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I agree this is bland corporate speak. But it reminded me of a question that's been floating around: A number of pundits, here on HN and elsewhere, keep referr

I agree this is bland corporate speak. But it reminded me of a question that's been floating around: A number of pundits, here on HN and elsewhere, keep referring to these large language models are "google killers." This just doesn't make sense to me. It feels like Google can easily pivot its ad engine to work with the AI-driven chat systems. It can augment answers with links to additional sources of information, be it organic or paid links. But I guess I'm wondering: what am I missing? Why would a chatbot like ChatGPT disrupt Google vs forcing Google to simply evolve. And perhaps make even more money?

jklinger410 4y ago
Google was already going this route. ChatGPT is simply pushing GOOG and META to go faster. Simple as.
- kccqzy 4y ago
  But without ChatGPT when would Google put a LLM into Search? 2025? 2030?
  - theptip 4y ago
    They wouldn't have been the first ones to release an AI chat bot, but that doesn't matter. What matters is, given ChatGPT is here, is Google going to lose the coming battle to monetize advertising in AI agents?
fosk 4y ago
That’s because you are trying to have a nuanced conversation about this, but “hot takes” are the most valuable currency on social media these days.
ekanes 4y ago
I think it's the first credible challenge to google's results in 2 ways. 1. People are typing questions into it and finding it hugely useful in ways that overlap with google. It just answers you, and you can ask clarifying questions, argue with it, etc. It's proving useful. 2. More subtly, the excitement around it seems to reveal that people are open to alternatives. For decades, alternative search engines haven't made inroads. If people are typing queries and questions into somewhere new, well that implies they're open to something new. So whether it's chatGPT or bing.com or ... the zeitgeist is shifting.
- xen2xen1 4y ago
  Hey Google, how big is Maine? G: It's xxx big. Person: Do I know anyone there ? G:No one is in your address book. P: What's the closest person I know to Maine? G:Bob. G: Is this about your asking about Maple Syrup last night? There are closer places to get fresh Maple Syrup, how about Michigan? Contrived, but not impossible.
  - antonvs 4y ago
    I think anyone who's used ChatGPT seriously could tell you that this isn't the same thing, at all. You're giving "assistant"-like questions, but the problem with those assistants has always been how shallow their responses have been, which significantly limits their usefulness. GPT's responses are still shallow in an absolute sense, but relatively speaking they're the Mariana Trench compared to Google's little creek.
    - notahacker 4y ago
      Depends what the objective is. If I want to be amused by a Hacker News comment in the style of the Bible, draft a conclusion for my essay or a engage in a long and superficially appealing conversation about philosophy, I'm not using Google's publicly-viewable AI products Then again, Google - with and without a conversational interface - will do just fine with what the capital of Maine is, much better with what the weather is like in Maine tomorrow, and there's a lot more usefulness and revenue in associating it with stuff in my address book and selling me flight tickets to Maine which is... some way outside ChatGPT's wheelhouse.
      - ekanes 4y ago
        I think that's fair. But one is a mature product, and the other was just born/launched and will improve massively over the next decades. That this new tech is competing already bodes badly for google (yes they will incorporate their own AI, but the cat is out of the bag...)
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
killjoywashere 4y ago
I don't think most people realize how much infrastructure separates something like ChatGPT from Google-scale deployment. OpenAI isn't suddenly building transoceanic fiber and datacenters near most major population centers. They aren't signing production-ready contract vehicles with most major OEMs and governments. And in the gap it would take a new entrant to acquire 10% of those assets, Google has 100,000 engineers who would iterate on this and 1000 other technologies 1000 times.
- kanwisher 4y ago
  OpenAI already has the infrastructure Azure and Bing. Microsoft has a bigger public cloud then google
  - kennethh 4y ago
    The public cloud is probably a small part of the Google Infrastructure.
- dougmwne 4y ago
  You are missing the Microsoft partnership. MS has a 48% stake in OpenAI and provides all the infrastructure through Azure, including purpose built machines for model training. Microsoft has also launched GitHub Copilot, summarization features in Teams, and is widely reported to be adding GPT features to Bing.
  - scarmig 4y ago
    Google has far more resources for training models and inference. Likely more than all their nearest competitors combined.
    - redox99 4y ago
      Source?
      - 4y ago
ZiiS 4y ago
The question becomes dose the best model win; or dose Google's existing processes, infrastructure, and advertising relationships allow it to purchase or reimplement the best model? Probably still an open question but a better chance then anyone has had to disrupt them for two decades.
badestrand 4y ago
> what am I missing? Why would a chatbot like ChatGPT disrupt Google vs forcing Google to simply evolve. Because it's not clear yet whether anyone else can currently develop a chatbot interface as capable as ChatGPT. For many ChatGPT is already replacing a lot of Google searches so G needs to hurry.
- eclipxe 4y ago
  For many? Citation needed. Yes there is a lot of hype, but is it really replacing a lot of Google searches, if so is that your anecdote or is there data here?
  - badestrand 4y ago
    Yes, sorry that's an anecdote of me and everyone I know that has tried ChatgGPT. Obviously in the grand scheme of things this is nothing, but if other early adopters behave similarly it is a great threat to Google because if it catches early adopters then everyone else will follow after a while.
HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
I guess a couple of reasons: 1) Because it is disruptive. Things may get shook up, and Google may not end up in as exclusive position as they are currently in. There's risk. 2) Because it's not obvious how advertising would fit in with a conversational interface. Google may stay as #1 search/answer engine, but would revenue be adversely affected?
- sharkbot 4y ago
  I think it could fit in with a conversational chat bot the same way that ads are part of podcasts and YouTube channels: a conversational and explicit ad that helps pay for the otherwise freely available content. Full disclosure: I work at Google, but nowhere near the chatbot stuff. This is my humble opinion and nothing more.
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    The problem with this is that it pretty explicitly makes the chatbot a worse product. The beauty of google ads is that they don't degrade the service. If they're not interesting just scroll right past. I don't think people would use the adbot service if Bing is providing a competitor that only has banner ads or maybe a clearly marked ad link. Bing wins because they go from making no money on search to some, but if google copies the strategy their market size is destroyed.
- relaxing 4y ago
  Banner, sidebar, in-line, interstitial, modal… what advertising modes wouldn’t work on conversational interface?
  - criddell 4y ago
