This is going to get spicy. I wonder what impact it will have on Google's monopoly.
The golden goose is cooked.
Edit: It's quite possible that anyone will be able to enter this race right now and build LLM silos for their own domain. This cracks monolithic search wide open.
GameFaqs becomes ChatGG, where you can ask, "How do I beat Ridley for the second time in Metroid Prime?"
Etc.
Websites will become less of a thing. All the people building websites will switch to building AI products.
If traffic to Google leaves by X%, they've lost. Now there are lots of new destinations.
The race is on, and apex tech companies are not the only ones that can win. Google, in fact, has to sacrifice its most important product to come out alive. That's dangerous.
This is the likely outcome, but I don't see how it's anything but an utter disaster for Google. The only way for chatbots to monetize at the rate google is currently monetizing search is by the responses themselves being ads. Would people use such a product or would they reject in favor of a product that has simple banner ads? I think the answer is clear. Even if Google retained 99.9% market share in search their revenue would nosedive and their expenses would surely skyrocket with the amount of compute required to run these models.
Meanwhile, MS has a lot of catching up to do in the ad space.
2) The deployment of ads would be subtle and hard to detect. To use the example from the announcement, when someone asks "give me a 5 day itinerary for Mexico", you would prioritize suggesting locations or activities that are backed by ad spend. The end user has no way of knowing, they just asked an open-ended question.
2) This might work for a while, but I refuse to believe people are that dumb. They'd find out eventually.
2) The masses aren't remotely aware of how their ideas and behaviors have been manipulated by PR experts for their entire lives, and that isn't about to change.
That's exactly my assertion, that the average person has no idea how the bulk of their opinions and behaviors have been suggested to them by a handful of media conglomerates and other powerful organizations.
Some like to point at the resources required to build training sets -- and moreover -- to train, yet open source efforts will not lag in any area except for product deployment. And there will be a host of companies willing to solve for that.
The product with the fewest ads and best results will win. A monumental problem for Google.
On the other hand, Google is still an incredibly formidable force, and it would be incredibly foolish for any prospective competitor (even in an adjacent field like AI) to ignore them. But, lest you be too freaked out: just remember Google Stadia.