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Comment by insane_dreamer | Hacker News Reader

Apple might emerge as one of the winners here, despite being one of the last to come out with an LLM, because it already has the infrastructure, or delivery system, for hundreds of millions of users to interact with an LLM. Google has a similar foothold worldwide, but its major weakness that it's cannibilizing its Search cash cow (how do you make $ from ads with LLMs?), whereas in Apple's case it enhances its product (finally a smart Siri). OpenAI doesn't have that except through Microsoft.

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But do I even want an actually smart Siri?

Microsoft's been trying to ram essentially that down my throat for the better part of a year now, and it's mostly convinced me that the answer is "no". I don't want to have arbitrary conversations with my computer.

I still just want the same thing I've been wanting from my digital assistant for 30 years now: fewer "eat up Martha" moments, and handling more intents so that I can ask "When does the next east-bound bus come?" and it stops answering questions like "Will it rain today?" as if I had asked "Is it raining right now?". None of those are particularly appropriate problems for a GPT-style model.

I would like to maybe be able to say:

Set two timers, one for 20 minutes, and another for 50 minutes.

Turn off the lights in my living room, and my office.

That's about as advanced as I want my home assistants to be though.

> (how do you make $ from ads with LLMs?)

I asked Google Gemini:

Tailored Ads: Create highly personalized ads based on this data, increasing the likelihood of clicks and conversions.

Could probably also have a version that goes something like

> you asked about $SUBJECT. Here is some advice on the subject, and a few links to helpful products and services.

LLMs only cannibalize search if people use it as a replacement. I'm not seeing this happening at scale, instead they can be used to complement it by providing summaries, doing translations etc.

If people no longer click on sponsored links because they are getting a reply to their query in the summary paragraph at the top, Google no longer makes money from search. That's the cannibalization.

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