    Conversational interfaces seem ideally suited to voice assistants. When you ask "hey google, what's the default password for my router?" does it make you sit through a 30 second ad before saying "the default password is password".
    - 4y ago
lemursage 4y ago
As an engineer my concern about "google killers" is that I can't see an easy way to scale and control/optimize them in business settings. Apart from factual misstatements happening in the ChatGPT, what about source attribution? How is the relevance of a source determined? How is the flow of information through the network preserved (sourceA => sourceB => sourceC)? With Google we also don't know exactly but I can image some version of PageRank as tuneable. Finally, how to add new pages to index and measure potential "forgetting" that could happen? Unless somebody could clarify those for me, this is what currently petrifies me -- some uncontrolled black box presenting its clandestine view of the web with no way to follow the breadcrumbs.
BurningFrog 4y ago
Maybe what they mean is Google Search killers?
xen2xen1 4y ago
Because sitting at a computer or a phone is, in fact, unnatural. We are trained to do that. Asking a question of another person is natural. If you can get Alexa or Google assistant to reliably, without lying, answer questions, that could be huge. Caveats, but so much $ is put into those things and they suck. Also, if you could get a Google AI to be like a real assistant, context and understanding of what you're doing, that could also be huge. Just getting the assitants of the world to really intract would slice a large piece off the Google search pie, and potentially set up whoever does that well to be the next major interface to tech.
- leobg 4y ago
  Not sure if this is accurate. Voice interaction is very slow, and low bandwidth. Visual interaction is much faster. Hence people love their spreadsheets. Even if a voice assistant allowed you to interrupt it, to make fast course corrections, it would still be much slower than, say, interacting with the filters on Google Flights. And I am saying this after having built for myself a bi directional voice interface to ChatGPT. There are certainly situations where it is great to use it, such as while driving, or perhaps in the kitchen while having your hands full. And probably on mobile, where screen real estate is scarce. But those doing information, work, or even just online shopping, probably won’t be giving up their screens anytime soon.
richardw 4y ago
OpenAI has had huge mindshare with students recently. Every (ish) kid who writes an essay or needs information summarised is hitting ChatGPT. Kids are where change happens, ask Facebook. They get on new things instantly - within days we were reading reports of kids writing essays with the latest tool. Young people are also naturally viral, sharing the cool new tool with entire classes. This is a marketer’s dream. You don’t need to change how sluggish corporates work, just focus on kids and watch them work. Google has to fight to get that mindshare back. Not sure I’d be building my company on the ADHD-fueled Google roundabout that generates and destroys systems monthly. You just know whatever they release is someone’s promotion project, until it’s in GA.
- sangnoir 4y ago
  > OpenAI has had huge mindshare with students recently. Clubhouse was once the new hotness - until it wasn't.
  - rogerclark 4y ago
    Clubhouse wasn't popular with kids. It was popular, and only briefly, with adult tech people.
    - sangnoir 4y ago
      True. I was only highlighting that popularity can be fleeting - and was for Clubhouse. ChatGPT's popularity may equally be a flash in the pan.
  - richardw 4y ago
    There's no comparison. Microsoft didn't consider integrating Clubhouse into one of their primary consumer platforms. One of the biggest software companies in the world has looked at the state of play and decided that this was important enough to shift their search strategy as quickly as they can. I didn't say it's a guarantee of success, it's a possibility. There is a non-zero chance that ChatGPT takes market share away from Google unless it moves very quickly. Having said that, the status-quo play is obviously the easiest bet. It's far easier to be Google than OpenAI or Microsoft at this point. https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-adds-chatgpt-ai-technology-to-bing-search-engine-11675793525 https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-adds-chatgpt-ai-techn...
arnvald 4y ago
I think Google is in a tough position, because for them ads (both in search and other websites) are a huge portion of their business, and they need to find a way to monetize LLMs without killing its own cash cow. Microsoft has a lot of advantages here - they can introduce LLM to search at a much smaller scale (order of magnitude), which means its cheaper, and they have plenty of other products making tons of money, so they can take their time to figure it out (also they're already adding ChatGPT to tolls like Teams and possibly Office, so they'll be able to increase revenue from these products). Google is also seen as a bit of a dinosaur - they struggle to introduce new products, and recently we've been hearing more about products they kill rather than huge successes. It seems that as a company they lost their innovative spirit, and that's why people don't believe they'll evolve quickly enough.
alain94040 4y ago
Those new language models are "Google killers" because they reset all the assumptions that people have made about search for several decades. Imagine that people start using those chat bots massively as a replacement for Google search. Then the notion of keyword disappears. Google AdSense becomes mostly irrelevant. Of course, Google is a giant today with a history of machine learning innovation. So they have a good chance of being successful in that new world. But the point is that many other companies get a chance again, which hadn't happened in 20 years. You couldn't displace Google in the old search/keyword/click business model. Now everyone gets a fresh start. Who knows what the economics will be. Just like page rank early on, it was expensive to compute. But the money in advertising made it worth it, and Google scaled rapidly. Which language model do you run? The expensive one, or the light one (notice how Google in this announcement mentions they will only offer the significantly smaller model to the public). Can you make this profitable? Other fun questions to answer if the industry moves to chat vs. search, in a 5-10 year horizon. What is the motivation to write a blog post by then? Imagine no one actually reads web sites. Instead a blog post to share an opinion, I'll probably want to make sure my opinion gets picked up by the language model. How do I do that? Computed knowledge may render many websites and blogs obsolete.
- s3p 4y ago
  I think this is the same type of thinking that people had when they think technology will "steal" jobs, when in reality we have lower and lower unemployment as time goes on. Most likely this will not actually happen, and even if it did your content would still be valuable as an AI is analyzing it in a more nuanced way than just looking for keywords. Which, by the way, is exactly what search engines do.
