[vctrm67]

But Google itself had and still is free. It's a service they provide to you without charge that, were it not to exist, your life would be almost immeasurably more difficult (as with any search engine). And most of the time it doesn't "take" from website owners; if anything, it generates more traffic for them.

When a model trains over Reddit, it may still provide a service that is free. But the way it's going, companies are charging money for access to those models and aren't generating traffic for the underlying training data/sites.

[pcthrowaway]

Free to search, though you are the product. Even ChatGPT hasn't productized their users yet in order to provide their service for free

But make no mistake, the secret sauce in Google Search is by no means open, and possibly not even comprehensible to a single human at this point.