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Comment by tofuahdude | Hacker News Reader

We're in the middle of the hype phase for LLMs; it'll die down when hallucinations are widely understood and the investment community + public realize that none of these organizations have built something that replaces Search (YET).

Calling for Sundar's head during the hype phase is premature.

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You're right, calling for his departure for this is premature.

But calling for his departure for an abject lack of corporate strategy (unless you consider "partially bankroll moonshots across Google etc. with ad revenue" a strategy, which it isn't) is fairly overdue.

What's Google's north star, their vision for 2035? Have you heard it?

I haven't, not from Google. But given Microsoft's trajectory with cloud and AI investments, I know theirs well.

Plus, what kind of strategy is it to antagonise every single large player in the industry.

Apple and Amazon are friendly to each other. Microsoft and Facebook have been longtime partners despite Microsoft owning Linkedin. but Google manages to enter everybody’s industry and fail.

I haven't fully replaced search, but I have replaced a good part of my usage (disclaimer: I'm a chatgpt plus subscriber). Search isn't dead but it sure is bleeding, and hard.

Doesn't it get annoying to have to fact check everything that ChatGPT spews? It's very useful for code generation, but other than that, the frequency of hallucinations makes it a lot less useful.

After some time you just get used to it and its limitations, so you know what it's reasonable to ask for. In general I use it as a tool for creative writing, code formatting and easy snippets, writing emails and summarizing texts.I lazily copy-pasted my linkedin profile page to it and it wrote a nice bio, which I corrected a bit, but it was time saved nevertheless. I don't ask many specific questions because then I'd have to fact check a lot, like you said.

It's amazing (literally, I can't fully grasp it) that MS got the state of the art LLM into search and decided to use it to answer questions. It looks like the hype is so strong that even the people that created it don't know its strengths and weaknesses.

But the hype will eventually calm down, and people will eventually discover what LLMs are good for. They will be out of the news, but they will still be essential for search. I don't know what Google has on that subject, but if they don't have any good answer by then, they will be done.

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