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    > I think this is the same type of thinking that people had when they think technology will "steal" jobs, when in reality we have lower and lower unemployment as time goes on. Technical changes do kill jobs. We always find a way to invent jobs, of course, but that doesn't mean old jobs aren't viable. Movie theaters once employed professional musicians, not they don't, because movies have audio built in. Obviously a net-loss since musicians are jobs people like. Less coal miners or farmers is probably a good thing though. It all depends on the type of job you replace. If you replace hard manual labor jobs, you're a net-good. Replacing a job people like... and you'll get a negative label. Doesn't change the fact that progress marches on, but jobs are killed by tech changes.
coliveira 4y ago
The reason is that high amount of usage is itself disruptive. The same way Google has an advantage of receiving 90%+ of search requests, ChatGPT has the advantage of being tested with millions of requests per day. If Google cannot test a similar AI technology with the public, it will hardly get results that are comparable with ChatGPT.
mrtksn 4y ago
It still can be a Google killer even if Google comes up with something better because Google makes its money from sending people to the highest bidder. So far there's no clear path to make money from ChatGPT, let alone match the sum Google is making from Search. If this new paradigm dominates the way people use computers and it's not as profitable as Search, Google might indeed have to scale back.
- greyman 4y ago
  ChatGPT can make money by subscriptions, or they can also put ads next to the chat?
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    Can they make $100 billion a year profit?
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    Can they? Google made $162B from search ads last year, to match that with the leaked $40/month subscription you will need 340 million subscribers. Can they really get 340 million subscribers at $40, which is %50 more than Netflix subscribers at double the price?
im3w1l 4y ago
If anyone with a couple million dollars can create a great LLM-powered search engine then maybe Google's search engine division should be valued a couple million dollars.
generalizations 4y ago
Anyone else remember the beginnings of youtube? Google tried to compete with them, with their own Google Videos. It sucked - and I remember reading how the engineers running it couldn't even figure out why they lost. In the end, Google just had to buy their competition, because they couldn't figure out any other way to win. They've tried to compete elsewhere, too, and I don't think they've ever been able to make a go of it outside their cash cow. The only thing they've really been able to do is 'search results + ads'. I don't think they'll be able to modify that winning combo even in the slightest and still be successful. And in this case, they can't buy the competition. Micro$oft already did.
- gretch 4y ago
  Disclosure: work at google YouTube was founded in ~2005. Google bought it in 2006. It is now 2023. YouTube has spent 2 years as its own company and 17 as part of Google. Try to remember what YouTube functionality was in 2006. It was very different and has grown a lot. The narrative that Google doesn’t know how to innovate YouTube doesn’t add up.
  - saberience 4y ago
    Youtube now is 90% of what it was 10 years ago and what might it good in 2006 is the same reason it's good now, the UI is clean and it's easy to use. That's it. Also, following the acquisition, for many years most of the people working on it were the original Youtube folk, not the "Google people." Google hasn't shown they can do new product in a very long time... see the GCP mess, Stadia, and the hundreds of other total failures (Plus, Wave, and many I've forgotten).
    - Itsdijital 4y ago
      Google has to dump Sundar and bring in a more old school leader. Google is a massive company and has to stop doing it's "everything is beta all the time, with teams internally competing for the same territory" I'm so put off by it, and been made a fool by it so many times, I'm phasing out Google in my life and long ago stopped recommending Google products to people in my life.
kerpotgh 4y ago
I use google in confluence with chatGPT. When I’m researching something, chatGPT gets me started and points me in the right direction but then I use google to find first hand sources/more detail/images/videos etc.
wejick 4y ago
rather than google killers, I would say it is SEO or publishers killers. There will be less traffic to websites or blogs, certain type of websites will be impacted most than the other. in fact google will have more way to recommend and curate content in their way.
ericmcer 4y ago
ChatGPT will have a very hard time. If I want to get on ChatGPT I usually google ChatGPT and click the first link. It is a crazy competitive advantage.
pleadthefifth 4y ago
Branding is one thing. "Google" has been a commonplace verb for a long time, which alone is worth billions to them. ChatGPT is the first time something has come close to stealing that spotlight, since for the time being, it's answer a lot of queries far better than Google would. So even if Google makes something technically better later, it might be too late to replace ChatGPT as the AI king.
tiborsaas 4y ago
If I'm looking for a specific answer, then with my googling skills, I can easily find an article or tutorial written for a target audience in mind. If I on the other hand use generative AI, then the answer (and hopefully correct one) would be generated only for me. This is the personal touch Google currently misses and I guess it's appealing for many people. Currently LLM-s are not Google killers, they can't find me a restaurant, a nice watch or other stuff I'd pay money for. Yet.
Mystery-Machine 4y ago
And that's exactly why the CEO of Google published the blog post about Google + AI, because they don't think AI is a potential Google killer. /sarcasm Yes, they took the risk seriously and that's great. However, Google's lack of good UX will probably produce a monstrosity of a tool that no one will use. The only usable parts will be what's embedded in the Google Search engine.
cutenewt 4y ago
Unfortunately I don't think it's that easy. That is, the cat is out of the bag: ChatGPT not only showed us the power of AI, but it showed us a bunch of non-AI things like: - Ad-free results - Clutter-free results - The elegance of not having to click on links A competitor could capitalize on this, putting Google's ad-driven, click-driven, clutter-driven model at serious risk.
- deleted 4y ago
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metta2uall 4y ago
"Google killer" is hyperbole, but I think Google does have a challenge since chat-based search may be much harder to monetise & thus less profitable. One reason is because people are used to having ads on the search results page, but ChatGPT presents itself as a human advisor, and in this context I suppose people would be quite unhappy to have ads injected into their conversation.
theptip 4y ago
