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Comment by tomjen3 | Hacker News Reader

Google is conflicted about AI. Having AI do searches for you and summerize the results is both way more expensive than normal searches and means way fewer ads are shown.

Google can't do anything about it either - consumers will prefer the chat approach and will go where it is offered. Google has to offer it, or people will go to ChatGpt and Bing, but at the same time they lose a lot of money each time people opt for the chat summary.

It is way expensive for Bing too, but they don't care because their market is growing and since the only thing people used to search Bing for was how to download Chrome and how to change the default browser, they aren't losing a lot this way.

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Imagine a search engine that tries to persuade you a sponsored product is the answer to your problems, and it can use its knowledge about you to do so.

I think search products will be OK - it will just be stranger than we expect.

One area Google has a big advantage is in its massive crawling and indexing infrastructure. As good as ChatGPT plus is, the search with Bing feature is so. damn. slow. It seems do be doing a normal search request in the background rather than using any kind of index, and multiple links are visited serially rather than concurrently. Did I mention that it’s slow?

That’s a large and difficult problem obviously and one Google is clearly well-positioned for if they can ever catch up on the model front.

> Google is conflicted about AI. Having AI do searches for you and summerize the results is both way more expensive than normal searches and means way fewer ads are shown

But those ads would be compelling and more valuable. There is no reason to believe the current inference LLM architecture is the optimal one (as shown by Mistral's MoE) - future inference will likely be cheaper than it is currently.

The sentiment that Google's goose is cooked I'm seeing in this thread seems like wish-fulfillment to me. Especially considering that the upstarts also don't have a clear road to profitability

OpenAI can raise a ton of more cash, so they may not have a road to profitability yet, but they have long time before they crash.

Big was used for porn. Don’t forget porn. Torrents too.

Bing going legit and genuinely threatening google wasn’t on my bingo card for sure.

And honest content. One order of magnitude more honest at least; Google is like asking the Kremlin for truth.

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