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My theory on AI is it's the next iteration of google search, a better more conversational, base layer over all the information that exists on the internet. Of

My theory on AI is it's the next iteration of google search, a better more conversational, base layer over all the information that exists on the internet. Of course some people will lose jobs just like what happened to several industries when search became ubiquitous. (newspapers, phone books, encyclopedias, travel agents) But IMHO this isn't the existential crisis people think it is. It's just a tool. Smart, clever people can do lots of cool stuff with tools. But you still have to use it, Search has just become Chat. You used to have to search, now you chat and it does the searching, and more!

jayd16 1y ago
Unlike peak google, this reduces signal to noise and obfuscates the source data its pulling against.
- hmmokidk 1y ago
  Creation of source data has been disincentivized
jopsen 1y ago
It's clearly useful for many things other than search.
staplers 1y ago
A lot of modern entry-level jobs were filled by people who knew how to use google and follow instructions. I imagine the next generation will have a similar relationship with AI. What might seem "common sense" with the younger, more tech-saavy crowd, will be difficult for older generations whose default behavior isn't to open up chatgpt or gemini and find the solution quickly.
ivanjermakov 1y ago
> Search has just become Chat I think chat-like LLM interfacing is not the most efficient way. There has to be a smarter way.
- clickety_clack 1y ago
  There’s an efficient way to serve the results, and there’s an efficient way for a human to consume them, and I find LLMs to be much more efficient in terms of cognitive work done to explore and understand something than a google search. The next thing will have to beat that level of personal mental effort, and I can’t imagine what that next step would look like yet.
  - aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
    I find a well-written human article or guide to be far more efficient when it exists. But if AI rehash them... then the market for those may disappear, and in the process, the AI won't be very good either without the source to summarise.
    - clickety_clack 1y ago
      I don’t disagree with that at all, but that’s not what I’m talking about. The market for serving information goes where the people want to consume it. The old portals of the 90s gave way to search because it was easier for people to find what they wanted. LLMs give people an even easier way to find information. The downstream effects don’t factor into most people’s decision to use an LLM over source material.
- majormajor 1y ago
  I think Photoshop is a good guide here. Famously complicated interface with a million buttons and menus. Now there's more buttons for the AI tools. Because at the end of the day, using a "brush" tool to paint over the area containing the thing you want it to remove or change in an image is MUCH simpler than trying to tell it that through chat. Some sort of prompt like "please remove the fifth person from the left standing on the brick path under the bus stop" vs "just explicitly select something with the GUI." The former could have a lot of value for casual amateur use; it's not going to replace the precise, high-functionality tool for professional use. In software - would you rather chat with an LLM to see the contents of a proposed code change, or use a visual diff tool? "Let the agent run and then treat it's stuff as a PR from a junior dev" has been said so many times recently - which is not suggesting just chatting with it to do the PR instead of using the GUI. I would imagine that this would get extended to something like the input not just being less of a free-form chat, but more of a submission of a Figma mockup + a link to a ticket with specs.
Quitschquat 1y ago
Google doesn’t have to change search. It already returns AI generated crap before anything useful.
- brabel 1y ago
  I was a bit wary of trusting the AI summaries Google has been including in search results… but after a few checks it seems like it’s not crap at all, it’s pretty good!
  - SoMomentary 1y ago
    I think their point is that all of the content out there is turning in to AI Slop so it won't matter if search changes because the results themselves have already been changed.
- arrowsmith 1y ago
  To be fair, Google also returns a lot of useless crap that wasn't generated by AI.
  - jenscow 1y ago
    wasn't generated by their AI, more like
- patcon 1y ago
  I have systemic concerns with how Google is changing roles from "knowledge bridging" to "knowledge translating", but in terms of information: I find it very useful. You find it gives you poor information?
  - aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
    Always check the sources. I've personally found it; - Using a source to claim the opposite of what the source says. - Point to irrelevant sources. - Use a very untrustworthy source. - Give our sources that do not have anything to do with what it says. - Make up additional things like any other LLM without source or internet search capability, despite reading sources. I've specifically found Gemeni (the one Google puts at the top of searches) is hallucination-prone, and I've had far better results with other agents with search capability. So... presenting a false or made-up answer to a person searching the web on a topic they don't understand... I'd really like to see a massive lawsuit cooked up about this when someone inevitably burns their house down or loses their life.