I agree, I think it's a fairly unimaginative take (a common one though) that ChatGPT is likely to lead to the usurping of Google. It's a two-part claim; a) yes, conversational AI agents will replace typing searches into a text box, but b) I see no reason to think that Google can't easily monetize that format. Regarding the first point, I think Google appears to have been caught a little bit off guard as to how soon this transition would happen. People seem to be over-indexing on the "code red". I do think it's a strategic mis-step by Google to not have a product ready to go here. (Their broader strategy was quite risk-averse and that was probably sensible, given the shit-storms that previous systems like Galactica and Tay generated; Google couldn't be the first ones to publish a prototype/demo system like ChatGPT, or the NYT would have jumped all over them for the inevitable questionable utterances.) But the second part; given AI agents are here, who's going to win the competition to monetize them? It seems clear to me that Google is in a great place to monetize and capitalize on this technology, and I think they will win if their language models are better. (So far, they seem to be way ahead; LaMDA was early 2022, and it's clearly better than ChatGPT.) If Google's version of this service is substantially better, but intersperses ads based on what you're talking about (the Gmail model for ads), would people use this? I think it's clear that consumers would take the better free service that comes with ads, vs. paying ChatGPT or accepting inferior quality. Let alone the fact that Google can put the assistant onto billions of Android phones, fine-tune a model per user, offload compute power with device-based inference to save OpEx, and so on; all of these will give whoever is running the AI agent a lot more ad targeting power.
- gremlinsinc 4y ago
  > yes, conversational AI agents will replace typing searches into a text box, but b) I see no reason to think that Google can't easily monetize that format. Current user workflow: - ask question in google. - get shitty results - checkout 5 pages worth of results are try a few more searches. In the process you've seen 5x the ads you would've maybe 10 years ago when the results were better. - In the middle of this you maybe clicked on 3 or 4 sites that were spam sites which themselves had on adsense ads. New workflow: - Ask google a question. - Immediately get a detailed thought out prospectus, or presentation, or whatever with a top-down overview of what you wanted, maybe you're still curious so you ask a couple follow up questions. Unless they put an ad between every sentence, you'd only have seen 1/10th the ads in the 3 replies it took to come close to google search.
yyyk 4y ago
>what am I missing? Google currently controls ~90% of the search market. AI-driven chat/search is a serious threat to this dominance. It's likely that after the market settles it won't have the same marketshare. Given how much Google has been dependent on Search/Ads and its other failures to execute, this is a serious revenue threat. This industry (and site) does have a tendency to exaggerate and take a current trend too far. Google is far too massive to 'die'. I believe even keyword-based search will survive. But going from 90% to 50% will be bad for Google. IMHO, the worst case realistic scenario is this: Google loses a lot of funds, is forced to close more unprofitable projects. This causes more lack of trust, and more projects are closed. Eventually Google is kicked down to a tier below Apple & Microsoft.
- acdha 4y ago
  I’d like to think this could be good for the rest of the company if every PM was told that ad sales weren’t going to make their stock options skyrocket, so they need to build a profitable product of their own. Unfortunately, I suspect that’d mean cramming ads everywhere.
kromem 4y ago
Way too many responses to your question are trying to engage with debate over products rather than focusing on the topic of monetization. Google makes money through ads, and especially ads that get you to click through to somewhere else. They do this through SEM ads that appear on your search query to direct you to a paid destination. And they do it through a display network on 3rd party websites that Google search inevitably ends up funneling you to. If you are simply engaging with an AI that's synthesizing those results so you don't have to, that's less time you spend on those sites seeing Google's ads, and less incentive to click through to paid results. Their entire business model basically goes up in smoke if AI successfully intermediates the Internet. This doesn't preclude them from competing, as you point out, but you generally don't want to see your cash cow get slaughtered and then suddenly be in a highly competitive market for what will replace it. Having a 90% market share in the Titanic isn't an enviable position.
- alfalfasprout 4y ago
  Agreed that what the product is exactly doesn't matter too much. It's kind of inevitable at this point that search is going to go in the direction of a chatbot. Ask jeeves back in the day already knew that what people really want is a question answered. Google search and its competitors were a well-lived offramp on that road. Ultimately free-form interaction is just more intuitive. But with that said, I also am not so quick to call the death of SEM ads. Just because chatbots exist doesn't mean people don't want to visit other websites. Display ads will continue to be a thing. Similarly, there's no reason chatbots can't now direct you to sites or advertise products as part of their responses. Heck, this is a much more sinister form of marketing with astronomically higher click rate since a chatbot is responding authoritatively with a recommendation. Yes, google is going to have to pivot... but this is a problem they're very well suited to solving and they have a very strong incumbent advantage in the meantime.
gibsonf1 4y ago
Ironically, using ml/dl language models, which have only statistics and no intelligence, is a Google killer to the extent that Google uses AI and destroys their real useful search. The declining quality of Googel search seems to only be accelerating.
xs83 4y ago
I think simply there are 2 killer features in LLM's vs Google search for me: 1 - Natural Language with prepositions and easy ways to include, exclude and filter 2 - Refinement - "No that wasn't quite right because X - please factor this in and try again" is a lot more intuitive than multiple rounds of operator uses and "memory exclusion" of pages you have already seen. I find that chatGPT will give me what I need within a few iterations, Google search sometimes takes a lot of searching and reading to get an idea of what I need. I feel like ChatGPT + Github Code search could be a killer combination for programmers
worldsavior 4y ago
> But I guess I'm wondering: what am I missing? Why would a chatbot like ChatGPT disrupt Google vs forcing Google to simply evolve. And perhaps make even more money? People thought google has no time to develop something like ChatGPT when they were totally wrong.
stephc_int13 4y ago
This is not that easy. Kodak and Nokia could have pivoted as well (and boy they tried). And this is not even a problem of scale, it is obviously difficult to change course for a giant supertanker, but the most insidious problem is the money makers inside the company, they usually have a lot of power and they won't allow anyone to butcher their margins. Killing the cash cow is difficult. I don't see Google taking the risk.
jhoelzel 4y ago
i have come to realize that most of the "google killer" chanters, have in fact not used ChatGPT for in-detail work. It absolutely has the same problem as Self-driving and only after 10 years we have accepted that it still is off for a very long time. Mercedes is doing Marketing by calling it self driving, but limiting it to areas the car seems to have a 99% understanding off. They are betting on the fact that they will make more money on the 99% buying these cars, then the few cars that inevitably will crash. Essentially how insurance has worked for ever.
boppo1 4y ago
Blockbuster should have been able to easily pivot too.
otabdeveloper4 4y ago
> This just doesn't make sense to me. It does if you remember that Google is in the search ads business, not in the search business. I guess you could find a way to weasel in ad copy into ChatGPT's answers, but that will kinda massively kill the vibe.

