Sure!
Google began investing heavily in AI (LLMs, actually) to catch up to the other frontier labs, which had already produced a product that was going to eviscerate Google Search (and therefore, Google ad revenue). They recognized this, and set about becoming a leader in the emerging field.
Is it not better to be a leader in the nascent industry that is poised to kill your profitability?
This is the same approach that Google took with smartphones. They saw Apple as a threat not because they had a product that was directly competing, but because they recognized that allowing Apple to monopolize mobile computing would put them in a position to take Google’s ad revenue — or allow them to extract rent in the form of payments to ensure Apple didn’t direct their users to a competing service. Android was not initially intended to be a revenue source, at least not most importantly. It was intended to limit the problem that Apple represented. Later, once Google had a large part of the market, they found ways to monetize the platform via both their ad network and an app store.
AI is no different. If Google does nothing, they lose. If they catch up and take the lead, they limit the size of the future threat and if all goes well, will be able to monetize their newfound market share down the road - but monetization is a problem for future Google. Today’s Google’s problem is getting the market share.
Even in this conservative case, ChatGPT could seriously erode Google Search revenues. That alone would be a massive disruption and Google wants to ensure they end up as the Google in that scenario and not the Lycos, AltaVista, AskJeeves etc. etc.
Panicking, and therefore making horrible design and product choices.
Google has made their main search engine output utter and complete junk. It's just terrible. If they didn't have 'web' search, I'd never be able to use it.
In almost every search for the last month, normal search results in horrible matches. Switch to web? Bam! First result.
Not web? The same perfect result might be 3 or 4 pages deep. If that.
(I am comparing web results in both cases, and ignoring the also broken 80% of the pages of AI junk.)
In an attempt to compete, they're literally driving people to use ChatGPT for search in droves.
They could compete, and do so without this panicky disaster of a response.
> If Google does nothing, they lose.
Is any of that actually true though? In retrospect, had google done nothing their search product would still work. Currently it's pretty profoundly broken, at least from a functional standpoint--no idea how that impacts revenue if at all. To me it seems like google in particular took the bait and went after a paper tiger, and in doing so damaged their product.
Tech nerds know what ChatGPT is, they know llm limits somewhat and they know it's hallucinating. Normal people do not - for them is a magical all knowing oracle.
Yep, and it’s hard to communicate that to them. It’s hard to accurately describe even to someone familiar with the context.
I don’t think “trust” is the right word. Sitting here on 19 Nov 2025, I do in fact trust LLMs to reason. I don’t trust LLMs to be truthful.
If I ask for a fact, I always consider what I’d lose if that fact were wrong.
If I ask for reasoning, I provide the facts that I believe are required to make the decision. I then double-check that reasoning by inverting the prompt and comparing the output in the other direction. For more critical decisions, I make sure I use different models, from different providers, with completely separate context. If I’ve done all that, I think I can honestly say that I trust it.
These days, I would describe it as “I don’t trust AI to distinguish truth”
You must know the limitations of the medium but searching for how much and at what temperature should i bake my broccoli is so fucking annoying to search on google
Anecdotally, I believe they did.
My wife is decidedly not a tech nerd, but had her own ChatGPT subscription without my input before I switched us over to a business account.
My mother is 58, and a retired executive for a “traditional” Fortune 100 company. She’s competent with MS productivity tools and the software she used for work, but has little interest outside that. She also had her own ChatGPT subscription.
Both of them were using it for at least a large subset of what they’d previously used Google for.
Problem for Google is that for a good chunk of normal non-techy people LLM chats looks like talking to genius super intelligence and they was not burned by it yet. So they trust it.
And now good chunk of non-tech people now go and ask ChatGPT instead of using google search. And they do it simply because it's less enshittified than Google search.
I know the tech itself is real and people do use it. And it will certainly change the world. Yet I doubt even fraction of money burnt on it will ever be recuperated because race to the bottom.
But yeah - I'm just random tech guy who has not built a big successful company and honestly have very little clue how to make money this way.
Hey, me too :)
I’ve been at this for a couple of decades, though, and from what I’ve seen the key to building a “successful” company is to ride the wave of popular interest to get funding, build an effective team, and then (and only then) try to find a way to make it profitable enough to exit.
I do think “AI” (really, LLMs, and GPTs in particular) are going to have a transformative impact on a scale and at a rate we’ve never seen before - I just have zero confidence that I can accurately predict what it’s going to look like when the dust settles.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don’t think it matters.
Google has the capital to spend, and this effort needn’t succeed to be worthwhile. My point is that the scope of the potential future risk more than justifies the expense.
> and in doing so damaged their product
Only in objective terms.
