it only summarizes the 9 unique ones.

> Realistically, given how fast the AI field improves month after month, do we think it will take long for Google to replicate a product similar to ChatGPT? I don't think so.

Users who use ChatGPT do not see either Google's search page or any linked pages. Instead, the user gets a summary answer from ChatGPT that currently shows zero ads from Google (or anyone else). This summary is the obvious place for ads; Google knows this. And Google also knows that if it is not the default summary provider for most users (in the same that it is for search currently), then its ad business is definitely at risk.

In terms of addressing the risk, it's not so much a technical challenge [-1]; it is instead that Google's business model is largely based on embedding ads in millions of web pages (in a way that MS's is not). The problem with this is that they now have to figure out what an alternative business model (that puts ads in summaries) looks like, then shift their entire enterprise and their partners in the wider ad industry over to using it before ChatGPT becomes dominant [0]

It's an enormous challenge, and it is easy to see why Sundar has sensibly signalled a code red and is reaching for as much help as possible.

[-1] As observed, Google are very technically capable.

[0] Realistically, if they cannot provide a competitive offering before MS push ChatGPT into Word, Excel, Bing etc., history says it will be hard, verging on impossible, to ever get those users back.

There will be more players taking market share from Google. Even if Google ultimately wins, they will have less revenue. ChatGPT represents a new beginning for the industry

Reply on news.ycombinator.com