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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

I'm old, so I remember saying the same thing about Google and search.

I hope you're right!

I think the big difference is that Google is free: everyone is using Google because it doesn’t cost anything and for a long time was the best search engine out there. I am sure that if Google would suddenly charge a few dollars per month for access, Bing market share would explode overnight, because it would become “good enough but cheaper”.

With the AI models, using a model that is “good enough but cheaper” is already an option.

There's no reason that a sizeable portion of LLM usage can't and won't end up free/ad-sponsored. Cutting edge stuff for professional use will probably be monetized via subscription or API credits for a long time to come. But running an older and less resource intensive model works just fine for tasks like summarization. These models will just become another feature in a "free" product that people pay for by watching or clicking ads.

I imagine the split will look a lot like b2b vs b2c in other technologies, b2b customers tend to be willing to pay for tech when it offers a competitive advantage, reduces their operating costs etc. b2c customers mostly just guzzle free slop.

It's actually pretty bonkers when you think about how basically every cutting edge professional you deal with is getting ads for all of their top search results for all of their work.

(Not quite "every", but outside of tech, most professional workplaces don't support ad blocking or Kagi.)

I too am old. Google search is free, hard to replicate, and while there used to be lots of search engines, Google was (and arguably still is) miles ahead of all the others in terms of quality and performance.

A model is hard to train but it doesn't need to be hyper up to date / have a new version come out every day. Inference is cheap (it seems?) and quality is comparable. So it's unclear how expensive offerings could win over free alternatives.

I could be wrong of course. I don't have a crystal ball. I just don't think this is the same as Google.

Of course I could be entirely mistaken and there could emerge a single winner

I would say Google's monopoly mainly comes from its name recognition, definitely not because its still ahead in core search as I have been using DuckDuckGo for 2 years once I noticed search results are the same or better than Google.

In the first years, I remember no other search engine was close to Google quality. We all ditched AltaVista because Google was incredibly better. It would have been awful to switch back to any other options. We can already switch between the 3 big proprietary models without feeling too much differences, so it’s quite a different landscape.

Yes, my point exactly.

There was never a high quality alternative to Google search, until Kagi - and even that isn't free!

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