The money situation is what gives me pause with LLMs.

The amount of money it's burned on this is giant; those companies will need to make so much money to have any possibility of return. The idea is that we will all spend more money on AI that we spend on phones, and we will spend it on those companies only... I don't know, it just doesn't add up.

As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing as a free lunch after all!

My dream solution:

The EU creates an institution for public knowledge, a kind of library+tech solution. It probably funds classic libraries in member countries, but it also invests in tech. It dovetails nicely into a big push to get science to thrive in the EU etc.

The tech part makes a in-the-public-interest search engine and AI.

The techies are incentivised to try and whack-a-mole the classic SEO. E.g. they might spot pages that regurgitate, they might downscore sites that are ad-driven, they might upscore obvious sources of truth for things like government, they might downscore pages whose content changes too much etc.

And the AI part is not for product placement sale.

This would bring in a golden age of enlightenment, perhaps for - say - 20 years or so, before the inevitable erosion of base mission.

And all the strong data science types would want to work for it!

> These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content.

For a few months, I've been wondering: how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data? It's trivial to add prompts encouraging product placement, but I would be completely shocked if the big players don't sell out within a year or two, and start biasing the models themselves in this way, if they haven't already.

Completely agree with this post I don't even think he's exaggerating.

I tried to search the full name of a specific roof company in my area in quotes, and they weren't in the first page of results. But I got so many disclosed and not disclosed ads for OTHER contractors.

SEO has turned search engines into a kind of quasi-mafia "protection" racket.. "oh you didn't pay your protection fee, wouldn't it be a shame if something happened to your storefront?"

I built a portal that makes it easier to query against multiple different search engines (https://allsear.ch/). It's open source, free, all that. I must say, building it really expanded my view of the internet.

I am also a heavy Kagi and Reddit user for search, and usually that's enough. But when it's not, its concerning how much better other search engines can be, especially since non-tech savvy folks will never use them.

This is another article that, for me, sort of walks right by the answers without realizing it. As I was reading, I was thinking "does this person really not think AI is going to be flooded with ads soon enough?" Then they asked the LLM that, and it basically said yes, and then the response. . . to go "Hmmm, I wonder if that will happen"? Yes, of course it's going to happen. Imagine if this was 20 years ago wondering whether ads would infect search engines or the web would be flooded with sites which are ads masquerading as actual content. Why would we believe anything different of AI? The only way it won't happen is if we decide we don't want it, instead of accepting it as inevitable.

And well, the article is ostensibly about AI, but then at the end:

> The investors aren’t just doing this to be nice. Someone is going to expect returns on this huge gamble at some point. > ... > The LLM providers aren’t librarians providing a public service. They’re businesses that have to find a way to earn a ridiculous amount of money for a huge number of big investors, and capitalism does not have builtin morals.

Those are the things that need to change. They have nothing to do with AI. AI is a symptom of a broken socioeconomic system that allows a small (not "huge" in the scheme of things) number of people to "gamble" and then attempt to rig the table so their gamble succeeds.

AI is a cute bunny rabbit and our runaway-inequality-based socioeconomic system is the vat of toxic waste that turned that innocent little bunny into a ravening mutant. Yes, it's bad and needs to be killed, but we'll just be overrun by a million more like it if we don't find a way to lock away that toxic waste.

A proposal for a solution. The data is the unique selling point. Put that in public hands with an API, published algorithms, and it's own development team. The free market can then sell user interfaces, filters, and whatever. The metaphor is roads (state managed) and vehicles (for profit). Today I can (physically) go to the British Library and get any published book, or go on line and pay for the privilege.

This example falls apart because libraries are paid for by taxes.

I wish I could violently shake every internet user while yelling "If you are not paying money for it, you cannot complain about it"

The librarian is selling you a vuvuzela because that is the only way the library has been able to keep the lights on. They offered a membership but people flipped out "Libraries are free! I never had to pay in the past! How dare you try and take my money for a free service!". They tried a "Please understand the service we provide and give a donation" but less than 2% of people donated anything. Never mind that there is a backdoor that you can use, allowing you to never need to interact with a librarian while fully utilizing the libraries services (that the library still pays for).

The internet was ruined by people unwilling to pay for it. And yes, I know the internet was perfect in 1996, I have a pair of rose colored glasses too.

It's an interesting article although I think it's rather telling that the authors search of "postgres slow database" seems to disappear in the LLM section. It mentions the adds disappeared, but no mention of the solutions found or the amount of time or changes to how they searched/added the question.