jklinger410 4y ago

Google was already going this route. ChatGPT is simply pushing GOOG and META to go faster. Simple as.

kccqzy 4y ago
But without ChatGPT when would Google put a LLM into Search? 2025? 2030?
- theptip 4y ago
  They wouldn't have been the first ones to release an AI chat bot, but that doesn't matter. What matters is, given ChatGPT is here, is Google going to lose the coming battle to monetize advertising in AI agents?

fosk 4y ago

That’s because you are trying to have a nuanced conversation about this, but “hot takes” are the most valuable currency on social media these days.

ekanes 4y ago

I think it's the first credible challenge to google's results in 2 ways. 1. People are typing questions into it and finding it hugely useful in ways that overlap with google. It just answers you, and you can ask clarifying questions, argue with it, etc. It's proving useful. 2. More subtly, the excitement around it seems to reveal that people are open to alternatives. For decades, alternative search engines haven't made inroads. If people are typing queries and questions into somewhere new, well that implies they're open to something new. So whether it's chatGPT or bing.com or ... the zeitgeist is shifting.

xen2xen1 4y ago
Hey Google, how big is Maine? G: It's xxx big. Person: Do I know anyone there ? G:No one is in your address book. P: What's the closest person I know to Maine? G:Bob. G: Is this about your asking about Maple Syrup last night? There are closer places to get fresh Maple Syrup, how about Michigan? Contrived, but not impossible.
- antonvs 4y ago
  I think anyone who's used ChatGPT seriously could tell you that this isn't the same thing, at all. You're giving "assistant"-like questions, but the problem with those assistants has always been how shallow their responses have been, which significantly limits their usefulness. GPT's responses are still shallow in an absolute sense, but relatively speaking they're the Mariana Trench compared to Google's little creek.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    Depends what the objective is. If I want to be amused by a Hacker News comment in the style of the Bible, draft a conclusion for my essay or a engage in a long and superficially appealing conversation about philosophy, I'm not using Google's publicly-viewable AI products Then again, Google - with and without a conversational interface - will do just fine with what the capital of Maine is, much better with what the weather is like in Maine tomorrow, and there's a lot more usefulness and revenue in associating it with stuff in my address book and selling me flight tickets to Maine which is... some way outside ChatGPT's wheelhouse.
    - ekanes 4y ago
      I think that's fair. But one is a mature product, and the other was just born/launched and will improve massively over the next decades. That this new tech is competing already bodes badly for google (yes they will incorporate their own AI, but the cat is out of the bag...)
kitsunesoba 4y ago

killjoywashere 4y ago

I don't think most people realize how much infrastructure separates something like ChatGPT from Google-scale deployment. OpenAI isn't suddenly building transoceanic fiber and datacenters near most major population centers. They aren't signing production-ready contract vehicles with most major OEMs and governments. And in the gap it would take a new entrant to acquire 10% of those assets, Google has 100,000 engineers who would iterate on this and 1000 other technologies 1000 times.

kanwisher 4y ago
OpenAI already has the infrastructure Azure and Bing. Microsoft has a bigger public cloud then google
- kennethh 4y ago
  The public cloud is probably a small part of the Google Infrastructure.
dougmwne 4y ago
You are missing the Microsoft partnership. MS has a 48% stake in OpenAI and provides all the infrastructure through Azure, including purpose built machines for model training. Microsoft has also launched GitHub Copilot, summarization features in Teams, and is widely reported to be adding GPT features to Bing.
- scarmig 4y ago
  Google has far more resources for training models and inference. Likely more than all their nearest competitors combined.
  - redox99 4y ago
    Source?
    - 4y ago

ZiiS 4y ago

The question becomes dose the best model win; or dose Google's existing processes, infrastructure, and advertising relationships allow it to purchase or reimplement the best model? Probably still an open question but a better chance then anyone has had to disrupt them for two decades.

badestrand 4y ago

> what am I missing? Why would a chatbot like ChatGPT disrupt Google vs forcing Google to simply evolve. Because it's not clear yet whether anyone else can currently develop a chatbot interface as capable as ChatGPT. For many ChatGPT is already replacing a lot of Google searches so G needs to hurry.

eclipxe 4y ago
For many? Citation needed. Yes there is a lot of hype, but is it really replacing a lot of Google searches, if so is that your anecdote or is there data here?
- badestrand 4y ago
  Yes, sorry that's an anecdote of me and everyone I know that has tried ChatgGPT. Obviously in the grand scheme of things this is nothing, but if other early adopters behave similarly it is a great threat to Google because if it catches early adopters then everyone else will follow after a while.

HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago

I guess a couple of reasons: 1) Because it is disruptive. Things may get shook up, and Google may not end up in as exclusive position as they are currently in. There's risk. 2) Because it's not obvious how advertising would fit in with a conversational interface. Google may stay as #1 search/answer engine, but would revenue be adversely affected?

sharkbot 4y ago
I think it could fit in with a conversational chat bot the same way that ads are part of podcasts and YouTube channels: a conversational and explicit ad that helps pay for the otherwise freely available content. Full disclosure: I work at Google, but nowhere near the chatbot stuff. This is my humble opinion and nothing more.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  The problem with this is that it pretty explicitly makes the chatbot a worse product. The beauty of google ads is that they don't degrade the service. If they're not interesting just scroll right past. I don't think people would use the adbot service if Bing is providing a competitor that only has banner ads or maybe a clearly marked ad link. Bing wins because they go from making no money on search to some, but if google copies the strategy their market size is destroyed.
relaxing 4y ago
Banner, sidebar, in-line, interstitial, modal… what advertising modes wouldn’t work on conversational interface?
- criddell 4y ago
  Conversational interfaces seem ideally suited to voice assistants. When you ask "hey google, what's the default password for my router?" does it make you sit through a 30 second ad before saying "the default password is password".
  - 4y ago

lemursage 4y ago

As an engineer my concern about "google killers" is that I can't see an easy way to scale and control/optimize them in business settings. Apart from factual misstatements happening in the ChatGPT, what about source attribution? How is the relevance of a source determined? How is the flow of information through the network preserved (sourceA => sourceB => sourceC)? With Google we also don't know exactly but I can image some version of PageRank as tuneable. Finally, how to add new pages to index and measure potential "forgetting" that could happen? Unless somebody could clarify those for me, this is what currently petrifies me -- some uncontrolled black box presenting its clandestine view of the web with no way to follow the breadcrumbs.