maqnius 1y ago
I agree that people are using it for things they would've googled, but I doubt that it's a good replacement. To me it mostly comes with a feeling of uncertainty. As if someone tells you something he got told on a party. I need to Google it, to find a trustful source for verification, else it's just a hint. So I use it if I want a quick hint. Not if I really want to have information worth remembering. So it's certainly not a replacement for me. It actually makes things worse for me because of all that AI slop atm.
aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
As search gives the answer rather than the path to it, the job of finding things out properly and writing it down for others is lost. If we let that be lost, then we will all be lost. If we cannot find a way to redirect income from AI back to the creators of the information they rehash (such as good and honest journalism), a critical load-bearing pillar of democratic society will collapse. The news industry has been in grave danger for years, and we've seen the consequences it brings (distrust, division, misinformation, foreign manipulation). AI may drive the last stake in its back. It's not about some jobs being replaced; that is not even remotely the issue. The path we are on currently is a dark one, and dismissing it as "just some jobs being lost" is a naive dismissal of the danger we're in.
- JSteph22 1y ago
  I am looking forward to the "news industry" breathing its last breath. They're the ones primarily responsible for the distrust and division.
  - aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
    No, i fully disagree. The economic viability to do proper journalism was already destroyed by the ad supported click and attention based internet. (and particular the way people consume news through algorithmic social media) I believe most independent news sites have been economically forced into sensationalism and extremism to survive. Its not what they wilfully created. Personally, i find that any news organisations that is still somewhat reputable have source of income beyond page visits and ads; Be it a senior demorgaphic that still subscribe to the paper, loyal reader base that pay for the paywall, or government sponsoring its existence as public service. Now what if you cut out the last piece of income journalists rely on to stay afloat? We simply fire the humans and tell an AI to summarise the other articles instead, and phrase it how people want to hear it. And thats a frightening world.
  - twixfel 1y ago
    The news industry of the future will be Joe Rogan and friends. Arguably it already is. Hard to see how that’s an improvement on what came before.
827a 1y ago
Yeah; there's still a massive chasm between "I spent hours precisely defining my requirements for this greenfield application with no users and the AI one-shot it" and "million line twenty team enterprise SaaS hellscale with ninety-seven stakeholders per line of code". The fact that AI can actually handle the former case is, to be clear, awesome; but not surprising. Low-code tools have been doing it for years. Retool, even back in 2018, was way more productive than any LLMs I've seen today, at the things Retool could do. But its relative skill at these things, to me, does not conclusively determine that it is on the path toward being able to autonomously handle the latter. The english language is simply a less formal programming language. Its informality means it requires less skill to master, but also means it may require more volume to achieve desired outcomes. At some level of granularity, it is necessarily the case that programming in english begins to look like programming in javascript; just with capital letters, exclamation points, and threats to fire the AI instead of asserts and conditionals. Are we really saving time, and thus generating higher levels of productivity? Or, is its true benefit that it enables foray into languages and domains you might be unfamiliar with; unlocking software development for a wider range of people who couldn't muster it before? Its probably a bit of both. Dario Amodei says we'll have the first billion dollar solo-company by 2026 [1]. I lean toward this not happening. I would put money on even $100M not happening, barring some level of hyperinflation which changes our established understanding of what a dollar even is. But, here's what I will say: hitting levels of revenue like this, with a human count so low that the input of the AI has to overwhelm the input from the humans, is the only way to prove to me that, actually, these things might be more than freakin awesome tools. Blog posts from people making greenfield apps named after a furrsona DJ isn't moving the needle for me on this issue. [1] https://www.inc.com/ben-sherry/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-predicts-the-first-billion-dollar-solopreneur-by-2026/91193609 https://www.inc.com/ben-sherry/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-pr...
- LtWorf 1y ago
  > Dario Amodei says we'll have the first billion dollar solo-company by 2026 [1]. I lean toward this not happening. Why not? Not like companies have to actually do anything beyond marketing to get insane evaluations… remember theranos?
fullstackchris 1y ago
This comment makes no sense here. Did you read the article? The author built an entire SaaS app in a few days with an agent. That isn't "just search"

jayd16 1y ago

Unlike peak google, this reduces signal to noise and obfuscates the source data its pulling against.

