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baron816 | on: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
This take only makes sense if you don’t know what people use Google search for. If you’re looking for your local Ford dealership, or to book a Carnival cruise, or need a disability lawyer, or to refinance your credit card debt, you’re searching for an ad. You’re not using Chat-GPT for that. You’re asking Chat-GPT about a research project. It’s stealing away all the hard to monetize searches and leaving the incredibly lucrative searches.

Your narrative depressed Google’s stock price for years, and bears finally gave up since they kept coming out with huge earnings beats.

darkoob12 | parent | next
I actually use Claude for finding stuff and recommendations. like "Find me a decent shoe with blah blah conditions" this query now goes to LLM Chat instead of google search. I use google search to find the url of something that i know exists like find the website of a company or finding address of a store.
bitpush | root | parent | next
The issue is Claude is losing money serving you that, and while Google makes money serving you the same result. On top of that, you are paying Claude to get that same result.

Unless Claude adds ads, it isnt going to be sustainable for both Anthropic or you - and congrats, you've invented Google Search.

ashdksnndck | root | parent
Google and ChatGPT are both running LLMs on free user queries. If Google is doing it more profitably, it’s because they have a much more mature ad business, and/or they are running a cheaper LLM. There’s no fundamental difference in the business model in that specific product line.

Regarding Claude, it’s true they must be losing money on free users since they promised they won’t put ads there.

Speculatively, I think people are overestimating the cost of inference for the consumer free tier chatbots. I suspect it’s effectively a marketing cost. The primary expenses are compute to train the next model, stock compensation, and heavy-duty enterprise inference (which pays for itself).

cute_boi | root | parent
Eventually they will show ads. Ads are like disease, we can stop for sometime, but they will find a way to infect. Eg. Netflix, chatgpt etc..
WarmWash | root | parent | next
Now get the other 99.99% of the (tech illiterate) population to do it...
thefourthchime | root | parent | next
Same I use models for nearly everything. Google only better at:

- fast, even the shitty AI results are nearly instant.

- some results like actors in a movie, or where to stream are useful

- instead of typing a url

But that’s it. I never use Google outside of that. It’s just ads, and most of the web is just ads or AI slop.

nmfisher | root | parent
> But that’s it. I never use Google outside of that. It’s just ads, and most of the web is just ads or AI slop.

Funnily enough, their core revenue driver (Google Ads) is very broken too. I'm trying to run some ads, but for a week they haven't been showing due to some invisible combination of flags when the campaign was created. There's no way of knowing they're not showing from the dashboard, it only becomes apparent when you try and preview the ads with one of your search terms.

I know everyone is long Google but that experience seriously makes me question how valuable their ad business will stay in the future.

BurningFrog | root | parent
Yeah, but are you getting the perfectly targeted ads that Google serves you?
quietbritishjim | parent | next
People 100% are asking ChatGPT for all those things.
| root | parent | next
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toomuchtodo | root | parent
Someone deleted a reply to this comment “And where does ChatGPT get the data for those answers?” they wrote and I think the question is important: LLM chatbots can crawl the web just as well as Google.
greenavocado | root | parent | next
The answer is Exa
toomuchtodo | root | parent
Nah, just another startup that’ll get acquired or a similar fate. Building the capability is a superior option imho, if you’re at Anthropic or OpenAI scale. Cut out the middleman.
greenavocado | root | parent
They can't do it, which is why they acquire.
suncemoje | root | parent
Huh? But only if you give it a tool it can use - which brings you back to Google (or Bing)
toomuchtodo | root | parent
Anyone can leverage common crawl and/or run their own crawler, to do so isn’t novel.

https://commoncrawl.org/

suncemoje | root | parent
Sure, I was just pointing at the fact that the question "And where does ChatGPT get the data for those answers?" has a two-part answer:

1) training data (common crawl as one example web data source), and

2) live data optionally retrieved at runtime.

My comment was about 2), and that part runs via a search engine (Bing?), at least if you look at how ChatGPT does it.

toomuchtodo | root | parent
Indeed, but what is the difference between crawl data and model data but decay rate? Models are trained on previous crawl data, but if an LLM provider engages a search engine to get "live data," that data isn't live but previously crawled as well (and perhaps not yet integrated into models as crawl data).

So, why would you use Google as a tool or search target when you can, in some combination, go direct to the website (or whatever the target data endpoint is) yourself as an LLM provider to retrieve the most recent data or rely on your own "hot cache" of that data that was crawled recently but said data is not stale enough warranting a live web crawl to retrieve and present to the user or AI agent? Is this capability to perform retrieval from a data source in real time not similar to an AI agent?

Broadly speaking, I'm just spitballing on the concept of "You must use a search engine for an LLM to return 'live-ish' results" as I think we're directionally headed to where that isn't the case.

jrflo | parent | next
You clearly haven't spent much time around young adults. I work with college students a fair amount and they use chatbots for 100% of their questions, including the ones you listed. And much like google got a rich data trove from user's searches, OpenAI is getting an even richer trove from chatbot chats.

I would actually recommend using a LLM over normal search for that sort of thing, because SEO has ruined those high intent phrases. The AI equivalent of SEO is also a problem there, but it's so much less prevalent.

revetkn | parent | next
Calling it "Chat-GPT" suggests that you are not familiar with the space.
claude-ai | parent | next
"google it" has a stain on it. And that's not said in jest. In my social circle, it has grown a boomer-tint. Like it or not; it's just how it is.

I personally like google over asking an AI. Esp. since something like google is a substrate without which an AI would be far more prone to hallucinations.

greenavocado | parent
> You’re not using Chat-GPT for that

And that's where you're dead wrong. Absolutely wrong.