This could be considered a new era for the internet. Or whenever it starts being used to serve the majority of search results.
People who are skeptical of AI won't like it of course. But it will be a literal and practical change to the way the majority of internet searches work.
Google basically becomes the de facto personal agent for most people at that point. I would not be surprised to see Google Assistant merge into the main search product.
Microsoft had actually been strategic by promoting Copilot.
I know that many HNers generally hate Blockchain and smart contracts and decentralized technologies, but I feel this direction is the only viable alternative to monopoly platforms that are now even more directly acting as our interface to the world via agents.
Exactly what that looks like I don't know. But I do know it involves open protocols and probably open marketplaces for knowledge and other types of tasks.
> I know that many HNers generally hate Blockchain and smart contracts and decentralized technologies
Whoa, slow down. There's definitely a lot of skepticism about blockchain and smart contracts around here, but that skepticism does not generalize to decentralization as a whole. Self-hosters are strongly represented on here, as are proponents of federated tech and P2P.
There's specifically a lot of skepticism about blockchain and web3 on HN, and I'm really curious to know how you think those specific decentralized technologies are going to make a difference in the search space.
I've been using both ChatGPT and Gemini for months as my primary question-seeking-response portals. I find Gemini to provide more relevant and recent responses while ChatGPT provides slightly more thorough code guidance. For me, LLMs are a shortcut to researching information where I am hoping to find one or two sources which answer the majority of my questions. Now, I can chat and reason through my questions in one thread without navigating to other sources. The biggest pitfall is surfacing differing perspectives but I think that is solvable.
Who will write pages for google to summarize from now on? This will kill the last bits of remaining organic content creators on the internet.
If Google was smart, they would use their existing ranking systems to find the highest quality creators and pay them to do this. Instead, they’ll probably train an LLM on SEO’d blogspam and call it a day.
> People who are skeptical of AI won't like it of course.
Very few (if any) are sceptical of ‘AI’. They are usually sceptical (and rightly so) of LLMs. They’re very different things.