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.
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.
>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.
I reckon it is more that you needed special circumstances and series of events to become OpenAI. Not just cash and smart people.
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 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Shuffle
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&fo...
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.
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.
But they are probably using various techniques in analyses, embeddings, "canned" answers to queries, and so on.