The overall size of the market Google is operating in hasn’t changed, and I’m not aware of anyone positioned to provide a better alternative. Even if we assume that Google Search has gotten worse as a result of this, their traditional competitors aren’t stealing marketshare. They’re all either worse than the current state of Search, are making the same bet, or both.
What, you don't want to ship the Torment Nexus? You're fired! We must ship a Torment Nexus, we must maintain our market share even if it means our destruction!
I'll take a stab at this. It's not 100% clear to me which product you're referring to, so I'll try to answer as if the product is something that already has customers, and the maker of the product is shoving AI into it. The rationale is that the group you're trying to convince that you're doing a good job is your shareholders or investors, not your actual customers. You can justify some limited customer attrition by noting that your competitors are doing the same thing, and that maybe if you shove the _right_ AI features into the product, you'll win those customers back.
I'm not saying it's a _good_ rationale, but that seems to be what's at play in many cases.
Nobody can really know what things will look like in 10 years, but if you have the capital to deploy and any conviction at all that this might be a sea-change moment, it seems foolish to not pursue it.
100% true. Do not invest trillions on such an uncertainty in the long term is always a bad investment.
> but if you have the capital to deploy and any conviction at all that this might be a sea-change moment, it seems foolish to not pursue it.
Gamblers argument: "But what if this is the winning ticket?"
A risky investment is obviously akin to gambling, but to get things built and make a profit you have no other choice.
Are you now equating an investor with some guy in a casino? Sorry, but that seems like a stretch.
I'm saying the risk aspect is similar, but I take issue with equating (product) investment and gambling, since one has a potential to create, and the other just shifts money around.
It doesn’t have to work. It just has to sell and become entrenched enough. And by all metrics that is what is happening. A self fulfilling prophecy, no different than your org buying redundant enterprise software from all the major vendors today.
now that there's a prime quality rare insult
anyway i totally agree with your reasoning. one might as well ask "why is MS Teams so bad? it's bloated, slow, buggy, nasty to use from a UX pov... yet it's everywhere"
this shitware -- ms teams, llm slopguns, whatever -- never had to work, they just have to sell.
How did they ignore technological advancements?
They had the tech but didn't see the danger in it, they belived that the lower quality digital camera would fail and investing in them would mean exploring a new market and they choose the safe corporate move, buisness as usual.
Turns out that low quality but way more pratical and cheaper on the long run really sells
“One of Job's business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. " If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will," he said. So even though an Iphone might cannibalize sales of an IPod, or an IPad might cannibalize sales of a laptop, that did not deter him.”
Kodak did sell digital cameras but they were so scared of protecting their film business I don't think they went all in on digital and let the other camera companies take over.
Kodak operated in a region that was a manufacturing and technology hub until the mid 1900s. The region started to decline significantly in the 1960s. By the 1990s it was basically a ruins compared to the 1950s.
So by the time Kodak made this strategic mistake, I imagine they already would have had a hard time recruiting talent into that obviously dying region for a decade or so, and many people who were there already were actively leaving the region by that time.
I suspect that in the counterfactual where the region stayed as it was in the 1950s in terms of economic prosperity, Kodak probably could have successfully played catch up once it was clear where the game was going.
So yes they made a strategic mistake, but they did so while simultaneously “brain drain” bleeding out due to other unrelated factors.
If there's something more specific and different you were referring to I'd love to hear what it is.
I don’t really see this. Lots of people like freebies, but the value aspect is less clear. AFAIK, none of these chatbots are profitable. You would not see nearly as many users if they had to actually pay for the thing.
> "It doesn't matter whether you want to be a teacher [or] a doctor. All those professions will be around, but the people who will do well in each of those professions are people who learn how to use these tools."
Bullshit. Citation very much needed. It's a shame--a shameful stain on the profession--that journalists don't respond critically to such absurd nonsense and ask the obvious question: are you fucking lying?. It is absolutely not true that AI tools make doctors more effective, or teachers, or programmers. It would be very convenient to people like Pichai and Scam Altman, but that don't make it so.
A small startup now has the chance to compete with incumbents without raising from VCs.
Not talking about you, but I think cynics just look at it with too much pessimism and therefore can't see it.
And Startups and SMB's are more open to attributing it to efficiency gains due to AI.
If you aren't seeing it then probably it's because you are in a niche vertical. Which is great for you, but not representative on the whole.
Chat GPT just happened to come out around the same time so we get all this misattribution
And yet, every time somebody not paid by the AI companies tries to measure it, they don't find it.
def mult2(points): return 2xpoints
Its going to be really interesting what happens to this labor pool once you've finally sunk all the ships youre let aboard.
I think it's very hard to convince AI skeptics since for some reason they feel more threatened by it than rest. It's counterproductive and would hinder them professionally but then it's their choice.
The studies I've seen--and there are very few--seem to indicate the effect is more placebo than pharmacological.
