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Comment by gradus_ad | Hacker News Reader

Rather than ChatGPT being a replacement for Google, I've found it complements it pretty well. Questions I never would have searched on Google because of length or complexity are well suited to ChatGPT while the sorts of things I've always gone to Google for I continue to use Google for. Also when ChatGPT spits out a few paragraphs of answer for a complex question I'm not even sure may have an answer, I have some concrete directions to pursue which translate much better to Google search than general/fuzzy complex questions.

At this point saving Google doesn't require replacing the golden goose of Search but rather wrapping it with Gemini/whatever that can decide whether to give an answer it's thought up or returning tailored search results.

It's much more a UX question than a deep technical one. Google has all the pieces it needs, it just needs to package them into a seamless experience. You don't need a mind like Demis' for this...

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I've found perplexity to be a replacement for google for 90% of my queries and i only use google now as a website index. If I have any sort of question, instead of jumping through the hoops of thinking how to structure the query in a way that fits google i just ask it naturally to perplexity and the answers it gives are correct often enough for me to use it over google.

And perplexity.ai and phind annotate their results with footnotes, linking to the source of the information.

> Rather than ChatGPT being a replacement for Google, I've found it complements it pretty well. Questions I never would have searched on Google because of length or complexity are well suited to ChatGPT while the sorts of things I've always gone to Google for I continue to use Google for.

Agree, though there are things that I used to google (normally across multiple searches) that I now use ChatGPT for. For example, instead of looking up how to use 4 arguments of a cli tool and putting it together myself I just say "Write me a sed command that replaces X with Y" to ChatGPT.

I've said this here a number of times but I've found a _crazy_ amount of value in having ChatGPT build bash one-liners or small scripts to process/parse data and give me actionable information. I know what's possible on the command line with cut/sed/awk/grep/sort/uniq/wc/etc but, with a few exceptions, I'm not proficient in writing it quickly. I can get there and in the past there were times I put in the effort to pipe together 4-10 commands to extract something important BUT I really needed to have a compelling reason or I needed to be sure it would bear fruit for me to spend that time. Nowadays I simply paste the raw logs/output/etc to ChatGPT and say "I need to extract ABC and XYZ from that string, get a count XYZ per ABC group, sort them and get a count" or similar.

I can take logs and grab what I need out of the lines and quickly say "here is a breakdown by minute of how many times X happened in the logs". This may seem small to some of you or trivial but it's not for me and in the past I wouldn't have spent the time since I wouldn't be sure of the ROI (especially in the middle of a production issue) but now I can take 1-2min, get results, then decide if I should chase it further. Using this I've been able to go from "The data is in our logs" to "Here is an HTML/CSS/JS file visualizing the data in realtime (on refresh)". ChatGPT does a great job at writing the HTML/CSS/JS to graph data and in PHP I can have the PHP script run the one-liner that ChatGPT then "embed" that info for JS to read and graph.

Yes, I'm aware of prometheus and friends and I use them but in the middle of an issue I'm not going to start writing a new prom file, write a grafana widget, and wait for new data to start rolling in especially if we have been logging it but just not sending it prometheus. Long-term I reach for prometheus but short-term I just need the data now and visualizing data in graph form can make thing obvious that no combing through logs is going to expose.

It’s for Apple/Amazon/Google to fuck up if they can’t integrate AI into web old point o apps.

When I pick up my phone, my Amazon groceries should already be bought. We are not even there yet.

>When I pick up my phone, my Amazon groceries should already be bought.

Why even pick up the phone? Or have one! We should stay in bed 24/7, fed through a tube controlled by AI, and watching multiple video streams in VR! Let AI think, write music and poetry, let our internet connected fridges and programmable lightbulbs experience things, let our corporate overlords govern!

Yes.

Maybe our consumption habits are different, but why would you want an AI buying your groceries?

Because I forget.

You’re so human after all.

> Google has all the pieces it needs, it just needs to package them into a seamless experience.

Google prefers it would be 2019, when LLMs were a "remote" threat. They don't make more ad money when people find things, they prefer to keep us searching and seeing ads. They will be dragged kicking and screaming into the future.

I think AI also presents a huge threat to Meta and other social networks. We can get interactive experiences with AI now. We don't need social networks like before. I personally read as much LLM text as human text in a day because it is so clean and useful.

Ads are also under threat. I think web browsers and phones will equip with a layer of "user-agent-ai" where the AI extracts the useful parts from the web and redisplays it for the user under their own controls. You can bet ads are not going to be shown, thrown away together with low quality content. Only AIs will read ads.

Search, social and ads are going to be digested by AI and redisplayed for us. We gain control and protection. AI will form a layer of protection when going online, as the web will be crawling with AI bots trying to gain something from us.

There's an easy fix for AI transforming the output of the Internet giants into useful content for us: just block those AI apps/services. They are determined to be the interface between humans and machines because that is where you make your money.

The advertisement business model of the internet for so long, 20 years plus, is indeed almost irrelevant now. It will collapse like a house of cards. We are heading into a micropayments future.

Even products or services of the front pages of websites, which are displayed to users and consumers on a higher priority than others, that's irrelevant as well.

Google for the record, didn't want to be reliant on ads for revenue back in 2006 or so, but they failed on the micropayment side. They couldn't achieve less than 0.05$ fee per transaction, which is huge. For micropayments even a thousand times less fee, is probably too much.

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