hmmokidk 1y ago
Creation of source data has been disincentivized

jopsen 1y ago

It's clearly useful for many things other than search.

staplers 1y ago

A lot of modern entry-level jobs were filled by people who knew how to use google and follow instructions. I imagine the next generation will have a similar relationship with AI. What might seem "common sense" with the younger, more tech-saavy crowd, will be difficult for older generations whose default behavior isn't to open up chatgpt or gemini and find the solution quickly.

ivanjermakov 1y ago

> Search has just become Chat I think chat-like LLM interfacing is not the most efficient way. There has to be a smarter way.

clickety_clack 1y ago
There’s an efficient way to serve the results, and there’s an efficient way for a human to consume them, and I find LLMs to be much more efficient in terms of cognitive work done to explore and understand something than a google search. The next thing will have to beat that level of personal mental effort, and I can’t imagine what that next step would look like yet.
- aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
  I find a well-written human article or guide to be far more efficient when it exists. But if AI rehash them... then the market for those may disappear, and in the process, the AI won't be very good either without the source to summarise.
  - clickety_clack 1y ago
    I don’t disagree with that at all, but that’s not what I’m talking about. The market for serving information goes where the people want to consume it. The old portals of the 90s gave way to search because it was easier for people to find what they wanted. LLMs give people an even easier way to find information. The downstream effects don’t factor into most people’s decision to use an LLM over source material.
majormajor 1y ago
I think Photoshop is a good guide here. Famously complicated interface with a million buttons and menus. Now there's more buttons for the AI tools. Because at the end of the day, using a "brush" tool to paint over the area containing the thing you want it to remove or change in an image is MUCH simpler than trying to tell it that through chat. Some sort of prompt like "please remove the fifth person from the left standing on the brick path under the bus stop" vs "just explicitly select something with the GUI." The former could have a lot of value for casual amateur use; it's not going to replace the precise, high-functionality tool for professional use. In software - would you rather chat with an LLM to see the contents of a proposed code change, or use a visual diff tool? "Let the agent run and then treat it's stuff as a PR from a junior dev" has been said so many times recently - which is not suggesting just chatting with it to do the PR instead of using the GUI. I would imagine that this would get extended to something like the input not just being less of a free-form chat, but more of a submission of a Figma mockup + a link to a ticket with specs.

Quitschquat 1y ago

Google doesn’t have to change search. It already returns AI generated crap before anything useful.

brabel 1y ago
I was a bit wary of trusting the AI summaries Google has been including in search results… but after a few checks it seems like it’s not crap at all, it’s pretty good!
- SoMomentary 1y ago
  I think their point is that all of the content out there is turning in to AI Slop so it won't matter if search changes because the results themselves have already been changed.
arrowsmith 1y ago
To be fair, Google also returns a lot of useless crap that wasn't generated by AI.
- jenscow 1y ago
  wasn't generated by their AI, more like
patcon 1y ago
I have systemic concerns with how Google is changing roles from "knowledge bridging" to "knowledge translating", but in terms of information: I find it very useful. You find it gives you poor information?
- aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
  Always check the sources. I've personally found it; - Using a source to claim the opposite of what the source says. - Point to irrelevant sources. - Use a very untrustworthy source. - Give our sources that do not have anything to do with what it says. - Make up additional things like any other LLM without source or internet search capability, despite reading sources. I've specifically found Gemeni (the one Google puts at the top of searches) is hallucination-prone, and I've had far better results with other agents with search capability. So... presenting a false or made-up answer to a person searching the web on a topic they don't understand... I'd really like to see a massive lawsuit cooked up about this when someone inevitably burns their house down or loses their life.

