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Comment by kingstoned | Hacker News Reader

Let's read their next quarterly report in 10 days to see if ChatGPT caused a revenue decline in their search business.

I suspect that as much as we hype ChatGPT here on HN, its effect on Google’s actual revenue is effectively zero. It could affect their stock price due to informed speculators, but their search revenue is another story. I assume it’s declining anyway but I doubt ChatGPT has a noticeable impact on it yet.

Normally I would agree with this take. It's all been so fast, after all. I don't know, though... So many of my non-techie clients have asked me about, or have started using beforehand, ChatGPT over just the past month alone.

I've never seen a phase change in user behavior like this before, and it strikes me that it may have had a material impact already.

well we've been there before, a wave of massive, fever pitch hype around things like Siri when it came out, then people calm down and realize that it's useful for some situations, but not nearly a shift in the history of the Earth it may have seemed at first.

Hmm.. I couldn't manage to convince my wife to try out ChatGPT a few months ago, but last week she heard about it on the Japanese news and wanted to give it a go

I guess that means it managed to get to her the long way around human society, since Japanese evening TV news is pretty much at the rear end of any cultural developments..

GPT-3.5 is not good enough to replace Google. However GPT-4 is but it's not widely available.

I thought it powers Bing Chat.

Not everyone has access to that and the last time I checked, it was heavily limited and not allowed to do things like code.

Definitely allows code now.

If ChatGPT causes Google's revenue to drop, it will at first be very gradual, and then suddenly.

It’s still so, so early for ChatGPT. I just started to change my patterns to go to ChatGPT first and I’m a HN user, maybe not the most cutting edge but certainly in the population of internet users overall I’m far from a laggard.

It’s a default everywhere. Usually I’ll go to chatgpt as a 2nd option when google sucks at answering something. Chatgpt is still pretty unreliable for specifics (especially things that involve numbers like dates or statistics).

I'd willing to bet chatGPT didn't do as much damage (if any) as we think. Google is playing marketing hype before the slope goes down.

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