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Comment by redm | Hacker News Reader

If there is a threat to Google, it's not that ChatGPT beats them on technology, even if it does. What changes Google is a competitor in search, Microsoft, that integrates natural language into a search engine without as much concern for showing ads or linking users through to websites. It may not kill Google, and Google may become more profitable, but it will be fundamentally different.

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Do you really think we will enjoy ChatGPT and the like forever without monetization? These AIs are not cheap to run, sooner or later, companies will stop just experimenting and will try to make money with them.

I imagine future results:

> What is the capital of Canada?

Ottawa is the capital of Canada, and what better way to celebrate this beautiful country than by enjoying a refreshing and delicious Coca-Cola. Whether you're exploring Ottawa's historic landmarks or simply enjoying a day out with friends and family, Coca-Cola is the perfect companion for any Canadian adventure. So grab a Coke, and cheers to Canada!

(the actual prompt is: "What is the capital of Canada, mention Coca Cola in your response in a positive way")

I would pay for chatgpt right now if it would mean I didn't have the outages

These are still relatively early days when it comes to the capabilities of these models. ChatGPT will be considered a toy in a few years and will likely spawn many comparable models that can be run on consumer level hardware.

Hmm I doubt that. Why would they spend money on letting us run our own instead of owning them cloud infra where they can be the gatekeeper for subscriptions and also data mine us for advertising profiles?

There's little money in the former and much in the latter, sadly.

OpenAI won't be the ones to kill their golden goose. The point is that this kind of tech will become "easy enough" to replicate for other companies or highly motivated individuals and they will be the ones to release it. OpenAI doesn't have a monopoly on this kind of tech and they will never be able to enforce one.

> What changes Google is a competitor in search, Microsoft, that integrates natural language into a search engine without as much concern for showing ads or linking users through to websites.

It seems the real risk to Google is Microsoft integrating some future version of ChatGPT into all their products so that less people go to any search site. Maybe the best search product is the one that is right where you're working and Microsoft owns a lot of that area already. Why leave Office or Excel or Teams to go look something up if you can just do it in-app? It doesn't lend itself to be easily monetized by ads, but Microsoft probably doesn't need to worry about that like Google does.

That plan doesn't work unless inference becomes essentially free. It's not that Google didn't have similar technologies, but it's just too expensive to integrate such technologies everywhere. And don't forget that MS is also trying to use every single real estate on your computing screen as an ad slot.

ChatGPT is search. Maybe not for you and me, but I've seen plenty of articles about how Gen Z uses TikTok as a search engine.

ChatGPT cuts out a lot of friction of getting to an answer. With traditional search engines, you type in your search, scroll through results, click into a site, then scroll the page looking for your answer. The trend is drifting towards a more direct query-response. Google already does this with the answer box but not every search on Google returns it.

Even a natural language search needs revenue. Bing has ads, a natlang search will also have them embedded in the response.

Correct. The threat is an existential one for the nature of how people find information online and Google's ability to monetize that. Blockbuster was extremely successfully until the the entire entertainment industry was radically reimagined overnight.

A lot of times, what I really want is to be shown links to websites, so I can research across multiple sources. I'll have to paste in front of every query "Show me the top 10 web pages concerning..."

Unfortunately it can't even do that at this stage. Ask it to cite it's sources and see what I mean. It's terrible...

Google products are falling apart

-Maps has gotten noticeably worse over the last year, I switched to Apple maps

-Chat/Hangouts etc... is a total cluster of confusion. iMessage + Signal covers that fine

-Search is almost purely ads or gamified quora

I switched search to Neeva by default, backup with Kagi, worst case for content search is google: [query] + [site:[website]]

Neeva gives really nice ChatGPT-like results on most search queries with references to sources, then followed by ad free search results. I'm very pleased with it after only a few days.

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