[mouse_]

It's clear that LLMs are improving faster than search engines are capable of. We live in a world where ChatGPT is now able to count the number of 'r's in "Strawberry", and next year, funding permitting, it may be able to count them in "Raspberry" as well.

As search is mostly a solved problem, this sort of growth is unfeasible, so where does that leave search in a growth economy? We need to keep chasing that dragon.

REMEMBER: We're not here to produce things to be used, but rather things that increase usage!

[pianom4n]

Search is a mostly solved problem? It seems more like the opposite is true.

Search lost the battle to spam and is approaching death.

[cratermoon]

> We're not here to produce things to be used, but rather things that increase usage!

That sounds exploitative and dystopian.

[nonrandomstring]

We haven't had anything like a "classical" economy since the second world war. It's not "dystopian" it's just a tragic waste of human and natural resources.

  """ Forget the idea that "spontaneous utilitarian consumer demand"
  drives markets. That mid 20th century 'pull model' passed into the
  era of cynical manufacture where successful businesses care not
  about what people want (let alone need, or just what might sell) so
  much as about what people can be made to want. Genuinely new
  inventions able to create wild, fresh markets, like in the golden
  age of nonlinear physics between 1940 and 1980, no longer
  happen. We've been in an incremental push economy for about 50 years
  now. Western capital economies manufacture demand by influence. We
  once used market research, but surveillance data now fills that need
  to shape markets.  """ - from Chindogu [0]

[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/chindogu/

[stankondrat]

Thanks for link!

""" Indeed we know in our hearts that they appeal to the weakest parts of human psychology, selfish, voyeuristic fantasies of omnipotence and omniscience. Yet they offer virtually no societal utility. """

Looks like the new toys my children want every day, but driven by their curiosity to explore the world.

> tragic waste of human and natural resources

People have solved major problems with technology: 5% of farmers can feed the world. There are no real visible challenges now. All problems are made to keep people on their toes to keep them moving. Otherwise, the heat death of the universe will come for humanity.

[cratermoon]

Interesting. I'd read Ed Zitron's take at https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/ and he's zeroing in on the tech companies doing this: 'Every app we use is intentionally built to “growth hack” — a term that means “moving things around in such a way that a user does things that we want them to do”'

[stankondrat]

> > We're not here to produce things to be used, but rather things that increase usage! > That sounds exploitative and dystopian.

If "things" are considered as content too, TikTok users will use them, even though the videos on TikTok will be generated with AI.

[stankondrat]

Google Search seems like a finished product that has been making money for years without much investment in research. AI chat systems, however, are currently spending heavily on research and development, and it's unclear what the final product will look like or how AI will generate revenue in the end.