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by bonsaibilly 1238 days ago
Possibly, but is an LLM geared towards interpolating between content likely to even be particularly well-suited to relevance ranking of results that require no interpolation?

And if it is, what stops Google from just ... incorporating an LLM into their existing search offering instead of having their lunch eaten by this hypothetical IndexGPT? It's not like Google lacks expertise in LLMs.

1 comments

Because ChatGPT version of google search will probably make them less money.
This seems like an incoherent objection – they would presumably prefer to be "Google + LLM" and make less money than let the hypothetical IndexGPT eat their lunch and make even less money as a result, while additionally suggesting that the business model for IndexGPT is poor, raising the question of why it would be pursued in the first place.

You've also not addressed the more fundamental question of why an LLM would even be good for this.

> This seems like an incoherent objection – they would presumably prefer to be "Google + LLM" and make less money than let the hypothetical IndexGPT eat their lunch

You'd think that, but it's the classic innovator's dilemma. Google would have to modify their product to generate less revenue now to maintain market share. Except that market share will decline regardless as competitors rise, so they'd be cutting revenue just to slow the decline of market share. Alternately they could release a new AI product that cannibalizes their own search profits.

Either way, for a large multinational obsessed with quarterly profits and the stock price, it's very hard to overcome internal resistance to do either of those things.