BurningFrog 4y ago

Maybe what they mean is Google Search killers?

xen2xen1 4y ago

Because sitting at a computer or a phone is, in fact, unnatural. We are trained to do that. Asking a question of another person is natural. If you can get Alexa or Google assistant to reliably, without lying, answer questions, that could be huge. Caveats, but so much $ is put into those things and they suck. Also, if you could get a Google AI to be like a real assistant, context and understanding of what you're doing, that could also be huge. Just getting the assitants of the world to really intract would slice a large piece off the Google search pie, and potentially set up whoever does that well to be the next major interface to tech.

leobg 4y ago
Not sure if this is accurate. Voice interaction is very slow, and low bandwidth. Visual interaction is much faster. Hence people love their spreadsheets. Even if a voice assistant allowed you to interrupt it, to make fast course corrections, it would still be much slower than, say, interacting with the filters on Google Flights. And I am saying this after having built for myself a bi directional voice interface to ChatGPT. There are certainly situations where it is great to use it, such as while driving, or perhaps in the kitchen while having your hands full. And probably on mobile, where screen real estate is scarce. But those doing information, work, or even just online shopping, probably won’t be giving up their screens anytime soon.

richardw 4y ago

OpenAI has had huge mindshare with students recently. Every (ish) kid who writes an essay or needs information summarised is hitting ChatGPT. Kids are where change happens, ask Facebook. They get on new things instantly - within days we were reading reports of kids writing essays with the latest tool. Young people are also naturally viral, sharing the cool new tool with entire classes. This is a marketer’s dream. You don’t need to change how sluggish corporates work, just focus on kids and watch them work. Google has to fight to get that mindshare back. Not sure I’d be building my company on the ADHD-fueled Google roundabout that generates and destroys systems monthly. You just know whatever they release is someone’s promotion project, until it’s in GA.

sangnoir 4y ago
> OpenAI has had huge mindshare with students recently. Clubhouse was once the new hotness - until it wasn't.
- rogerclark 4y ago
  Clubhouse wasn't popular with kids. It was popular, and only briefly, with adult tech people.
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    True. I was only highlighting that popularity can be fleeting - and was for Clubhouse. ChatGPT's popularity may equally be a flash in the pan.
- richardw 4y ago
  There's no comparison. Microsoft didn't consider integrating Clubhouse into one of their primary consumer platforms. One of the biggest software companies in the world has looked at the state of play and decided that this was important enough to shift their search strategy as quickly as they can. I didn't say it's a guarantee of success, it's a possibility. There is a non-zero chance that ChatGPT takes market share away from Google unless it moves very quickly. Having said that, the status-quo play is obviously the easiest bet. It's far easier to be Google than OpenAI or Microsoft at this point. https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-adds-chatgpt-ai-technology-to-bing-search-engine-11675793525 https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-adds-chatgpt-ai-techn...

arnvald 4y ago

I think Google is in a tough position, because for them ads (both in search and other websites) are a huge portion of their business, and they need to find a way to monetize LLMs without killing its own cash cow. Microsoft has a lot of advantages here - they can introduce LLM to search at a much smaller scale (order of magnitude), which means its cheaper, and they have plenty of other products making tons of money, so they can take their time to figure it out (also they're already adding ChatGPT to tolls like Teams and possibly Office, so they'll be able to increase revenue from these products). Google is also seen as a bit of a dinosaur - they struggle to introduce new products, and recently we've been hearing more about products they kill rather than huge successes. It seems that as a company they lost their innovative spirit, and that's why people don't believe they'll evolve quickly enough.

alain94040 4y ago

Those new language models are "Google killers" because they reset all the assumptions that people have made about search for several decades. Imagine that people start using those chat bots massively as a replacement for Google search. Then the notion of keyword disappears. Google AdSense becomes mostly irrelevant. Of course, Google is a giant today with a history of machine learning innovation. So they have a good chance of being successful in that new world. But the point is that many other companies get a chance again, which hadn't happened in 20 years. You couldn't displace Google in the old search/keyword/click business model. Now everyone gets a fresh start. Who knows what the economics will be. Just like page rank early on, it was expensive to compute. But the money in advertising made it worth it, and Google scaled rapidly. Which language model do you run? The expensive one, or the light one (notice how Google in this announcement mentions they will only offer the significantly smaller model to the public). Can you make this profitable? Other fun questions to answer if the industry moves to chat vs. search, in a 5-10 year horizon. What is the motivation to write a blog post by then? Imagine no one actually reads web sites. Instead a blog post to share an opinion, I'll probably want to make sure my opinion gets picked up by the language model. How do I do that? Computed knowledge may render many websites and blogs obsolete.

s3p 4y ago
I think this is the same type of thinking that people had when they think technology will "steal" jobs, when in reality we have lower and lower unemployment as time goes on. Most likely this will not actually happen, and even if it did your content would still be valuable as an AI is analyzing it in a more nuanced way than just looking for keywords. Which, by the way, is exactly what search engines do.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  > I think this is the same type of thinking that people had when they think technology will "steal" jobs, when in reality we have lower and lower unemployment as time goes on. Technical changes do kill jobs. We always find a way to invent jobs, of course, but that doesn't mean old jobs aren't viable. Movie theaters once employed professional musicians, not they don't, because movies have audio built in. Obviously a net-loss since musicians are jobs people like. Less coal miners or farmers is probably a good thing though. It all depends on the type of job you replace. If you replace hard manual labor jobs, you're a net-good. Replacing a job people like... and you'll get a negative label. Doesn't change the fact that progress marches on, but jobs are killed by tech changes.

