‘A decent job’ is really subjective here. You don’t get to see the pictures from the article it’s summarizing, which may be ok for something as routine as a Starlink launch, but doesn’t help for a hurricane forecast where you want to see its path on a map etc.
I rarely just want an answer when I am doing a search. But when I do I generally care more about accuracy than I am willing to trust a LLM.
This whole product category is barely a year old and you’re pointing out its (real) limitations?
If we’re talking about the viability of the search ads business in the next few months, sure, those are good reasons people will stay with traditional search and therefore be monetizable.
But as an industry trend, I think search will be 100% LLM intermediated pretty quickly. Pics of a subject, projections of hurricane routes… I’d be very surprised if both aren’t provided by LLMs within 12 months.
But won’t LLMs be monetized in the exact same ways search has been? If you’re asking Bing Chat instead of searching Google for the best hotels in a city, you bet people are gonna wanna pay to make sure their name comes up.
If anything, I can see this poses more of a risk to websites than to Google. You’re still querying a knowledge graph representation of the internet, it’s only really the last step (clicking a link to a third party website from the SERP) that disappears.
AI can clearly move past these limitations, but it won’t be an LLM it will be some other technique.
If anything in the next 12 months I expect LLM’s to get worse in many areas as people start doing the equivalent of SEO to get LLM’s to say whatever they want. It’s GPT 5.0+ vs companies trying to sell stuff etc.
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‘A decent job’ is really subjective here. You don’t get to see the pictures from the article it’s summarizing, which may be ok for something as routine as a Starlink launch, but doesn’t help for a hurricane forecast where you want to see its path on a map etc.
I rarely just want an answer when I am doing a search. But when I do I generally care more about accuracy than I am willing to trust a LLM.
This whole product category is barely a year old and you’re pointing out its (real) limitations?
If we’re talking about the viability of the search ads business in the next few months, sure, those are good reasons people will stay with traditional search and therefore be monetizable.
But as an industry trend, I think search will be 100% LLM intermediated pretty quickly. Pics of a subject, projections of hurricane routes… I’d be very surprised if both aren’t provided by LLMs within 12 months.
But won’t LLMs be monetized in the exact same ways search has been? If you’re asking Bing Chat instead of searching Google for the best hotels in a city, you bet people are gonna wanna pay to make sure their name comes up.
If anything, I can see this poses more of a risk to websites than to Google. You’re still querying a knowledge graph representation of the internet, it’s only really the last step (clicking a link to a third party website from the SERP) that disappears.
AI can clearly move past these limitations, but it won’t be an LLM it will be some other technique.
If anything in the next 12 months I expect LLM’s to get worse in many areas as people start doing the equivalent of SEO to get LLM’s to say whatever they want. It’s GPT 5.0+ vs companies trying to sell stuff etc.