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by teawrecks
1295 days ago
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Google is first and foremost an advertiser. The search engine, android, all the random short lived products, they're all attempts to find new ways to put ads in front of eyes. The only way google is "done" is if someone can figure out a way to put the ads in front of more receptive eyes/wallets AND do it on Google's scale without first being acquired or killed off. This means they would need to more effectively gather information about the viewer. This language model is neat, but it doesn't attempt to gather much info at all. It's almost completely orthogonal to Google's business model. |
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No, alternatively they just need to steal googles traffic, they don’t need to steal the ad spend. If you take the traffic, you’ll take their revenue, and they’ll die. If you steal 50% of traffic, you’ll steal 50% of their ad impression revenue. Advertisers will go elsewhere.. like meta or apple.
In fact, most companies are disrupted by orthogonal businesses not by being directly outdone by a startup. No one is going to make a better general purpose search engine anytime soon, but Amazon is successfully stealing product search and discovery queries from Google.
Google is first and foremost a collection of products. A product needs to make money from users. If you take their users, you take their source of income. Everyone likes to make sassy claims about “you’re the product” due to ads. You are still consuming a service designed to provide you value, even if you didn’t pay for it directly. There is no reason web search needs to gather data about you and show ads, it’s just an easy way to pay for the service. Google could offer a subscription to a “pro” search engine if it wanted, and fund the company that way (probably less profitably though).
(And fwiw there’s no reason a language model based service couldn’t capture exactly the same data, it’d just be harder to get people to click on ads).