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Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

But Alphabet will probably be fine. YouTube and Android are still billion-user products that aren't being displaced with AI, and their advertising business doesn't seem threatened much by this either.

So what's the scoop? I use ChatGPT, it hasn't replaced my search engine. They're insisting that search is obsoleted with AI (and Google is spooked internally) but I have yet to see any research-based evidence supporting it. Personally, I use both tools for completely different things, and while they are similar by-way-of a text box with a prompt, their responses are completely distinct and neither one can replace the other.

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I recently asked gpt to give me a markdown table of the continents, their landmass and their populations. I checked the numbers and they matched wikipedia.

Google gave me listicles instead...

I recently asked ChatGPT to multiply 2 numbers together. Every search engine I tried yielded a product, except ChatGPT which gave me an excuse.

They're useful in their own right, but you can't fool yourself into believing either one cannibalizes the other.

curious what the excuse was.

To be fair to ChatGPT though, all the search engines first recognize that the query is trying to perform an arithmetic calculation, then pass it on to a calculator. ChatGPT already understands what is being asked, it would be trivial to perform the next step, pass it on to a calculator and return the right answer.

Why didn't Wolfram Alpha disrupt Google? GPT is just passed a threshold of user friendliness?

The fact that you felt the need to check Wikipedia shows why LLMs can't replace search, at least not in their current form.

> I recently asked gpt to give me a markdown table of the continents, their landmass and their populations. I checked the numbers and they matched wikipedia.

But there is no reason to think that it will be correct, structurally. While you can find examples that work, the AI does not know the truth. An AI does NOT have an understanding of populations, locations, etc.

Google didn’t return answers, but it directed you to sites with answers. Those sites were like curated by hand by a human who does understand the meaning of the data

No tech invention ever kicked out the previous iteration. Google and ChatGPT will co-exist. Same way faxes are still alive even if mobile telephony conquered the world.

What will happen is that new use cases will be set in place. Some people might head to Google for diversity of results. Others will prefer ChatGPT for one single search result.

In my opinion, only the "I'm feeling lucky" function on Google will be challenged or replaced.

How can a tech journalist imagine that noobs will modify the default search engine on their Chrome browser and Android smartphones? These guys are not realistic.

The point made by the article is that these big lawsuits distracted management. And Google's management is so ineffective today, imagine how much worse it would be with this crowbar poked in.

Maybe they will slow down on the reorgs. Could be good.

> But Alphabet will probably be fine. YouTube and Android are still...

If you look at a revenue breakdown[1] and then also figure in that search has much higher margins than the other areas, it's pretty skewed to search dollars. They've improved it some, but there's a long way to go.

[1] https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/how-does-google-make-money

> YouTube and Android are still billion-user products that aren't being displaced with AI

I think they care waaaay more for billion-dollar products than for billion-user products.

> and their advertising business doesn't seem threatened much by this either.

Is it? What fraction of their ad revenues comes from ads on search result pages?

YouTube being a billion user product has nothing to do with how successful they are. My free service of "Contact me and I will give you a dollar" can grow to billions of users if you borrow enough money, and don't care at all about actually making it back.

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