coliveira 4y ago

The reason is that high amount of usage is itself disruptive. The same way Google has an advantage of receiving 90%+ of search requests, ChatGPT has the advantage of being tested with millions of requests per day. If Google cannot test a similar AI technology with the public, it will hardly get results that are comparable with ChatGPT.

mrtksn 4y ago

It still can be a Google killer even if Google comes up with something better because Google makes its money from sending people to the highest bidder. So far there's no clear path to make money from ChatGPT, let alone match the sum Google is making from Search. If this new paradigm dominates the way people use computers and it's not as profitable as Search, Google might indeed have to scale back.

greyman 4y ago
ChatGPT can make money by subscriptions, or they can also put ads next to the chat?
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  Can they make $100 billion a year profit?
- mrtksn 4y ago
  Can they? Google made $162B from search ads last year, to match that with the leaked $40/month subscription you will need 340 million subscribers. Can they really get 340 million subscribers at $40, which is %50 more than Netflix subscribers at double the price?

im3w1l 4y ago

If anyone with a couple million dollars can create a great LLM-powered search engine then maybe Google's search engine division should be valued a couple million dollars.

generalizations 4y ago

Anyone else remember the beginnings of youtube? Google tried to compete with them, with their own Google Videos. It sucked - and I remember reading how the engineers running it couldn't even figure out why they lost. In the end, Google just had to buy their competition, because they couldn't figure out any other way to win. They've tried to compete elsewhere, too, and I don't think they've ever been able to make a go of it outside their cash cow. The only thing they've really been able to do is 'search results + ads'. I don't think they'll be able to modify that winning combo even in the slightest and still be successful. And in this case, they can't buy the competition. Micro$oft already did.

gretch 4y ago
Disclosure: work at google YouTube was founded in ~2005. Google bought it in 2006. It is now 2023. YouTube has spent 2 years as its own company and 17 as part of Google. Try to remember what YouTube functionality was in 2006. It was very different and has grown a lot. The narrative that Google doesn’t know how to innovate YouTube doesn’t add up.
- saberience 4y ago
  Youtube now is 90% of what it was 10 years ago and what might it good in 2006 is the same reason it's good now, the UI is clean and it's easy to use. That's it. Also, following the acquisition, for many years most of the people working on it were the original Youtube folk, not the "Google people." Google hasn't shown they can do new product in a very long time... see the GCP mess, Stadia, and the hundreds of other total failures (Plus, Wave, and many I've forgotten).
  - Itsdijital 4y ago
    Google has to dump Sundar and bring in a more old school leader. Google is a massive company and has to stop doing it's "everything is beta all the time, with teams internally competing for the same territory" I'm so put off by it, and been made a fool by it so many times, I'm phasing out Google in my life and long ago stopped recommending Google products to people in my life.

kerpotgh 4y ago

I use google in confluence with chatGPT. When I’m researching something, chatGPT gets me started and points me in the right direction but then I use google to find first hand sources/more detail/images/videos etc.

wejick 4y ago

rather than google killers, I would say it is SEO or publishers killers. There will be less traffic to websites or blogs, certain type of websites will be impacted most than the other. in fact google will have more way to recommend and curate content in their way.

ericmcer 4y ago

ChatGPT will have a very hard time. If I want to get on ChatGPT I usually google ChatGPT and click the first link. It is a crazy competitive advantage.

pleadthefifth 4y ago

Branding is one thing. "Google" has been a commonplace verb for a long time, which alone is worth billions to them. ChatGPT is the first time something has come close to stealing that spotlight, since for the time being, it's answer a lot of queries far better than Google would. So even if Google makes something technically better later, it might be too late to replace ChatGPT as the AI king.

tiborsaas 4y ago

If I'm looking for a specific answer, then with my googling skills, I can easily find an article or tutorial written for a target audience in mind. If I on the other hand use generative AI, then the answer (and hopefully correct one) would be generated only for me. This is the personal touch Google currently misses and I guess it's appealing for many people. Currently LLM-s are not Google killers, they can't find me a restaurant, a nice watch or other stuff I'd pay money for. Yet.

Mystery-Machine 4y ago

And that's exactly why the CEO of Google published the blog post about Google + AI, because they don't think AI is a potential Google killer. /sarcasm Yes, they took the risk seriously and that's great. However, Google's lack of good UX will probably produce a monstrosity of a tool that no one will use. The only usable parts will be what's embedded in the Google Search engine.

cutenewt 4y ago

Unfortunately I don't think it's that easy. That is, the cat is out of the bag: ChatGPT not only showed us the power of AI, but it showed us a bunch of non-AI things like: - Ad-free results - Clutter-free results - The elegance of not having to click on links A competitor could capitalize on this, putting Google's ad-driven, click-driven, clutter-driven model at serious risk.

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metta2uall 4y ago

"Google killer" is hyperbole, but I think Google does have a challenge since chat-based search may be much harder to monetise & thus less profitable. One reason is because people are used to having ads on the search results page, but ChatGPT presents itself as a human advisor, and in this context I suppose people would be quite unhappy to have ads injected into their conversation.

theptip 4y ago

I agree, I think it's a fairly unimaginative take (a common one though) that ChatGPT is likely to lead to the usurping of Google. It's a two-part claim; a) yes, conversational AI agents will replace typing searches into a text box, but b) I see no reason to think that Google can't easily monetize that format. Regarding the first point, I think Google appears to have been caught a little bit off guard as to how soon this transition would happen. People seem to be over-indexing on the "code red". I do think it's a strategic mis-step by Google to not have a product ready to go here. (Their broader strategy was quite risk-averse and that was probably sensible, given the shit-storms that previous systems like Galactica and Tay generated; Google couldn't be the first ones to publish a prototype/demo system like ChatGPT, or the NYT would have jumped all over them for the inevitable questionable utterances.) But the second part; given AI agents are here, who's going to win the competition to monetize them? It seems clear to me that Google is in a great place to monetize and capitalize on this technology, and I think they will win if their language models are better. (So far, they seem to be way ahead; LaMDA was early 2022, and it's clearly better than ChatGPT.) If Google's version of this service is substantially better, but intersperses ads based on what you're talking about (the Gmail model for ads), would people use this? I think it's clear that consumers would take the better free service that comes with ads, vs. paying ChatGPT or accepting inferior quality. Let alone the fact that Google can put the assistant onto billions of Android phones, fine-tune a model per user, offload compute power with device-based inference to save OpEx, and so on; all of these will give whoever is running the AI agent a lot more ad targeting power.

