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Just some quick thoughts on the future of the internet. In short, I expect the way we use the web and social media to change quite dramatically over the next 3-5 years as a result of the growing sophistication of AI assistants combined with a new deluge of AI spam, agitprop, and clickbait content hitting the big socials. Specifically, I’d guess most people will have an AI assistant fielding user queries via API calls to Reddit, TikTok, Twitter, etc. and creating a personalised stream of content that filters out ads, spam, phishing, and (depending on users’ tastes) clickbait and AI generated lust-provoking images. The result will be a little bit like an old RSS feed but mostly selected on their behalf rather than by them directly, and obviously packed with multimedia and social content. As the big social networks start to make progressively more of their money from API charges from AI assistant apps and have fewer high-value native users, they’ll have less incentive to control for spambots locally, which will create a feedback loop that makes the sites basically uninhabitable without AI curation.
One result of this is that Google is kind of screwed, because these days people use it mainly for navigation rather than exploratory search (eg you use it to search Reddit, Twitter, or Wikipedia, or find your way to previously-visited articles or websites when you can’t remember the exact URL). But AI assistants will handle navigation and site-specific queries, and even exploratory search will be behind the scenes, meaning Google Ads will get progressively less and less exposure to human eyeballs. This is why they urgently need to make Gemini a success, because their current business model won’t exist in the medium-term.
All of this feels incredibly predictable to me given the dual combination of AI assistants and spambots getting much better, but I'm curious what others think, and also what the consequences of this new internet landscape will be for society and politics.
GOOG is up 40% YoY, compared to 25% for SPY (SP500) - the market strongly disagrees with you.
I like LLMs quite a lot, for certain things, but almost orthogonal to what I like search for. If I want reliable docs, or to find reddit posts: Google. If I want a particular passage in a book explained: LLM...but then usually Google to confirm things.
Old people are super not into LLMs, or change of any variety. LLMs are also going to take a big ol' reputational hit if they start being monetized to suggest you have a delicious Slurm. The search results model of paid results is a much cleaner separation of ad vs not. LLM responses are so much longer that it'd be hard to separate out the ad and organic responses, decreasing trust, adoption, and monetizability.
BlackBerry's market cap peaked the year after the iPhone was introduced, and it took the market three or four years to really see the writing on the wall. The market still doesn't quite get tech disruption.
LLMs aren't going to remain distinct products that people have to seek out. They'll be integrated into platforms, and the natural starting point for any task, information retrieval included, will just be talking to your device. Many older people (and a surprising number of younger people, honestly) have never managed to form coherent mental models of current software UI, and thus commonly struggle to perform new or complex tasks. They'll greatly prefer this.
Most developed countries have laws that would prevent surreptitious product promotion in LLM responses. It's very possible LLMs will be harder to monetize than search, but Google isn't in a position to prevent their adoption, so that's just further bad news for them. They're essentially forced to enter this market, so others don't eat their lunch, but may be worse off than they are now even if they win it.
100% agree on all points. Not clear whether Google will be able to adapt AdWords for LLMs but at least they have a chance if they’re the ones leading the revolution.
And also completely agree about the changing shape of LLMs. They’ll just become a mostly invisible layer in operating systems that eg handles queries and parlays user vague requests (“show me some funny videos”) into specific personalised API calls.
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