4 ms·

The problem is that chatting with an LLM is extremely disruptive to their business model and it's difficult for them to productize without killing the golden go

The problem is that chatting with an LLM is extremely disruptive to their business model and it's difficult for them to productize without killing the golden goose.

yobbo 3y ago
Yes, but Google's search volume would make it impossible either way. But they are probably using various techniques in analyses, embeddings, "canned" answers to queries, and so on.
crowcroft 3y ago
I know everyone cites this as the innovators dilemma, but so far the evidence suggests this isn't true. ChatGPT has been around for a while now, and it hasn't led to a collapse in Google's search revenue, and in fact now Google is rushing to roll out their version instead of trying to entrench search. A famous example is the iPhone killing the iPod, and it took around 3 and a half years for the iPod to really collapse, so chat and co-pilots might be early still. On the other hand handheld consumer electronics have much longer buying cycles than software tools.
- autokad 3y ago
  maybe its too early. I almost never google search anymore, a lot of my friends do the same. Kind of like after I was using google for years, lots and lots of people were still using sites like ask jeaves, but the writing was on the wall
  - flamedoge 3y ago
    Maybe. I can't be the only one who gets irked by the slow, typing-out response from copilot/gpt when google gets me instant results. Near instant or a lot faster result might convince me to use whatever gpt search
    - autokad 3y ago
      honestly I use the free version and the text is really fast. Lets take a look at a typical question I may send to chat gpt: >I have some tasks, some of them maintenance, some of them relaxation that I do >before bed. For example, maintenance: >brush teeth, floss, water floss, put on nose strips, take prylosec. >For relaxation: >stretch, massage gun, ASMR, music, tiger balm, salt bath, movie, tea, nasal >clean, moisturize. >can you suggest some others tasks? Google can't even handle this. if you try, the entire page is filled with Videos: ... with 4 video thumbnails from youtube on how to use a water pic. So I scroll off down (by now chat gpt already has a response) half a page on 'people also ask' with 4 questions about water pics, keep scrolling, finally search results, and all of them are about ... water pics/flossers.
- codethatwerks 3y ago
  Google is big enough to avoid innovators dilemma. You just create a new company and leave it alone. I reckon it is more that you needed special circumstances and series of events to become OpenAI. Not just cash and smart people.
- ajcp 3y ago
  > ChatGPT has been around for a while now ChatGPT has been around for less that 15 months[1]. In what version of reality is that "a while now"? Your iPhone/iPod timeline is also off by about 9 years[2]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Shuffle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Shuffle
  - crowcroft 3y ago
    'A while now' being long enough that I might expect some notable impact on Google's business by now. I do agree it could just be too early. My iPhone/iPod timeline is referring to the time it took for the iPod's sales to be severely impacted [1]. I'm not disputing that the iPod continued to exist for a long time, the iPod Touch wasn't discontinued until 2022, but it was a pretty meaningless part of Apple's business by that point. 1. https://i.insider.com/597b68f2b50ab162018b466b?width=1300&format=jpeg https://i.insider.com/597b68f2b50ab162018b466b?width=1300&fo...
    - empath-nirvana 3y ago
      Blackberry chugged along with record profits for a couple of years after the iphone had already made them irrelevant.
      - crowcroft 3y ago
        Yea, this is a good example that it might just be too soon still to say. There was a period where it was not obvious that the iPhone or Blackberry would become the dominant player in the field and it could be true with search and AI chat etc too.
solomonb 3y ago
Sounds like Xerox all over again.
thehappypm 3y ago
No, I think very few people truly believed that a souped-up SmarterChild would be all that interesting. Google focused more on winning board games.
bevekspldnw 3y ago
Ironically they killed the golden goose (the web) with display ads which incentivized low quality content to keep users scrolling. To put salt in their own wound, they are now indexing ever more genAI crap than they can handle and search is imploding.
mike_hearn 3y ago
No, it's the other way around. Right now web search is "disruptive" to the LLM business model. Google is a business fundamentally oriented around loss leaders. They make money on commercial queries where someone wants to buy something. They lose money when people search for facts or knowledge. The model works because people don't want to change their search engine every five minutes, so being good at the money losing queries means people will naturally use you for the money making queries too. Right now LLMs take all the money losing queries and spend vast sums of investor capital on serving them, but they are useless for queries like [pizza near me] or [medical injury legal advice] or [holidays in the canary islands]. So right now I'd expect actually Google to do quite well. Their competitor is burning capital taking away all the stuff that they don't really want, whilst leaving them with the gold. Now of course, that's today. The obvious direction for OpenAI to go in is finding ways to integrate ads with the free version of ChatGPT. But that's super hard. Building an ad network is hard. It takes a lot of time and effort, and it's really unclear what the product looks like there. Ads on web search is pretty obvious: the ads look like search results. What does an ad look like in a ChatGPT response? Google have plenty of time to figure this out because OpenAI don't seem interested. They've apparently decided that all of ChatGPT is a loss leader for their API services. Whether that's financially sustainable or not is unclear, but it's also irrelevant. People still want to do commercial queries, they still want things like real images and maps and yes even ads (the way the ad auction works on Google is a very good ranking signal for many businesses). ChatGPT is still useless for them, so for now they will continue to leave money on the table where Google can keep picking it up.

