But since Google is adding LLMs to search, an LM competitor might not win still.
> lucrative queries
Also the hardest for an LM.
I predict this won’t end well for anyone. Google will destroy a bunch of their own value preemptively self-disrupting and burning a ton of cash only for everyone to discover that it’s not lucrative to use an AI to tell people the distance to the moon. Viagra and insurance queries will stay valuable and be least useful for a LM to disrupt. Google will maintain their market share, at the expense of more cost per query, so they’ll purge more of the loss-leaders across their consumer offering. We’ll all discover that an LLM isn’t great for search and better integrated into Gmail and similar.
I would add that it needs to be more than just good, it also needs to be cheaper for mass adoption.
Spoiler: classic search is at least cheaper (old post, but relevant: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/the-inference-cost-of-search-...). The thing is it cannot get that much cheap without disrupting earning expectations from hyperscalers.
Note that you need to replace search on the lucrative queries, stuff like you want to buy a product or want to know about nearby open stores, those are the queries Google focuses the most on and will be the hardest to replace them on.