I've found AI helpful for answering questions, but better at plausibly answering them, I still end up checking links to verify what was said and where it's sourced from. It saves frustration but not really time.

I am deliberately keeping away from LLMs for search. I'm old enough to remember finally ditching Altavista for the new upstart Google. I did briefly flirt with Ask Jeeves but it was not good enough.

I don't think anyone has it sorted yet. LLM search will always be flawed due to being a next token guesser - it cannot be trusted for "facts". A LLM fact is not even a considered opinion, it is simply next token guessing. LLMs certainly cannot be trusted for "current affairs" - they will always be out of date, by definition (needs training)

Modern search - Goog or Bing or whatever - seem to be somewhat confused, ad riddled and stuffed with rubbish results at the top.

I've populated a uBlacklist with some popular lists and the results of my own encounters. DDG and co are mostly useful now, for me.

SEO spam was still easy enough to spot and skip through in search results before the masses of LLM-generated content took over.

They seem to generate extremely specific websites and content for every conceivable search phrase. I'm not even sure what their end goal is since they aren't even always riddled with affiliate links.

Sometimes I wonder if the AI companies are generating these low-quality search results to drive us to use their LLMs instead.

Absolutely agree. Especially Google search results became generic and useless. Their Youtube search is a list of 3 generic links and then just complete junk. DuckDuckGo had been lagging behind Google for years, but around 2022 it became on par if not superior.

The author would do well to check out Kagi -- the search results for all of the suggested queries are, to my eye, better than the results they found.

Given that Kagi's higher tier plans come with search-enabled LLM chat interfaces, and those searches use Kagi's results (which, again, appear to be superior) it seems to me that you get the best of both worlds: Better search, and better search results to feed into your search-enabled LLM queries.

I am not affiliated with Kagi or anything, it's just honestly that good a product.

The current search engines really feel like a librarian who's always trying to sell you something. I just want to find a simple answer, but I keep getting led to all kinds of other pages. I believe if search engines were more like public libraries, focused on providing information rather than recommending things for commercial reasons, the experience would be so much better.

Google is the greatest shopping center in the world and I must admit; I really do like it. Must be more shoppers around than the information seekers it seems.

> AIs are much better at responding to my intent, and they rarely attempt to sell me anything

Yet. It's only a matter of time before AI becomes ad-riddled and enshittified.

You'd have to be pretty daft to not imagine your future LLM conversations being corrupted by private interests, in far more subtle ways than the obvious ads littering search results.

The web is in such a bad state, I think there is probably an opportunity for traditional publishers (or somebody else, like a university) to start a walled garden web. A vast trove of interesting, and valuable information on every topic. No shopping, no ads. Just the content you would find in the library.

People used to spend money on books and magazines, I'm sure some of them could be convinced to sign up for a Netflix of books and magazines.

So why aren't real libraries like this? Can you fund the internet the same way?

> I would rather use a library where the librarians don’t have financial incentives to show me certain kinds of books more often than others.

Oh, you sweet summer child...

I have family that used to be in charge of dealing with institutional corruption. In particular, public service corruption.

It's bad. Very, very bad. When "public servants" are paid less than their private counterparts, are routinely treated like crap by their employers, as well as those they serve, and they are in charge of services that could be incredibly lucrative to others, you're guaranteed to get corruption.

"Let's just use AI!" is the rallying cry.

Now, let's examine a scenario, where the folks that can make money from the service, also run the tools that implement the service...

There is a good article scattered within this article, but unfortunately it is hard to take seriously when it claims to be based on "research" entitled "Is Google Getting Worse" which is one of the most misleading papers of the last few years. That's the title and everyone just closes the tab. University researchers have proved that Google is getting worse! There was a paper! But the problem with the paper is that none of the search results it evaluates are from Google.

I think it's a bit naive to think that companies like OpenAI will be content with their monthly user subscription fees and not seek to monetize their content through ads. Yahoo and Google didn't have ads either at the beginning (neither did Facebook or Instagram). And the reason why Google became the dominant tech company aka money-maker it is today is because of Adwords.

>Yet these days I find that I often can no longer convince the search engine to give me what I want, even when I know it exists and can describe the shape in detail. These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content.

A couple months ago, I spent a week or two writing some shell scripts to exhaustively mine one of those pdf hosting companies, looking for digital copies of Paste magazine. I only became aware that they might still exist after having spent at least a week trudging through Wayback Machine's archives of the old Paste website. I think I managed to get 8 or 9 issues total.