The problem is that chatting with an LLM is extremely disruptive to their business model and it's difficult for them to productize without killing the golden goose.

yobbo 3y ago

Yes, but Google's search volume would make it impossible either way. But they are probably using various techniques in analyses, embeddings, "canned" answers to queries, and so on.

crowcroft 3y ago

I know everyone cites this as the innovators dilemma, but so far the evidence suggests this isn't true. ChatGPT has been around for a while now, and it hasn't led to a collapse in Google's search revenue, and in fact now Google is rushing to roll out their version instead of trying to entrench search. A famous example is the iPhone killing the iPod, and it took around 3 and a half years for the iPod to really collapse, so chat and co-pilots might be early still. On the other hand handheld consumer electronics have much longer buying cycles than software tools.

autokad 3y ago
maybe its too early. I almost never google search anymore, a lot of my friends do the same. Kind of like after I was using google for years, lots and lots of people were still using sites like ask jeaves, but the writing was on the wall
- flamedoge 3y ago
  Maybe. I can't be the only one who gets irked by the slow, typing-out response from copilot/gpt when google gets me instant results. Near instant or a lot faster result might convince me to use whatever gpt search
  - autokad 3y ago
    honestly I use the free version and the text is really fast. Lets take a look at a typical question I may send to chat gpt: >I have some tasks, some of them maintenance, some of them relaxation that I do >before bed. For example, maintenance: >brush teeth, floss, water floss, put on nose strips, take prylosec. >For relaxation: >stretch, massage gun, ASMR, music, tiger balm, salt bath, movie, tea, nasal >clean, moisturize. >can you suggest some others tasks? Google can't even handle this. if you try, the entire page is filled with Videos: ... with 4 video thumbnails from youtube on how to use a water pic. So I scroll off down (by now chat gpt already has a response) half a page on 'people also ask' with 4 questions about water pics, keep scrolling, finally search results, and all of them are about ... water pics/flossers.
codethatwerks 3y ago
Google is big enough to avoid innovators dilemma. You just create a new company and leave it alone. I reckon it is more that you needed special circumstances and series of events to become OpenAI. Not just cash and smart people.
ajcp 3y ago
> ChatGPT has been around for a while now ChatGPT has been around for less that 15 months[1]. In what version of reality is that "a while now"? Your iPhone/iPod timeline is also off by about 9 years[2]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Shuffle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Shuffle
- crowcroft 3y ago
  'A while now' being long enough that I might expect some notable impact on Google's business by now. I do agree it could just be too early. My iPhone/iPod timeline is referring to the time it took for the iPod's sales to be severely impacted [1]. I'm not disputing that the iPod continued to exist for a long time, the iPod Touch wasn't discontinued until 2022, but it was a pretty meaningless part of Apple's business by that point. 1. https://i.insider.com/597b68f2b50ab162018b466b?width=1300&format=jpeg https://i.insider.com/597b68f2b50ab162018b466b?width=1300&fo...
  - empath-nirvana 3y ago
    Blackberry chugged along with record profits for a couple of years after the iphone had already made them irrelevant.
    - crowcroft 3y ago
      Yea, this is a good example that it might just be too soon still to say. There was a period where it was not obvious that the iPhone or Blackberry would become the dominant player in the field and it could be true with search and AI chat etc too.

solomonb 3y ago

Sounds like Xerox all over again.

thehappypm 3y ago

No, I think very few people truly believed that a souped-up SmarterChild would be all that interesting. Google focused more on winning board games.

bevekspldnw 3y ago

Ironically they killed the golden goose (the web) with display ads which incentivized low quality content to keep users scrolling. To put salt in their own wound, they are now indexing ever more genAI crap than they can handle and search is imploding.

mike_hearn 3y ago

No, it's the other way around. Right now web search is "disruptive" to the LLM business model. Google is a business fundamentally oriented around loss leaders. They make money on commercial queries where someone wants to buy something. They lose money when people search for facts or knowledge. The model works because people don't want to change their search engine every five minutes, so being good at the money losing queries means people will naturally use you for the money making queries too. Right now LLMs take all the money losing queries and spend vast sums of investor capital on serving them, but they are useless for queries like [pizza near me] or [medical injury legal advice] or [holidays in the canary islands]. So right now I'd expect actually Google to do quite well. Their competitor is burning capital taking away all the stuff that they don't really want, whilst leaving them with the gold. Now of course, that's today. The obvious direction for OpenAI to go in is finding ways to integrate ads with the free version of ChatGPT. But that's super hard. Building an ad network is hard. It takes a lot of time and effort, and it's really unclear what the product looks like there. Ads on web search is pretty obvious: the ads look like search results. What does an ad look like in a ChatGPT response? Google have plenty of time to figure this out because OpenAI don't seem interested. They've apparently decided that all of ChatGPT is a loss leader for their API services. Whether that's financially sustainable or not is unclear, but it's also irrelevant. People still want to do commercial queries, they still want things like real images and maps and yes even ads (the way the ad auction works on Google is a very good ranking signal for many businesses). ChatGPT is still useless for them, so for now they will continue to leave money on the table where Google can keep picking it up.