Yes. And lots more.
Part of Google's competitive advantage is a combination of real and perceived barriers to entry. ChatGPT has stretched what people think it possible. The degree to which such futures are feasible may be relatively less important at this point, since the excitement alone will drive a lot of investment.
To horribly mix metaphors, Google wants everyone to think their resources, mindshare, talent pool, and track record create a huge moat, so to speak. They want everyone to think the stone walls are steep and the risk of storming the castle is just too high. But perhaps the emperor has no clothes? Maybe the castle doesn't need to be stormed? Castles are drafty. Who wants to live there anyway? Maybe drafty castles provide nice cooling for server farms? Perhaps castles will just become a tourist attraction as new architectures are developed. But I digress. Maybe this gives some ideas?
In words: Schmidt here is saying that Google returning lots of pages is a "bug" and the future of search is understanding what the user wants and providing a single best answer.
Once more content is created with AI, and then AI is trained on it, we get this irreversible learning loop because you won't know who or what wrote your training data. It's that paper, but without the human in the loop any more.
Product review sites won't be worth it since there will be less reason for users to click through to your site. Google can put their affiliate code in the answer. Probably not a huge loss as most of these are seo spam sites anyway.
SAAS and service websites might be able to get better rankings then?
Discussed on HN yesterday, 479 comments: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34475784>