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Comment by bflesch | Hacker News Reader

LLMs = ad-free version of google

That's why people adopted it. Google got worse and worse, now the gap is filled with LLMs.

LLMs have replaced google, and that's awesome. LLMs won't cook lunch or fold our laundry, and until a better technology comes around which can actually do that all promises around "AI" should be seen as grifting.

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The ads will come and they'll need to be an order of magnitude worse to make llms profitable.

LLMs know a magnitude more about you and your needs. This will make targeting users very valuable.

The big question is who will be first to get it done in an unobstrusive way (subtlely integrated into text with links).

I suppose the only solution is to communicate with LLMs only through TOR and pay for them only via crypto?

That's the real AI future, not some atomic war with robots. Manipulative AI bowing to the dollars of advertisers, responding to something overheard by a smart speaker 20 minutes ago by packaging an interstitial ad for coca-cola and delivering it stealthily in-experience to your child in their bedroom on a VR headset, straight to their cornea.

The ways for circumventing the influence are currently being dismantled and these AI RTB ad systems are well funded and being built. AI news feed will echo the message and the advertiser will be there again in their AI internet search.

We will cede the agencies of reality to machines responding to those wishing to reshape reality in their own interest as more of the human experience gets commodified, packaged, and traded as a security to investors looking to extract value from being alive.

This is the part I don't understand. Individually I don't know anyone paying for LLM's, only companies that are immediately pivoting to find reduced costs/internal options to horizon that expense.

Considering the massive cost and shortened lifespan of previous models, current gen models have to not only break even on their own costs but make up for hundreds of millions lost in previous generations.

As soon as they find a way to embed advertising into LLM outputs the small utility LLM's provide now will be gone.

The only hope I guess is that the local LLM stuff that Microsoft is pushing will actually work out. If inference is done on the device… well, at least using it doesn’t need to be profitable. Training it… I guess will have to be justified by the feature being enough of a value-add that it makes the OS more profitable.

Designing operating systems that people would actually pay real money for doesn’t seem to be a focus for anybody except Apple. But I guess there’s hope on some theoretical level at least.

If Microsoft made it and distributed it, the only thing you can be sure of is that it will work out for Microsoft.

I am not curious what Bing says about Microsoft's ethics.

Sure, but no need to optimize for that until it happens. It's not clear to me that they will become profitable; they might go under.

Awesome for everyone except the creators of all that data. For years Google slowly encroached on their viewership (ads, amp, summaries, etc) and now they are being replaced by something that gives the creators absolutely nothing. Not even attribution. Not only are they giving nothing, they are actively fighting in the legal system to ensure their data thievery is deemed legal.

100% agree. And suddenly copyright laws don't exist any more it seems.

Google has sources: the sites/URLs of the search results, some of which may be reputable or be the source itself.

LLMs like Phind can cite parts of their output, but my understanding is they're prone to missing key details from or even contradicting the citations (the same issue as LLM "summaries" missing or contradicting what they're supposed to summarize), at least moreso than human writers (and surely more than reputable human writers).

while I agree with the notion that sources should be given, current google search provides "old-school" search results only at the bottom of the page. first they give AI suggestions, special tabs with provenly-false content (see "john wick 5" drama in recent days), big blocks of ads. and then they show the results from websites which pay most for SEO.

LLMs give more accurate results for many queries, and they also include knowledge from books / scientific papers / videos which are not included in the standard google search result pages.

also LLMs have no ads.

so there is net benefit for users to use LLMs for search instead of googling it.

and I'd bet nowadays the percentage of false/outdated information is the same on both Google and LLM results.

People thinking LLMs have replaced search engines is probably one of the most dangerous ideas today lol. They merely look similar, the functionality is totally different.

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