Google CEO Sundar Pichai on AI-powered search and the future of the web

As the internet evolves, especially for us “very online people,” there’s a deepening sense that we are, together, becoming something beyond the scope of our original intentions. We are rapidly approaching a sum far greater and more mysterious than what we often perceive as its cold, mechanistic parts.

While we conventionally think of ourselves as “u... See more

A sense of dread as I see this. We are slowly seeing the end of the open web. - AI search powered experiences take away clicks from high quality publishers in aggregate + - Crawlbots from AI companies not playing by the rules leading to - High quality publishers are looking to get paid *now* for "the value of their data" to compensate for traffi... See more

While their creators seek to craft them as some sort of digital gods, algorithms actually learn from the profane experience of humans. When asked about the perfect search engine, Google cofounder Sergey Brin said, “It would be like the mind of God.”27 Yet even Brin, though he might try, cannot endow Google’s algorithms with God’s mind. To learn, to

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most of the internet will be completely obsolete very soon. it already feels like an abstraction we tolerate for lack of a better alternative. ai agents replacing it would essentially reduce the web to a set of apis & scraped data repositories—just raw material for agent-mediated interaction. no need for direct user involvement; you ask, they fetc... See more

Dan O’Connell, chief AI and strategy officer at the cloud communications company Dialpad, sees his current role—and the jobs of other AI-devoted C-suiters—as essentially transitional: They are there to shepherd their respective companies into a future where AI is ubiquitous enough that it no longer falls under the purview of just one exec.

“I actual... See more

Can large language models take the place of traditional search engines? For us to have confidence in them, we would need to know that they haven’t been fed propaganda and conspiracy theories—we’d need to know that the jpeg is capturing the right sections of the Web. But, even if a large language model includes only the information we want

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