I think it's not just run cost - there's also a risk of ad revenue destruction, that has to be worrying.
The cost of computing these ads would be a lot more than today's keyword-based approach, that's certainly a problem. But think of hyper-relevant ads, based on the chat itself. There's a lot of information there, that beats tracking people's behavior online all day.
That depends on ad publishers, right? If they want to sell A, B and C and I am interested in D, then Google's still showing one of A, B or C to me. D doesn't make profit if there is nobody paying for ads.
Google is advertising things we don't need, that's why ad clicks are so abysmal. LLMs won't change that.
I’ve been infuriated with DuckDuckGo on occasion because it refused to exclude certain results.
In fact when you add an exclusion clause it simply boosts those results further instead of removing them.
I’ve been told this is because the underlying search providers refuse to exclude paying customer even when you explicitly don’t want to hear from them.
I could definitely see this happening in LLM answers too and I don’t expect it to be particularly subtle.
If I was Google I'd be worried. Very worried indeed. They either need to dramatically change their entire company within 18 months, or accept they are going to loose substantial amount of market -- and once its gone, it's gone in a first mover, winner takes all environment like what we have right now. Just ask Google themselves what it felt like back in the early 2000's when they completely destroyed the other search engines.
Now it is. Google used to be good too, until ads started looking like search results, and then the first page became entirely ads.
In the future, when you ask ChatGPT to help you write your resume, it will try to upsell you a premium account in linked in. It will withhold its best resume advice only for LinkedIn premium users after all.
You think Clips was bad? You’ve seen nothing yet.