What Does a Post-Google Internet Look Like?

> FAANG isn't going to be hiring at anywhere near the same rate they were before, because they won't need to.

They already didn't need to. The reason they hire as much as they do is to keep their lead, essentially denying potential competitors of growth potential by taking the best engineers and trying every crazy idea before anyone else. Or so I think.

And even though they overhire, it doesn't mean they can do huge layoffs without consequences, as the structure is now built around a massive workforce.

It’s a dark take, but I mostly agree with it. The ad model, with all its flaws, is a flexible model, and it has funded the web for a while.

The part that will break is that a lot of sites will have 0 incentives to continue to publish, in the face of 0 revenue and 0 credit. That will degrade the quality/ relevance of LLMs. I also think that “guaranteed produced by humans “ will have value.

> "The internet is going to return to more of its original roots, which are niche fan websites you largely find through social media or word of mouth"

Ok, that sounds possible, and not so bad...

> "Very few of them are going to survive... it costs a lot of money to pay people to write high quality content"

That may also be true, but doesn't really jibe with the image of the early 'net?

In one sentence, this is what I have been saying about LLMs since they got impressive:

"I don't know what good it can make, but this thing clearly has the potential to break the Internet".

> Paid services like Kogi will be

Typo: it's called "Kagi"

Tell me again how LLMs were going to make everything better?

This is a chilling outlook, but it looks very plausible.

The process has already started, the building blocks are in place. See the recent rise in public complaints about intense scraper activity. Zero-Click has become all but inescapable, and is going to capture an ever-growing share of searches.

Still, any paradigm shift also gives room for hope. There will be pitfalls for Moloch, they might just trip over their own ambitions. And maybe there will be opportunity for organic growth to take root in the cracks of their foundations.

I think end state is LLM-facilitated micropayments. One vast clearinghouse / marketplace of human-generated up to date content. Contributors get paid based on whether LLMs called their content via some kind of RAG. Maybe there are multiple aggregators / publishers.

Yes and there will still be a "free" version of content somewhere because not everyone will pay those prices (because they can't afford them or didn't know the value of a premium service).

So since there will be a demand, someone will produce "free resources" which will be the equivalent of a sewage outlet running into the sea.

Absolute garbage of an AI ouroborus just churning in on itself to aggregate and produce something for whatever this free channel of content ends up being.

for now - we can identify AI slop.

in the future - yeah interaction will be at a premium and that includes all textual content - since you can't trust whether it was generated by AI or not. which means books / content pre-AI gonna more valuable.

Later on things will need to be human curated.