The internet is on life support

I am wondering what is going to happen to the internet when you can no longer navigate it with a Google Search? Its just astounding what OpenAI and Anthropic have accomplished, and I reminisce. I remember in 2004, how much better Google performed versus Alta Vista for finding sources for term papers and essays. Later, I learned that they achieved this by converting all the content on the internet to vectors, a process we would now call tokenization. I learned that they created the first stable search solution by inventing the scalable advertising business model using state of the art economics invented by Hal Varian. I was "Google native", Google was incredible.

Google Search was the internet. I've used it to find almost everything: jobs, houses, cars, schools for me, schools for my kids. It has been the dominant way to find information on the web since the mid 2000s. In 2023, within 6 months of the release of ChatGPT, I had reduced my usage of Google by 50%. ChatGPT had completely replaced my use of Google for software engineering questions (my job), and at the time I wondered if that would proliferate to other types of queries. Would I end up not using Google Search anymore?

Done reminiscing. Today, I use Google Search in map searches only, and for everything else, I use Claude. Not only that, but it has fundamentally changed the set of tasks I do for work, it answers my email and it plays a large part in planning my work day. I use it to find jobs, schools, cars, houses and I have come to rely on it to better understand the world.

This is uncharted territory and Google Search is not the only tool I don't use anymore. Social media has been completely subsumed by AI generated content. The platforms like LinkedIn and Meta are strictly enforcing bans on bots publishing content. You can't use a computer-use bot to click the Publish button, or you get banned. Yet the platforms are completely swamped with AI generated text and images - AI posts .. AI slop. This will be the first post you've read from a certain demographic in some time that has been completely written and edited without AI. Could you tell the difference?

Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Zillow, Instagram .. the list goes on .. have been disrupted in a fundamental way. Don't get me wrong, they will thrive financially, but AI has left a void on systems where humans want to interact with each other. Thinking, brainstorming, dreaming, sharing visions for the future, collaborating in a world with 10, 100, 1000x .. as much content, human interactions 1:1, 1:5, etc.. has never been at a higher premium. In person events have become the most effective ways to buy and sell things because we can't trust the internet anymore, or just can't sift through the mountain of content created effortlessly by AI.

Human interaction is a real need, and it will be filled. I believe these will be AI enabled ways, where the AI facilitates human interactions instead of offsetting it. We already are starting to see some innovative platforms arise, and there are a lot of projects in the works. These are real needs, and they will be filled.