Regardless, breathless claims that I'm somehow damaging my career by wondering whether these tools actually work are going to do nothing to persuade me. I'm quite secure in my career prospects, thank you kindly.
I do admit I don't much like being labeled an "AI skeptic" either. I've been following developments in machine learning for like 2 decades and I'm familiar with results in the field going back to the 1950s. You have the opportunity here to convince me, I want to believe there is some merit to this latest AI summer. But I am not seeing the evidence for it.
As I said the evidence is in companies not hiring anymore since they don't need as many developers as before. If you want rigorous controlled studies you'll get it in due time. In the meantime maybe just look into the workflows of how people are using
re AI skeptics: I started pushing AI in our company early this year, and one of the first questions I got was that "are we doing it to reduce costs". I fully understood and sympathize with the fact many engineers feel threatened and feel they are being replaced. So I clarified it's just to increase our feature velocity which was my honest intention since ofc I'm not a monster.
I then asked this engineer to develop a feature using bolt, and he partially managed to do it but in the worst way possible. His approach was to spend no time on planning/architecture and to just ask AI to do it in a few lines. When hit with bugs he would ask the AI "to fix the bug" without even describing the bug. His reasoning was that if he had to do this prep work then why would he use AI. Nonetheless he finished entire month's worth of credit in a single day.
I can't find the proper words, but there's a certain amount of dishonesty in this attitude that really turns me off. Like turbotax sabotaging tax reforms so they can rent seek.
I hope so, because the alternative is grim. But to be quite honest I don't expect it'll happen, based on what I've seen so far. Obviously your experience is different, and you probably don't agree--which is fine. That's the great thing about science. When done properly it transcends personal experience, "common sense", faith, and other imprecise ways of thinking. It obviates the need to agree--you have a result and if the methodology is sound in the famous words of Dr. Malcolm "well, there it is." The reason I think we won't get results showing AI tooling meaningfully impacts worker productivity are twofold:
(1) Early results indicate it doesn't. Experiences differ of course but overall it doesn't seem like the tools are measurably moving the needle one way or the other. That could change over time.
(2) It would be extremely favorably in the interests of companies selling AI dev tools to show clearly and inarguably that the things they're selling actually do something. Quantifying this value would help them set prices. They must be analyzing this problem, but they're not publishing or otherwise communicating their findings. Why? I can only conclude it's because they're not favorable.
So given these two indications at this point in time, a placebo like effect seems most likely. That would not inspire me to sign a purchase agreement. This makes me afraid for the economy.
Really I only use chat GPT and sometimes Claude code, I haven't used these special-cased AI tools
If you mean AI Overview, you really need to cite the source of this claim:
> seeing that it drives consumers away from your product
Because every single source I can find claims that Google search grew in 2024[0]. HN is not a good focus group for a product that targets billions of people.
[0]: For example https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-growth-39040.html but feel free to provide a more credible source that claims the opposite.
With AI summaries being hit or miss, we may say users now need to do 20% more searches to find what they are looking for.
Numbers aren't always a good proxy for customer satisfaction.
Make cars break faster so you can sell more cars.
Hey now, Google Plus was more than a decade ago. I didn't like it either, but maybe it's time to move on? I think they learned their lesson.
- get customers used to using AI by “gently” cough nudging them towards this in all products.
- get experience and data for your LLMs and AI dev teams regarding what works and what doesn’t
- Bet on AI becoming good enough that people will use this as their entry to the Web, Media and software
- become the largest player of these AI apps, so that you can inject ads again
https://open.substack.com/pub/nothinghuman/p/the-tyranny-of-...
That's only one article and with only a small focus: Americans only.
U.S. adults are generally pessimistic about AI’s effect on people’s ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships: 53% say AI will worsen people’s ability to think creatively, compared with 16% who say it will improve this....
Regarding your skepticism about the loss of trust: https://publicpolicy.cornell.edu/masters-blog/what-americans...
One of the most consistent themes in the research is fear of misinformation. In an era where AI-generated content can be nearly indistinguishable from authentic material, the potential for deception is enormous, and people know it. A full 76% of Americans say they are concerned about AI tools producing false or misleading information.
Anyways: https://futurism.com/the-byte/study-consumers-turned-off-pro...
Researchers have found that including the words “artificial intelligence” in product marketing is a major turn-off for consumers, suggesting a growing backlash and disillusionment with the tech — and that startups trying to cram “AI” into their product are actually making a grave error.
Where is your evidence for this part of your claim?
- Steve Jobs
I'm certain Jobs thought there's no need to point that detail, because nobody still living¹ would be dumb enough not to understand it implicitly. Too bad that we have evidence otherwise.
1 - At the worst case, selection bias should make it true.
Even if that change is wildly profitable for megacorps in the long run.