Hacker News
points by rf15 4 days ago | 0 comments
Sometimes I do wonder why it's hard to see that you shouldn't invest in AI, let Sam Altman hoover up all compute hardware and then make a surprise pikachu when hardware sales of your user base decline. Same for Google: "what, if I stop people from going to websites because I let a bot summarise what they're looking for, I get less money from website visits?"

At this rate (I know I keep beating that drum), I think we cannot have AI: it is too self-defeating from a business pov.

[–] dubeyaayush07 4 days ago
It's not like Google had a choice. Asking AI is superior to browsing links in 90% of use cases, and they would have been disrupted otherwise.
[–] catlikesshrimp 4 days ago
Browsing a curated list of the worst SEO generated spam, sure. Anything is better. Wait for SEO advertising to come to AI summary.
[–] simulator5g 4 days ago
It's already here, ask AI for a product recommendation and it will recommend whichever company has the highest Reddit astroturfing budget.
[–] dubeyaayush07 4 days ago
Yeah but there is more competition in that space which might delay/slowdown the inevitable enshitification
[–] tliltocatl 3 days ago
Google search became considerably worse around 2019 when they started using LLMs for indexing, which make it ignore keywords it deemed "irrelevant".
[–] kristianp 4 days ago
Just a clarification, Google's search revenue actually went up in their latest quarterly reporting. It just didn't go up as far as analysts were predicting.
[–] rf15 4 days ago
Yes, but the logical ouroboros should be evident:

- make money from ad views

- make people place ads on many websites, so a lot of ads can be shown

- use made money to build AI summary

- AI summary prevents people from visiting many websites