Yea, like their failed video shorts in an attempt to compete with YouTube (which I also don’t use anymore). Basically they both claim user engagement is the user watches like 10 seconds of a video, which is hard to move away from in that time.

Their main audience isn’t the end user, but the shareholders. All that matters is they can say they are still “growing”. Which is why they don’t care about making things worse. Same goes for Meta. If something succeeds, it’s a happy accident secondary to the goal. Each of these companies did have a good initial idea that was fundamentally good and better than the competition, but ultimately will not last forever for reasons like this. Something else will eclipse them in time. History is full of corpses the likes of these companies. Recent tech ones include IBM, HP, and Microsoft. All big (or moderately big) players today sure, but not what they were at their prime and not close to the “main” ones anymore.

Even people who use AI in search would fall into that trap. The output is one thing, how you take it is another. I sounds like people mostly don’t check sources, which is the biggest problem. Not saying that person does or doesn’t check sources. Aside from that, Google forcing AI into search is fundamentally the opposite of their business model. If they don’t direct people to sites to buy stuff, how do they expect the sites that they are scrapping to survive? So they scrap and don’t pay and kill the source due to excessive energy demands? Only like Amazon could survive that. Google’s search should be a utility and Google should be broken up. In the meantime, I highly recommend people use DuckDuckGo or StartPage or Kagi (paid), or any other search engine that hasn’t been on a mission to destroy SEO in favor of advertising and AI.

Yea, and the main discovery being transformers (GPT predecessor). That allowed for the groundbreaking technology of AlphaFold to come into being, for which a Nobel prize was awarded to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper (who just left Google DeepMind to join Anthropic).

Let me start off by saying I think Google should be broken up. I really don’t like that company. But I and glad that the publicized research that they have done has lead to benefits for humanity. Like they discovered the underlying technology behind GPTs, being transformers back in 2017. And then an extension on that being AlphaFold. I think those applications are great, like some others for the use of AI. I don’t think that using AI to call people criminals and lock them out of their account is a good use of the technology, and then not budging when those people are found innocent (there are many news articles on that topic). Google needs to be broken up and their search made into a public utility.

They’re surely juicing the numbers that they show investors. It’s all about showing that they are still growing in some way or another. Nothing else matters to them. Much to the detriment of the users. I moved away from Google many many years ago. Have been moving away from Reddit over the past several months as well.