You can even see some of this play out a bit over the course of the web's nearly 30 year history. 20 years ago, informational websites tended to be brief, highly structured, and minimally chatty. Nowadays, people produce walls of text that you have to dig through to find the actual content. Why the change? Search engine optimization. Which I'd argue is an example of essentially the same folks who give us AI basically dragging us back to a world where natural language dominates. Not because it's actually better for anyone, but because it's what they can more easily build a one-size-fits-all algorithm around.
But we clearly have an ouroboros situation. If publishers lose views, they lose money and the ability to craft good information. Less new info to incorporate into LLMs.
LLM training over the internet corpus has really been a massive heist. Pulling a wool over publishers' heads, undercutting their business, hoarding the information.
But it's really unavoidable at this point. Everything has been democratized: compute on cloud platforms, data via Common Crawl, OSS algorithms and tool-kits. No one can put a stop to this, and there's powerful economic incentives to actually get some benefit out of the hundreds of billions that have been poured in already.
What I wonder though is - we've been a year and a half into the LLM craze and we still don't see a really good information processing system for them. Yes, there's chatbots, some that let you throw in images and PDFs.
But what we need is more like a ground-up rethink of these UIs. We need to invent the "desktop" of LLMs.
But the keys here, I think, are that
a) the LLMs are only part of the solution. A chat interface is immature and not enough.
b) external information is brought in by the user, and augmented by a universe of knowledge given by the provider
c) being overly general is probably a trap. Yes, LLMs can talk about everything - but why not solve a concrete vertical?
Semantic search helps with a part of this, but is just one component.