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GOOG is up 40% YoY, compared to 25% for SPY (SP500) - the market strongly disagrees with you.
I like LLMs quite a lot, for certain things, but almost orthogonal to what I like search for. If I want reliable docs, or to find reddit posts: Google. If I want a particular passage in a book explained: LLM...but then usually Google to confirm things.
Old people are super not into LLMs, or change of any variety. LLMs are also going to take a big ol' reputational hit if they start being monetized to suggest you have a delicious Slurm. The search results model of paid results is a much cleaner separation of ad vs not. LLM responses are so much longer that it'd be hard to separate out the ad and organic responses, decreasing trust, adoption, and monetizability.
BlackBerry's market cap peaked the year after the iPhone was introduced, and it took the market three or four years to really see the writing on the wall. The market still doesn't quite get tech disruption.
LLMs aren't going to remain distinct products that people have to seek out. They'll be integrated into platforms, and the natural starting point for any task, information retrieval included, will just be talking to your device. Many older people (and a surprising number of younger people, honestly) have never managed to form coherent mental models of current software UI, and thus commonly struggle to perform new or complex tasks. They'll greatly prefer this.
Most developed countries have laws that would prevent surreptitious product promotion in LLM responses. It's very possible LLMs will be harder to monetize than search, but Google isn't in a position to prevent their adoption, so that's just further bad news for them. They're essentially forced to enter this market, so others don't eat their lunch, but may be worse off than they are now even if they win it.
The workaround dynamics to that I can imagine are somewhat concerning. We're already seeing funny bloopers from Gemini where it won't explain the C++ concepts extension to an underage user because it's an experimental advanced feature and therefore unsafe. What would a world in which any product placement has to be performed by backdoor through the (legally mandated and socially protected) alignment mechanism look like? You can't directly pay to have the LLM recommend Coke, but if the corpus is set up in such a way that Pepsi sets off the model's dpoed "unsafety" spidey sense...
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100% agree on all points. Not clear whether Google will be able to adapt AdWords for LLMs but at least they have a chance if they’re the ones leading the revolution.
And also completely agree about the changing shape of LLMs. They’ll just become a mostly invisible layer in operating systems that eg handles queries and parlays user vague requests (“show me some funny videos”) into specific personalised API calls.
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The market is not a perfect or even reliable indicator of anything but the price people are willing to pay for things. Bear Stearns was 100 years old and trading for $100 a share the day before JP Morgan bought it for $2 a share
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