gremlinsinc 4y ago
> yes, conversational AI agents will replace typing searches into a text box, but b) I see no reason to think that Google can't easily monetize that format. Current user workflow: - ask question in google. - get shitty results - checkout 5 pages worth of results are try a few more searches. In the process you've seen 5x the ads you would've maybe 10 years ago when the results were better. - In the middle of this you maybe clicked on 3 or 4 sites that were spam sites which themselves had on adsense ads. New workflow: - Ask google a question. - Immediately get a detailed thought out prospectus, or presentation, or whatever with a top-down overview of what you wanted, maybe you're still curious so you ask a couple follow up questions. Unless they put an ad between every sentence, you'd only have seen 1/10th the ads in the 3 replies it took to come close to google search.

yyyk 4y ago

>what am I missing? Google currently controls ~90% of the search market. AI-driven chat/search is a serious threat to this dominance. It's likely that after the market settles it won't have the same marketshare. Given how much Google has been dependent on Search/Ads and its other failures to execute, this is a serious revenue threat. This industry (and site) does have a tendency to exaggerate and take a current trend too far. Google is far too massive to 'die'. I believe even keyword-based search will survive. But going from 90% to 50% will be bad for Google. IMHO, the worst case realistic scenario is this: Google loses a lot of funds, is forced to close more unprofitable projects. This causes more lack of trust, and more projects are closed. Eventually Google is kicked down to a tier below Apple & Microsoft.

acdha 4y ago
I’d like to think this could be good for the rest of the company if every PM was told that ad sales weren’t going to make their stock options skyrocket, so they need to build a profitable product of their own. Unfortunately, I suspect that’d mean cramming ads everywhere.

kromem 4y ago

Way too many responses to your question are trying to engage with debate over products rather than focusing on the topic of monetization. Google makes money through ads, and especially ads that get you to click through to somewhere else. They do this through SEM ads that appear on your search query to direct you to a paid destination. And they do it through a display network on 3rd party websites that Google search inevitably ends up funneling you to. If you are simply engaging with an AI that's synthesizing those results so you don't have to, that's less time you spend on those sites seeing Google's ads, and less incentive to click through to paid results. Their entire business model basically goes up in smoke if AI successfully intermediates the Internet. This doesn't preclude them from competing, as you point out, but you generally don't want to see your cash cow get slaughtered and then suddenly be in a highly competitive market for what will replace it. Having a 90% market share in the Titanic isn't an enviable position.

alfalfasprout 4y ago
Agreed that what the product is exactly doesn't matter too much. It's kind of inevitable at this point that search is going to go in the direction of a chatbot. Ask jeeves back in the day already knew that what people really want is a question answered. Google search and its competitors were a well-lived offramp on that road. Ultimately free-form interaction is just more intuitive. But with that said, I also am not so quick to call the death of SEM ads. Just because chatbots exist doesn't mean people don't want to visit other websites. Display ads will continue to be a thing. Similarly, there's no reason chatbots can't now direct you to sites or advertise products as part of their responses. Heck, this is a much more sinister form of marketing with astronomically higher click rate since a chatbot is responding authoritatively with a recommendation. Yes, google is going to have to pivot... but this is a problem they're very well suited to solving and they have a very strong incumbent advantage in the meantime.

gibsonf1 4y ago

Ironically, using ml/dl language models, which have only statistics and no intelligence, is a Google killer to the extent that Google uses AI and destroys their real useful search. The declining quality of Googel search seems to only be accelerating.

xs83 4y ago

I think simply there are 2 killer features in LLM's vs Google search for me: 1 - Natural Language with prepositions and easy ways to include, exclude and filter 2 - Refinement - "No that wasn't quite right because X - please factor this in and try again" is a lot more intuitive than multiple rounds of operator uses and "memory exclusion" of pages you have already seen. I find that chatGPT will give me what I need within a few iterations, Google search sometimes takes a lot of searching and reading to get an idea of what I need. I feel like ChatGPT + Github Code search could be a killer combination for programmers

worldsavior 4y ago

> But I guess I'm wondering: what am I missing? Why would a chatbot like ChatGPT disrupt Google vs forcing Google to simply evolve. And perhaps make even more money? People thought google has no time to develop something like ChatGPT when they were totally wrong.

stephc_int13 4y ago

This is not that easy. Kodak and Nokia could have pivoted as well (and boy they tried). And this is not even a problem of scale, it is obviously difficult to change course for a giant supertanker, but the most insidious problem is the money makers inside the company, they usually have a lot of power and they won't allow anyone to butcher their margins. Killing the cash cow is difficult. I don't see Google taking the risk.

jhoelzel 4y ago

i have come to realize that most of the "google killer" chanters, have in fact not used ChatGPT for in-detail work. It absolutely has the same problem as Self-driving and only after 10 years we have accepted that it still is off for a very long time. Mercedes is doing Marketing by calling it self driving, but limiting it to areas the car seems to have a 99% understanding off. They are betting on the fact that they will make more money on the 99% buying these cars, then the few cars that inevitably will crash. Essentially how insurance has worked for ever.

boppo1 4y ago

Blockbuster should have been able to easily pivot too.

otabdeveloper4 4y ago

> This just doesn't make sense to me. It does if you remember that Google is in the search ads business, not in the search business. I guess you could find a way to weasel in ad copy into ChatGPT's answers, but that will kinda massively kill the vibe.