It seems like everyone is so focused on LLMs are magic smartness machines that there isn't much analysis of them as better search (maybe "search synthesis"). And original search was a revolutionary technology, LLM as just better search are revolutionary.
Like original search, the two application aspects are roughly algorithm and interface. Google years ago won by having a better interface, an interface that usually got things right the first time (good defaults are a key aspect of any successful UI). ChatGPT is has gotten excitement by taking a LLM and making it generally avoid idiocy - again, fine-tuning the interface. Google years ago and ChatGPT got their better results by human labor, human fine tuning, of a raw algorithm (In ChatGPT's case, you have RLHF with workers in Kenya and elsewhere, Google has human search testers and years ago used DMOZ, an open source, human curated portal).
Google's "Moat" years ago was continuing to care about quality. They lost this moat over the last five years imo by letting their search go to shit, become focused always on some product for any given search. This is what has made ChatGPT especially challenging for Google (it would be amazing still but someone comparing to Google ten years ago could see ways Google was better, present day Google has little over ChatGPT as UI. If Google had kept their query features as they added AI features, they'd have a tool that could claim virtues through still not as good).
And this isn't even considering of updating a model and the question of how the model will be monetized.
Google search seems to optimize for "What?" (... is the best phone) and the list of results allows some variation, while GPT chats seem to answer "How?" , and tend to give the same average, stereotypical answer every time you ask.
Maybe google has an advantage because it can answer "What?" with ads, but i haven't used chatGPT for any product searches yet
Like original search, the two application aspects are roughly algorithm and interface. Google years ago won by having a better interface, an interface that usually got things right the first time (good defaults are a key aspect of any successful UI). ChatGPT is has gotten excitement by taking a LLM and making it generally avoid idiocy - again, fine-tuning the interface. Google years ago and ChatGPT got their better results by human labor, human fine tuning, of a raw algorithm (In ChatGPT's case, you have RLHF with workers in Kenya and elsewhere, Google has human search testers and years ago used DMOZ, an open source, human curated portal).
Google's "Moat" years ago was continuing to care about quality. They lost this moat over the last five years imo by letting their search go to shit, become focused always on some product for any given search. This is what has made ChatGPT especially challenging for Google (it would be amazing still but someone comparing to Google ten years ago could see ways Google was better, present day Google has little over ChatGPT as UI. If Google had kept their query features as they added AI features, they'd have a tool that could claim virtues through still not as good).
And this isn't even considering of updating a model and the question of how the model will be monetized.