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by partiallypro 1233 days ago
> the problem here is monetization, will search even be profitable if LLMs are used for most queries?

I think that is a concern, which is why I think Microsoft has a chance to just bundle this or a more advanced version with Microsoft 365. Then you're already paying for it. That automatically puts it in the hands of millions of paying customers and corporations. You can just raise your price by a dollar a month or something to offset the costs and no one really will even think they are paying for this.

2 comments

"Clippy, write me a 25 page requirements doc for an integration between Workday and our IAM solution."
Thanks to that joke I just imagined how it could be a game changer for internal corporate documents (the kind that are 50+ pages and never read), especially if it’s native into Office.
We'll have to invent a new form of busy work to justify head count.
Employee: Chatbot, write me a 20 page document describing what I've been working on the past two weeks so that I can give it to my manager.

Manager: Chatbot, write me 1 page summaries of these documents from my employees so that I can collate them for the CEO.

CEO: Chatbot, where should I go on vacation next?

In Kino's Travels (I guess nowadays Kino's Journey), there was one country in the first anime adaptation where people no longer needed to work because the system/computer/whatever it was called did it all for them, so they spent all their time confirming its correctness.
I fucking LOVE Kino's Journey, nobody else I've met has ever seen it!

TIME TO REWATCH YET AGAIN

Actually reading printed copies of those documents would be the penultimate busy works, so much that it would quickly become uberablingly alienating!
And what would be the ultimate busy works?
That only makes sense if they can charge more for office 365.

Shoving more features into something people pay for doesn’t mean those feature were worth it.

Except that's not the calculus. By integrating chatgpt with their products, Microsoft pulls users away from: search, docs/workspace, and even gmail, and brings them over into: Bing, Office365, and outlook. In doing so, they threaten google's core income stream, and therefore google's ability to fight back.

Microsoft is not paying for an expensive search engine: Microsoft is paying (with chatgpt compute infrastructure) for a much larger piece of the productivity suite market, and hamstringing google in the process.