“Replaced Google” is definitely an impact, but it’s nothing compared to the people that were claiming entire industries would be wiped out nearly overnight (programming, screenwriting, live support, etc).

Speak to some illustrators or voiceover artists - they're talking in very bleak terms about their future, because so many of them are literally being told by clients that their services are no longer required due to AI. A double-digit reduction in demand is manageable on aggregate, but it's devastating at the margin. White-collar workers having to drive Ubers or deliver packages because their jobs have been taken over by AI is no longer a hypothetical.

We had this in content writing and marketing last year. A lot of layoffs were going to happen anyway due to the end of ZIRP, AI came just at the right time, and so restructuring came bundled with "..and we are doing it with AI!".

It definitely took out a lot of jobs from the lowest rungs of the market, but on the more specialized / upper end of the ladder wages got actually higher and a lot of companies got burned, and now they have to readjust. It's rolling over slowly still, as there a lot of companies selling AI products and in turn new companies adopting those products. But it tells you a lot that

A) a company selling an AI assistant last year is now totally tied to automating busy work tasks around marketing and sales

B) AI writing companies are some of the busiest in employing human talent for... writing and editorial roles!

It's all very peculiar. I haven't seen anything like this in the past 15 years... maybe the financial crisis and big data was similar, but much much smaller at scale.

>It definitely took out a lot of jobs from the lowest rungs of the market, but on the more specialized / upper end of the ladder wages got actually higher

Effectively all mechanization, computerization, and I guess now AI-ization has done this. In the past you could have a rudimentary education and contribute to society. Then we started requiring more and more grade school, then higher education for years. Now we're talking about the student debt crisis!

At least if AI doesn't go ASI in the near term the question is how are we going to train the next generation of workers to go from unskilled to more skilled and useful than the AI is. Companies aren't going to want to do this. The individuals are going to think it's risky getting an education that could be replaced by a software update. If left to go out of control this is how a new generation of luddites will burn data centers in protest they are starving on the streets.

colleges are seeing apprentices placements drop - why train an apprentice for two years when ChatGPT will do the work for them?

We should be thinking pretty hard right about now why this kind of progress and saving these expenses is a BAD thing for humanity. The answer will touch deeply ingrained ideas about what and who should underpin and benefit from progress and value in society.

I think mostly claims have been around multiplying the efforts of people for now.

If Google hadn't ruined Search to help Advertising perhaps it wouldn't have been such a stark comparison in information quality.

Search was always a byproduct of Advertising. Don’t blame Google for sticking to their business model.

We were naive to think we could have nice things for free.

When google search first appeared, it had nothing to do with advertising. In fact, the founders wrote a paper on why advertising would be bad.

Found the zoomer.

It will be interesting to see how they compare, years from now, when ChatGPT has been similarly compromised.

It might not happen in that way since there are alternatives available. Google had/has a monopoly on search.

For the premium subscribers it'll be good, but they'll sure ruin the experience for free tier just like Spotify cause they just can't keep their business sustainable without showing vc's some profits.

There is little other way of making money from search.

I believe you, and I do turn to an LLM over Google for some queries where I'm not concerned about hallucination. (I use Llama 3 most of the time, because the privacy is absolute.)

But OpenAI is having a hard time retaining/increasing ChatGPT users. Also, Alphabet's stock is about as valuable as it's ever been. So I don't think we have evidence that this is really challenging Google's search dominance.

Google is an ad company. Ad prices are on an auction and most companies believe that they need ads. Less customers don't necessarily mean that the earnings go down, as when the clicks go down the prices might go up (without ad competitors). Ergo, they don't compete (yet at least).

But ChatGPT has really hurt Google's brand image.

Ironically, I was like that for a while, but now use regular google search again quite a bit. A lot of times, good old stack overflow is best.

The questions I ask ChatGPT have (almost) no monetary value for Google (programming, math, etc).

The questions I still ask Google, have a lot of monetary value (restaurants, cloths, movie, etc).

I use Google and it gives me AI answers.

But I agree seems SO often helps more than Google-AI.