[quaintdev]

I thought it's going to take decades to dethrone Google. Lo and behold a chatbot funded by Microsoft is giving some serious competition to Google. Bing might finally beat Google in case they don't rename Bing or launch completely different product!

[visarga]

Google is toast. It has been in continuous regression for the last 10 years. On the other hand, language models are progressing by leaps and bounds.

It is likely that within the next year, a new open chatGPT model will emerge that is comparable to "ClosedAI", to be used as the next stage after search. This model, along with others in its family such as Stable Diffusion and Wisper may become integral components of browsers and operating systems and could potentially be used as the main interface for accessing the internet.

As people become tired of ads and spam, they may turn to language models as a way to shield themselves from these distractions. These local models may also serve as personal creative spaces, allowing individuals to work and explore ideas without outside interference.

[ben_w]

Google can trivially duplicate the research and compute needed for their own version of GPT-3 if they want to. Given the size of the company, I wouldn't be surprised if several people or teams have done so without them all knowing about each other.

Google also has at least two generative models of their own that they, like OpenAI is criticised for, don't publish "just in case"; one for duplicating voices, and the LaMDA chatbot that got in the news before ChatGPT.

People will get tired of ads, but I bet someone will use a text agent to rewrite stories and scripts so heroic characters always enjoy the great taste of $beverage while saving the day, the lead romantic opportunity is $consumer_gender_preference and likes wearing $fashion_brand.

[visarga]

Can duplicate, yes, but it's not going to increase their revenues. The chat interface is less profitable than the search box + ads. Search has reached a paradigm change moment.

[hakfoo]

The search concept might not be that disruptable in a lot of niches, because chat tends to provide an answer without context.

The traditional search-box-and-list-of-URLs at least provides attribution, which can be of huge value in some search scenarios.

If I have a health-related query, I want to see the links from research papers from legitimate institutions, or trusted authorities like the NHS. A human-language answer doesn't necessarily say "based on the groundbreaking research of wificausesherpes.com" at the end.

Any sort of comparison and recommendation searches are similarly iffy. That's why there are a trillion "best 8k webcam under $30 December 2022" affiliate-link-farm sites, but The Wirecutter and Consumer Reports still have some minor level of clout.

[dvngnt_]

google already has this technology and have submitted their own research. this is just hard to deploy at google scale. chatgpt is millions, google is billions and many companies rely on that entire ecosystem/ads

[htrp]

technically google can trivially duplicate this work with their own llms...

organizationally, google is a hot mess that can't even figure out how to launch a product

[dragonwriter]

> organizationally, google is a hot mess that can’t even figure out how to launch a product

Maybe, but for Google LLMs wouldn’t be a product, they’d be an algorithm behind the universal query box and conversational assistants, which are established products. Adding additional backing algorithms and changing output UI to prioritize their output isn’t something Google has a problem with, even if it arguably does with new product launches.

[btbuildem]

In my experience at least, the LLM-based "search" is super unreliable, because it makes up "facts" half the time.

[neel8986]

Google have literally invented LLM using Transformer. LLMs are trained on large corpus of text. Google have bigger corpus than anyone. So this prediction of google's demise don't make any sense. ChatGPT literally have no advantage in terms of technique and dataset that Google don't have. Reason companies like google are exposing their internal LLMs are they are not production ready to handle 50 billion queries a day

[ben_w]

I was agreeing right up to the last sentence:

> Reason companies like google are exposing their internal LLMs are they are not production ready to handle 50 billion queries a day

If anyone can do that, Google can. Even at that scale, I'd bet Amazon and Microsoft can also do that right now, possibly also Apple and Twitter, and the only reason I'm not listing Tesla is that (to my surprise) SOTA image AI uses way less RAM than SOTA text AI, and Tesla's probably all about image data.

Nah, all of them have got a lot of potential reasons why they might not make them public, but I don't see that being one of them, and especially not Google given how often they jump in with half-baked launches that they try to make work later.