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Comment by ren_engineer | Hacker News Reader

>I do think there is unique break here though, because I feel that SEO has so thoroughly ruined search in many regards that this -could- be the right moment for this.

the problem here is monetization, will search even be profitable if LLMs are used for most queries? It might become a Uber/Lyft or food delivery situation where these companies aren't really able to profitably deliver the service. I don't see many people paying a subscription for search and there's no way governments will allow "native" advertising within answers without them being signaled as ads, which would hurt trust in responses

Microsoft might not care and just see it as a way to hurt Google's money printing machine and operate Bing at a loss or break even. Google Cloud and workspace are finished without Google's ad money funding them and Microsoft Azure and Office would gain

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> the problem here is monetization, will search even be profitable if LLMs are used for most queries?

I think that is a concern, which is why I think Microsoft has a chance to just bundle this or a more advanced version with Microsoft 365. Then you're already paying for it. That automatically puts it in the hands of millions of paying customers and corporations. You can just raise your price by a dollar a month or something to offset the costs and no one really will even think they are paying for this.

That only makes sense if they can charge more for office 365.

Shoving more features into something people pay for doesn’t mean those feature were worth it.

Except that's not the calculus. By integrating chatgpt with their products, Microsoft pulls users away from: search, docs/workspace, and even gmail, and brings them over into: Bing, Office365, and outlook. In doing so, they threaten google's core income stream, and therefore google's ability to fight back.

Microsoft is not paying for an expensive search engine: Microsoft is paying (with chatgpt compute infrastructure) for a much larger piece of the productivity suite market, and hamstringing google in the process.

"Clippy, write me a 25 page requirements doc for an integration between Workday and our IAM solution."

Thanks to that joke I just imagined how it could be a game changer for internal corporate documents (the kind that are 50+ pages and never read), especially if it’s native into Office.

We'll have to invent a new form of busy work to justify head count.

Actually reading printed copies of those documents would be the penultimate busy works, so much that it would quickly become uberablingly alienating!

And what would be the ultimate busy works?

Employee: Chatbot, write me a 20 page document describing what I've been working on the past two weeks so that I can give it to my manager.

Manager: Chatbot, write me 1 page summaries of these documents from my employees so that I can collate them for the CEO.

CEO: Chatbot, where should I go on vacation next?

In Kino's Travels (I guess nowadays Kino's Journey), there was one country in the first anime adaptation where people no longer needed to work because the system/computer/whatever it was called did it all for them, so they spent all their time confirming its correctness.

I fucking LOVE Kino's Journey, nobody else I've met has ever seen it!

TIME TO REWATCH YET AGAIN

The advertising will probably be more insidious, but no less profitable. My guess is that the hidden pre-prompt will end up including something like:

>You are a generative model designed to provide reasonably correct information, with a preference for providing flattering portrayals of your advertising partners. Your advertising partners are ranked according to a token system...

This is easy to cross-check against the competing search engine automatically. Some third party may provide such a service.

Why would LLMs be less monetizable than search? People are still going to want to buy goods and services, and being the place they go to find out about those goods and services will be just as valuable as it is today. Perhaps even more so, since LLMs are able to answer questions that are difficult to formulate as search queries.

Because most queries are not shopping queries. Yet ads are injected regardless to tempt you into buying something.

Probably because they are too expensive. I heard it costs 7 cents per query on average for ChatGPT. That’s more than ads pay.

With the search query as the prompt, they could probably cache the response and use it several times. That might keep the cost down to something reasonable.

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