[riskable]

I've been saying for quite some time now that AI is going to kill the traditional (free) search engine. This is just another nail in the coffin.

When an AI searches google.com for you, the ads never get shown to the user. Search engines like kagi.com are the future. You'll give the AI your Kagi API key and that'll be it. You won't even need cloud-based AI for that kind of thing! Tiny, local models trained for performing searches on behalf of the user will do it instead.

Soon your OS will regularly pull down AI model updates just like it pulls down software updates today. Every-day users will have dozens of models that are specialized for all sorts of tasks—like searching the Internet. They won't even know what they're for or what they do. Just like your average Linux user doesn't know what the `polkit` or `avahi-daemon` services do.

My hope: This will (eventually) put pressure on hardware manufacturers to include more VRAM in regular PCs/consumer GPUs.

[purplecats]

> I've been saying for quite some time now that AI is going to kill the traditional (free) search engine

if you say it for long enough, i'm sure you will be right!

[stephantul]

I fully agree, except that I think this will still be a very “power user” thing. Perhaps this is also what you mean because you reference Linux. But traditional search will be very important for a very long while, imo

[lukaslevert]

There are very broad consequences for a world that no longer accesses the web primarily through Google Search. We're building for that too!

[gethly]

> AI is going to kill the traditional (free) search engine

Yes, this has been issue for for many content creators. I predict that because of this, a lot of internet will get behind a paywall. I run one, so I hope the future is bright, but overall this is very bad for the internet because it was never intended to be used this way. Sure, it will be great for users to save unimaginable amount of time searching manually, but if websites lose traffic, well...that is the end of the internet as we know it.

[riskable]

Inflation might help the situation; by making microtransactions a more realistic prospect. However, what would really help would be to end Visa, MasterCard, and American Express's monopoly on payments—where they extract at least $0.30 out of every transaction.

I used to work for the credit card industry like 15 years ago (damn, I feel old now). Back then, you know how much a credit card transaction actually cost (them)? $0.00001 (or something like that). That accounts for all the people they had working for them, the infrastructure, the servers, etc. It'd be even less today.

There's no reason for them to exist. The government should just setup a central bank transfer system with unlimited free transactions already. Or even better: Mandate that banks can't charge fees for transactions. Not to consumers or businesses! They already make enough money to more than make up for it (Source: I work for a bank and transaction fees are nothing but pure profit since there's basically zero cost associated with them).

[gethly]

I absolutely agree. I have designed the platform to use wallets, so I never involve a third party in my business or the business of the content creators and risk being financially deplatformed(famously often done by Stripe and Paypal). I wanted to give users a chance to use payment cards to deposit money into their wallets, as people are used to paying online with cards, but as the platform provides no service in return, this was incompatible with policies of payment processors and card providers. So users have to make a bank transfer. Thankfully European SEPA payments are nowadays wide-spread and can be instant. People have banking apps on their phones, so it is even faster than using a card. But the use of cards for online payments is seeded too deep for modern users to find this comfortable, yet. Anyhow, I think we are slowly moving away from cards and in time they will hopefully become a thing of the past as internet has been around for ages and cards fulfil absolutely no useful function that cannot be supplement by decentralised solution by modern banks.

[tyre]

I agree that they are a cartel tax on the economy, but their costs are higher than that. They are also taking on risk from credit. If your card gets stolen, the thief buys a $3k surfboard, and then you get refunded, they are out the $3k.

They are also paying for the rewards on top of the points given out.

Again, not saying they’re not making a ton of profit. It’s higher than you’ve said, though.

[gethly]

You are mixing debit and credit cards here. Debit cards have essentially no protection, only credit cards as they are literally loans and lenders invest in protection of their debtors to make them popular.

[Xss3]

Chances are it could be similarly expensive because cobol devs are more expensive now? Is very old but still scalable infrastructure really much cheaper to run now?

[paragagrawal]

I worry about this too. Some thoughts on how we plan to tackle this challenge are here: https://parallel.ai/about

[NitpickLawyer]

> that is the end of the internet as we know it.

Eh. Some of us remember an internet before the free-with-advertising became the norm. In the 90s and early 2000s people were putting stuff online for free with no desire to monetise that content. And it was way more expensive back then to do so. Today you can host a personal blog for less than a coffee. I for one wouldn't mind going back to people sharing stuff for the fun of it, isntead of the myriad of content that's only there to promote/sell/advertise for this and that.

[gethly]

I remember. But you forgot one fact - the amount of users online was miniscule compared to what we have today. That is the bane of everything - saturation. You keep diluting a good thing until only a faint memory of it remains.