Search is dead. There was a time when I could probably have found those with a careful Google search in under an hour.

Selling has poisoned human life. As someone who grew on a farm, with a culture that never bothered to sell anything, and never cared to impress anyone, we pitied on the pathetic business/sales people and anyone who tries to impress other through art/acts etc. The street performer such as drama artists and acrobats got some kind give-aways.

Today, I can't watch any TV without immediately realizing that every face I see on TV is forced to sell their expression and talk. They are basically selling, not expressing their true feelings. Every great movie, actor, great singer, great anchor - everyone. There is nothing natural in human interactions any more.

> The LLM providers [are] businesses that have to find a way to earn a ridiculous amount of money for a huge number of big investors, and capitalism does not have builtin morals. What externalities will the broader public end up paying?

I actually have a theory about this. I hate it, but I can absolutely imagine this future.

I'm going to specifically talk about the software engineering industry, but let's assume that LLMs progress to the stage where "vibe coding" can be applied to other areas ("vibe writing", "vibe research", "vibe security", "vibe art", "vibe doctors", "vibe management", "vibe CEOs", etc.)

It only takes a few years of "vibe coding graduates" to be successful in their work to create a new class of software engineer - this is in fact what AI companies are actively encouraging / envisioning as the future. Assuming this happens in the next few years, we're still in the phase where AI companies are burning money acquiring as many of these users as possible.

In about 5 years, some of those vibe coders will become vibe managers, and executives will no doubt be even more invested in LLMs as the solution to their problems.

At a certain tipping point, a large part of the industry can't actually function effectively without LLMs. I don't know when this point will be, but vibe coders (or other vibe <industry>ers) don't have to be a majority, they just have to be a large enough group.

Suddenly AI companies have all their losses called in and they have to pay back their VCs.

LLM usage prices skyrocket.

----

Four things happen across 2 axes:

- [A] Companies that can afford to pay skyrocketing LLM costs, vs. [B] those that can't

- [C] Companies that have reached a critical mass of vibe coders, vs. [D] those that haven't

----

[BC] These companies collapse. They don't have talent and they can't afford to outsource it to LLMs anymore.

[BD] These companies lay off all their vibe coders because they can't afford LLMs anymore. They survive on the talent they retain, but this looks very different if you're a large or small business. Small businesses probably fail too.

[AC] These companies see an enormous increase in costs that they cannot avoid. Large layoffs likely, but widespread vibe coding continues.

[AD] These companies have a decision to make: lay off all their vibe coders, or foot the LLM bill. The action they take will depend on their exact circumstances. Again, most small business in this situation probably fail.

---

The real question is, for the surviving vibe companies [AC, AD]. Will they be able to sustain such high costs in the long-run, and even if they can, will enough be able to sustain them to successfully pay back all the AI companies' losses to that date?

Interesting times ahead, maybe.

I mean sure, but also, I feel like the ability to query an LLM for something is an invaluable resource I never had before and has made knowledge acquisition immeasurably easier for me. I definitely search the web much, much less when I'm trying to learn something.

Some curious misconceptions here about how the search industry works.

There's a very strong financial incentive for ad-powered search engines to keep SEO spam out of search results, because that makes advertisers more willing to pay for search placement. A publicly run search engine would not have those incentives and would be at if anything graver risk of a "tragedy of the commons" type scenario where the engine is overtaken with spam.

Yes, there are perverse incentives to populate search engine results with paid placements, but the best corrective force I can think of is having more competition in the search space. As long as people are willing to try other search engines (spoiler: for the most part, they are currently not), this creates a strong incentive to ensure that paid placements that harm the search experience are kept to a minimum.

...and I think the concerns about profitability of the LLM space is completely missing the larger agenda. Even if public use of OpenAI and its competitors NEVER TURNS A PROFIT, there is tremendous economic opportunity that investors expect to realize from a company with intelligent/powerful LLMs. That is why they are pumping so much money into these companies.

What makes the author think we are entitled to free search? How much would you pay for ad-free search? The “golden era” of free search was just setting us up for the plucking.

> These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content.

> This is just my anecdata

Not a single example, so it's not even that, just vibes

> the past few years. There’s recent science to read about the quality of search.

Let's look at the "science"

> We monitored Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo for a year on 7,392 product review queries.

Oh, so there is nothing about the past few years either. And this isn't "search", but a very narrow category of search that is one of the prime targets for SEO scam, so it's always been bad, and the same incentives made review content highly suspect before any SEO was ever involved.

Which multiple engines can help you here? Which LLMs?