Why OpenAI Is Forced to Enter the Search Business | Hacker News Reader

Why OpenAI Is Forced to Enter the Search Business

nextword.substack.com

13 pointsnextworddev10 comments

The article makes a great point. OpenAI is far from safe. There is no moat for them yet.

Open source is always nipping at their heels, giving enterprises safer alternatives to build against. It's why Sam Altman clamors for AI safety regulation while simultaneously killing their own AI safety team. There's very little you need OpenAI for to build an AI product. And by being so closed, they've killed off developer goodwill.

Meanwhile, consumers will go with the entrenched pane of glass (smartphone, browser) that gives them the AI experience without looking for it. Platforms will have a much easier time meeting the customers where they already are.

I'm currently paying something close to $200 a month for search products/ai products because all of the ones on the market have issues and google is borderline unusable.

I'd be happy paying that much going forward indefinitely if I don't have to deal with adds.

Currently perplexity.ai is the best after the gpt4o model release, because it lets me not use it. If you want to pay one company pay them. The rest are add ons that are useful but not essential.

Just to lite a fire under them, my top pick until last week was phind.com until they moved to the gpt4o model and didn't give you a chance to select or pay for alternative models.

> I'm currently paying something close to $200 a month for search products/ai products because all of the ones on the market have issues and google is borderline unusable. ... I'd be happy paying that much going forward indefinitely if I don't have to deal with adds.

As someone who has been using google as a working tech person for like the last 18 years this is so insane to read. I've had one or two times where searches were filled with some annoying content, but I've never said "I would like to pay for better results" much less $200.

I would love to watch you use google just to see what's going on that's so bad.

I get paid $300 an hour. If one of those services saves me an hour a month it pays for itself. I would like a better search engine with a better model on top of it obviously but this is good enough for now.

Author here. Which products are you currently subscribing to?

Perplexity, phind, kagi, openai, anthropic, open AI, cohere, a couple of services which let you run other models online, throw in the api calls I use so I don't leave Emacs when writing, it adds up to little over $200 per month.

I also have a 4x4090 rig for local inference when I need to do work offline or overnight, e.g. llama3 70b is amazing at converting old docs into valid json for the cost of keeping my office warm. But local models without websearch are pretty useless for the more creative work I do.

Like I said, I would absolutely love to shadow you while you search, because what you're describing just isn't happening to me.

... $200! I pay for kagi's top plan and they have search and AI chat that lets you choose between many different models including all three GPT4 variants, Gemini and Claude. $25 a month.

Google is abusing its monopoly power, so I'm glad other companies are joining the search market. But we need a new framework to reward authors of primary information fed to LLM.

I just read the headline and was kind of like, duh, is that not inevitable?

People don't use Google just to "look for websites," they go seeking information.

Given how crap Google has been lately, it's just a no-brainer of a hole to fill?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com