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Comment by AndroTux | Hacker News Reader

The end game is the consumer no longer leaving Google and the web becoming synonymous to Google for them. Why shop on some random website when you can have Gemini buy it for you? Why look for information on Wikipedia when… you get the idea.

I think the coming years will be pivotal for the web. Facebook attempted a similar strategy back when their apps got traction, but they ultimately failed. Let’s hope Google fails too.

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It’s not necessarily going to be Google, but the rise of AI does not look good for the web, and it’s a largely self-inflicted wound.

Have you not noticed that the typical user experience on the web is dire? You need to click through tracking consent forms, subscription overlays, put up with dark patterns, etc. Remember, half of all users don’t even use an ad blocker. We’ve collectively made the web a very unpleasant experience.

Along comes a new technology that lets you just say what you want and it will go and find the answer or do what needs doing for you without any of that crap. Of course users are going to prefer it to the crap we dump on them via the web! Can you blame them‽

> Along comes a new technology that lets you just say what you want and it will go and find the answer or do what needs doing for you without any of that crap. Of course users are going to prefer it to the crap we dump on them via the web! Can you blame them‽

The web used to be like that, but then it was enshittified. The same thing will happen to consumer AI, and it will be done by the same people.

We're going back to the CompuServe/AOL/Prodigy model

We're going back to the mainframe model. Client-side general-purpose computing is an impediment to recurring subscription revenue and vendor lock-in.

This calls to mind the war on general-purpose computing (https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html) and it amazes me how even today we are still stuck with a couple of companies that have already cornered their markets, and yet still won't give up their fight to take microchip-technology out of the hands of their fellow humans - still trying to move the whole part of executing commands back within their own walls, and have people subscribe to have access to being able to request a specific type of process to be applied to their input. It occurs to me that surely all this must be the result of some ego/power-trip, for it hardly serves any party in any future I can envision where the ability to have computers compute is placed under lock and key, out of reach of the general public.

Is it simply a couple of billionaires eager to pull tricks like Adobe did when they cut an entire country off from access and use of Adobe-software, just for the thrill of it? Or is there actually some plausible future benefit or a specific outcome they have in their minds, and am I (or are we) too ignorant to be able to see anything worthwhile in their direction?

Why allow the sale of personal computing-devices in the first place, if you don't want people to decide which instructions they want to feed to it's processor? Right now they may be slowing down many processes, both computational and mental, wasting lots of time and making everybody hate subscription-models more and more every minute... what is it they really hope to accomplish, apart from pissing everybody off?

The mainframe model fell apart the moment that microcomputers became powerful enough to satisfy same use cases sufficiently. Centralized GenAI will also become obsolete as soon as local LLMs are capable enough to satisfy the same use cases sufficiently.

Artificial lock-in simply doesn't work in the long run: the incentive structures will always motivate customers to cut out middlemen, and peripheral markets to develop around providing the tools for doing exactly that. Anthropic and OpenAI may well end up being the Data General and Honeywell of our era.

The greatest risk to this is the possibility of political intervention creating artificial hurdles that prevents decentralized AI from challenging the big players. With than in mind, it's worthwhile to subject every proposal to regulate AI to intense scrutiny.

The fundamental problem with this of course is that every human being is likely more niche and more advanced at the LLM in the things that they find most important, and this realization sours the average user's impression of LLM usefulness. For example, an LLM cannot reasonably find me alternatives to specific tea regional vendors because the LLM does not know enough about tea to be able to say "this tea is half the price for 80% of the qualities of tea you're looking for". Instead I have to build my own mental knowledge base of careful trying and tasting and recalling which an LLM would maybe only have if I personally wrote every single tea session I have ever had in my life for it as context.

But hunting for a new tea to try is something I do regularly and something I would likely try with an LLM only to come away deeply disappointed with the results. And then I just wouldn't have much faith in it after that for things I don't have much knowledge about, like looking for a gift idea for one of the hobbies of a friend.

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