google has the ai ability but no one has achieved cost scalability yet

No one doubts their ability. What one does doubt is the willingness of the suits to replace their wildly profitable business model with a new one.

Kodak invented digital cameras but jettisoned it because they ate into its existing business. Will the same happen with Google?

It already has started.

Look at Meta, and how Apple borked their primary cash cow.

Now, mostly due to concerns about state spying, many jurisdictions are passing enhanced privacy bills.

On top of that, the entire planet now wants cash for news listings.

And the EU is repeatedly extending its legislation, making Pii collection and tracking less and less profitable.

The US keeps considering similar bills. Alphabet can lobby all it wants, but even so, these laws will be passed eventually.

Google needs to smarten up.

A very very conservative prediction given the exact same thing happened to IBM, Sun, Burroughs, Yahoo to an extend, and infinitely many others.

I am not totally sure what you mean by an AI-first competitor. Could you give a (hypothetical) example?

ChatGPT can be an example.

Do you need to search and figure things out if you have a personal assistant to do that for you?

ChatGPT already far outperforms google for heavily-SEO’d topics like recipe searches.

Try asking “what herbs and spices go well in a chilli?” in both. I get a sensible, rough answer from ChatGPT within seconds. From Google I get page after page of content farms hiding information in amongst ads and life-story filler.

I wanted to demo it for my wife who was writing a paper on digital media consumption during the pandemic.

She was trying to find poems that went viral during the pandemic. Googling it showed a bunch of mediocre articles or irrelevant news stories

I asked chatGPT and it gave me a list of 10 poems by relatively well known poets. A brief review showed that these poems were, indeed, viral during the pandemic. Saved at least 15 minutes of Googling.

This is going to take a long time. Longer than one would think if one is using the progression of the language model as a basis for this prediction.

There are a lot of pitfalls and erroneous assumptions built into both Google's current search and the information used to train AI/ML models. Two big ones are "assuming that a person searching for something and accepting the answer means it's a successful search" and "assuming a person searching/asking for something actually wants what they're asking for".

I'm a librarian with several years of reference experience under my belt and neither of those things are true. They're both good tools for a well considered and well informed information search, but that 'well considered and well informed' is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Since you have domain expertise, I'd love to know your opinion on searching through "personal libraries" like Zettelkasten (or similar repositories), and perhaps linking that with Internet-scale indexes.

Are there tools that do that well right now? Do you know of (maybe niche) projects exploring such ideas?

Google far outperforms everyone else in AI.

Search is already heavily ML-powered. Right now it’s impossible to provide ad-sponsored fully-AI-powered search and make it profitable. Remember, you are actually not paying for it at the cost, and users that actually click ads are subsidizing you.

But when it will be possible, Google is going to be in perfect position to capitalize on it.

The problem with search that it can be powered by AI, but it is worse now than it was 5 years ago.

It might be ML powered but has that power made it better? Can it actually provide you with useful relevant info without adding “site:reddit.com” to the query?

Google simply can’t monetize chatGPT-like search to the tune of $150B/year.

The current model doesn’t work for this new reality. They’ll have to find a new model. And if history is any clue, the suits will be unwilling to change