Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Users have to sign in with a Microsoft account to use this. Is that the future? You have to sign up to search?

It takes more resources per query to run AI-based search than a search engine. Everybody offering ChatGPT type systems is either pay per view or heavily throttled. We may be in the last days of free search as the dominant product.

View on HN

Google's business model is entirely based off the fact that search is great for signaling intent, and that is great for selling ads.

A personalized AI assistant goes WAY beyond that. Whenever you talk to it, it can go into salesman mode to con you into buying shit you don't need.

Surely the economics will work out to still provide "free" searches.

> Surely the economics will work out to still provide "free" searches.

Only for people with significant spending. Amazon Prime customers, for example.

As Cookies die, Sign-up will rise.

Mark my words.

I think it's far too early to say where this is going. If you could make this into an extremely skilled targetable manipulator/advocate for any kind of viewpoint, worldview, marketing strategy, on a per-user and day basis, one that subtly pushes the user in a given direction, I'm sure that would be lucrative enough to cover any amount of free/"free" views/prompts. Also, if this takes off in earnest, improving hardware acceleration will probably bring down costs as well.

ChatGPT also asks for phone.

I have no problem with paying for high quality ad free search. I would welcome the change.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com