maqnius 1y ago

I agree that people are using it for things they would've googled, but I doubt that it's a good replacement. To me it mostly comes with a feeling of uncertainty. As if someone tells you something he got told on a party. I need to Google it, to find a trustful source for verification, else it's just a hint. So I use it if I want a quick hint. Not if I really want to have information worth remembering. So it's certainly not a replacement for me. It actually makes things worse for me because of all that AI slop atm.

aDyslecticCrow 1y ago

As search gives the answer rather than the path to it, the job of finding things out properly and writing it down for others is lost. If we let that be lost, then we will all be lost. If we cannot find a way to redirect income from AI back to the creators of the information they rehash (such as good and honest journalism), a critical load-bearing pillar of democratic society will collapse. The news industry has been in grave danger for years, and we've seen the consequences it brings (distrust, division, misinformation, foreign manipulation). AI may drive the last stake in its back. It's not about some jobs being replaced; that is not even remotely the issue. The path we are on currently is a dark one, and dismissing it as "just some jobs being lost" is a naive dismissal of the danger we're in.

JSteph22 1y ago
I am looking forward to the "news industry" breathing its last breath. They're the ones primarily responsible for the distrust and division.
- aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
  No, i fully disagree. The economic viability to do proper journalism was already destroyed by the ad supported click and attention based internet. (and particular the way people consume news through algorithmic social media) I believe most independent news sites have been economically forced into sensationalism and extremism to survive. Its not what they wilfully created. Personally, i find that any news organisations that is still somewhat reputable have source of income beyond page visits and ads; Be it a senior demorgaphic that still subscribe to the paper, loyal reader base that pay for the paywall, or government sponsoring its existence as public service. Now what if you cut out the last piece of income journalists rely on to stay afloat? We simply fire the humans and tell an AI to summarise the other articles instead, and phrase it how people want to hear it. And thats a frightening world.
- twixfel 1y ago
  The news industry of the future will be Joe Rogan and friends. Arguably it already is. Hard to see how that’s an improvement on what came before.

827a 1y ago

Yeah; there's still a massive chasm between "I spent hours precisely defining my requirements for this greenfield application with no users and the AI one-shot it" and "million line twenty team enterprise SaaS hellscale with ninety-seven stakeholders per line of code". The fact that AI can actually handle the former case is, to be clear, awesome; but not surprising. Low-code tools have been doing it for years. Retool, even back in 2018, was way more productive than any LLMs I've seen today, at the things Retool could do. But its relative skill at these things, to me, does not conclusively determine that it is on the path toward being able to autonomously handle the latter. The english language is simply a less formal programming language. Its informality means it requires less skill to master, but also means it may require more volume to achieve desired outcomes. At some level of granularity, it is necessarily the case that programming in english begins to look like programming in javascript; just with capital letters, exclamation points, and threats to fire the AI instead of asserts and conditionals. Are we really saving time, and thus generating higher levels of productivity? Or, is its true benefit that it enables foray into languages and domains you might be unfamiliar with; unlocking software development for a wider range of people who couldn't muster it before? Its probably a bit of both. Dario Amodei says we'll have the first billion dollar solo-company by 2026 [1]. I lean toward this not happening. I would put money on even $100M not happening, barring some level of hyperinflation which changes our established understanding of what a dollar even is. But, here's what I will say: hitting levels of revenue like this, with a human count so low that the input of the AI has to overwhelm the input from the humans, is the only way to prove to me that, actually, these things might be more than freakin awesome tools. Blog posts from people making greenfield apps named after a furrsona DJ isn't moving the needle for me on this issue. [1] https://www.inc.com/ben-sherry/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-predicts-the-first-billion-dollar-solopreneur-by-2026/91193609 https://www.inc.com/ben-sherry/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-pr...

LtWorf 1y ago
> Dario Amodei says we'll have the first billion dollar solo-company by 2026 [1]. I lean toward this not happening. Why not? Not like companies have to actually do anything beyond marketing to get insane evaluations… remember theranos?

fullstackchris 1y ago

This comment makes no sense here. Did you read the article? The author built an entire SaaS app in a few days with an agent. That isn't "just search"