Search costs nothing to run relative to ad revenue. Microsoft makes each query require 100x the cpu usage because users expect an LLM answer for results.
Microsoft’s share of search goes from 1% to 5%. Their cost go up but their sale of ads increases and they get valuable IP.
Google loses 5% share of market but its costs go up 100x.
Google can no longer finance its other bets like Cloud so effectively.
Microsoft meanwhile has a more compelling cloud offering.
Google starts to lose more ground on Cloud.
Amazon (not an AI company) lose ground to both.
Classic Art of War, if your opponent is strong, attack somewhere they are weak.
However, they will force Google's hand into moving their whole search load over to LLM to avoid loosing market share to Bing. This will cost Google a lot more as search is a much bigger part of their business.
It's an interesting theory but I wouldn't know enough to evaluate how likely it is.
AI has many other profitable uses for Microsoft but specifically using it to compete with Google Search seems like a poison pill.
I really wouldn't recommend looking to LLMs to evaluate truthfulness, they aren't built for that and have no way of knowing what true is.
They're much better as a tool for summarizing information, with the usual caveat that any summary is incomplete and can only be as truthful as the original source(s) used.
On the other hand asking it the population of Azerbaijan is problematic. I'd have to Google whatever it told me.
A confidence level could be helpful to know how much competing data was considered by the LLM when predicting each word, but it would say nothing of truthfulness or even accuracy relative to the original training data.