All the Answers | The Generalist

OpenAI’s product trades Google’s vastness for directness, dimensionality for simplicity. It is Gaiman’s librarian, leveraging vast sums of human knowledge to provide a definitive answer – even if it sometimes gets it wrong. In E.O. Wilson’s Age of the Synthesizer, ChatGPT’s talent for distillation, generation, coalescence – managed at speed – may

Google was not pre-ordained to become a trillion-dollar business. In 2002, for example, the budding search engine company was treated with some skepticism. The New York Times titled a piece from that year, “Google’s Toughest Search Is for a Business Model,” summarizing the market’s concerns. One Salomon Smith Barney analyst more directly articulat

It’s notable how different using ChatGPT feels. The simplicity of typing a request into a box and receiving a thoughtful, written response – unencumbered by images, advertisements, and other links – is compelling. From a pure interface design standpoint, OpenAI’s platform feels like a liberating throwback, a return to simplicity and clarity.

ChatGPT is also expensive . Talia Goldberg highlighted this point in our exchange. Goldberg noted that while traditional search engines incur costs north of $1 billion per year to index the web, AI players like ChatGPT are “far more expensive. This is part of why the company has had to throttle usage of its product and is seeking further capi

“Google can bring you back 100,000 answers,” author Neil Gaiman said. “A librarian can bring you back the right one.” 

Like any intelligence, ChatGPT has its limitations. For one thing,  it’s not clear that it’s a search engine . “I think a  part  of ChatGPT will be search, and it may become a primary destination for certain types of search behavior,” Goldberg noted. “But I don’t believe search will be its dominant use case.” 

Here, too, we may spy another weakness. Though it remains the world’s search engine of choice, there’s a sense among many that Google’s product has degraded. Much of its deterioration seems purposeful, either as a way to extract more revenue or obstruct competitors.

How will these companies monetize?  A fundamental premise behind the argument that ChatGPT will make Google obsolete is that an ad-based model doesn’t work in a chat-based world. Talia Goldberg noted this potential, saying, “What could be damaging [to Google] is a potential interface shift that moves the industry away from pay-per-click ads a