This is the first non-technical Google presentation I've felt compelled to archive
I think folk are unestimating the scale of the change in medium that ChatGPT represents, it's not simply a problem of popping out a compelling clone for Google, they must also preserve or replace the lost ad revenue which represents 80% of their income, otherwise things quickly start to look grim. In contrast, ads are only 36% of Microsoft's income. If it turns out that llms are only economical as a subscription offering, Microsoft are already better placed to e.g. bundle NewBing with its 365 subscriptions.
I think subscription based search might be the scariest outcome, it would be something like an iPhone moment, where the entire medium becomes stratified into commodity/ad supported/low income user vs. premium/ad free/high value users. Imagine Google's legacy as the spam riddled search engine low income folk use, filled with ads for payday loans, used car dealers and predatory personal injury lawyers
Just to add the cost-per-query may not be a temporary blip. ChatGPT's cost per query is based on a static base model trained over a year ago. Imagine the energy and compute that might be required to add meaningful personalization or an up to date index, or if there were to be a repeat of something like the search engine document count wars of the late 90s/early 00s. Training ChatGPT is estimated to cost between $2-$12 million per run ( https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/hwfjej/d_t... )
Responses on Twitter are horrific: https://twitter.com/googleeurope/status/1623251768099409920
This is the first non-technical Google presentation I've felt compelled to archive
I think folk are unestimating the scale of the change in medium that ChatGPT represents, it's not simply a problem of popping out a compelling clone for Google, they must also preserve or replace the lost ad revenue which represents 80% of their income, otherwise things quickly start to look grim. In contrast, ads are only 36% of Microsoft's income. If it turns out that llms are only economical as a subscription offering, Microsoft are already better placed to e.g. bundle NewBing with its 365 subscriptions.
I think subscription based search might be the scariest outcome, it would be something like an iPhone moment, where the entire medium becomes stratified into commodity/ad supported/low income user vs. premium/ad free/high value users. Imagine Google's legacy as the spam riddled search engine low income folk use, filled with ads for payday loans, used car dealers and predatory personal injury lawyers