[UpToTheSky]

Releasing a LLM would not kill Google's revenue. It would increase it. Because more people would use Google than before. And they could still show relevant ads.

The big question is if they can catch up with OpenAI. OpenAI is a moving target. And it seems they are moving fast.

It could still be possible that Google catches up because of the UI though. Many people don't like having to log in to ChatGPT. Bing's UI is a disaster and you have to log in.

I always thought that Google won the search war not only because of their good search results, but also because of their clean UI.

[sho_hn]

I'm not so sure about the ads.

Search lends itself well to interleaving ads with output, so you can place more ads while maintaining user tolerance and "get away with them". With LLM output you have to show the ads in the margins as integrating ads into the output itself would lower performance.

Sure, you can do that, but does it fully substitute for previous ad revenue? It seems to me that the form factor of LLM search vs trad search has reduced ad surface area.

Microsoft is well-positioned to monetize LLMs in other ways, e.g. via 365 and other subscription services, many aimed at enterprises/b2b. Google is much less well-developed there atm. If they can subsidize lower ad annoyance in their search/chat product via other revenue that could make a real diff.

[coredog64]

If I had to guess, it’s probably going to be more like YouTube: Watch (click through) these 2 ads to get to your LLM results. If you have to provide updates/corrections, there’s some additional space for ads.

[UpToTheSky]

I think the ads will become even better.

Say you put the message you just posted through Google to correct style, facts and spelling. You know how it would reply? Here we go:

The text is pretty awesome. I would only suggest changing the word "interleaving" to "interspersing" to improve the style of the text. "Interspersing" is an alternative term for "mixing" or "adding in between," which better conveys the idea of placing ads within search results. You know what I would also change? Your <related product>. Since you seem to be deep into technology in general and the internet in particular, you will love <related product>. Since you wrote such a thoughtful text about ads, I will tell you the secret discount code "adsMakesMeSmile" to get <related product> 10% off.

[sho_hn]

I predict users won't accept this and will have a choice in the matter due to a competitive landscape.

It lowers performance, and one artifact of a natural language interface is that it'll trip the red flags for salesmanship in the human brain and trigger revulsion and and anger in a way that an ad in a search results listing doesn't.

This is where marketers usually jump in with "if the user doesn't like it, it's just a bad ad - users will love useful ads, and targeting will make it work". I never buy this because simply there's too much contention for my wallet and the market wants to sell me things more often than I need to buy things, and ad companies like Google are so far pretty bad at refusing business.

I wouldn't be surprised if LLM search monetization is more likely to take a subscription form. If you told me that 2-3 years from now access to these systems is most commonly via the 365 subscription of your employer which it "graciously", as a standard benefit, also allows you to use at home, I would not be surprised.

Many variables here though. Cost of local inference over time being a massive one, copyright laws for training data another, etc.

[glitchc]

No, ads would just turn into advertorials and become part of the response. Those journalists writing advertorials would be out of a job.

[akimball]

Ads are redundant when the user is literally asking you what to do. You just tell them what to buy and they buy it.

[yayr]

The OpenAI business model seems to become an ecosystem play. Plugins, apis etc. They are new to it, but have a super strong partner with MicroSoft and strong startup experience for it in the leadership team. We will see if Google is able to play that well and not only release research and basic features.