This kind of cynicism is wild to me. Of course most AI products (and products in general) are for end users. Especially for a company like Google--they need to do everything they can to win the AI wars, and that means winning adoption for their AI models.
This is different. AI is an existential threat to Google. I've almost stopped using Google entirely since ChatGPT came out. Why search for a list of webpages which might have the answer to your question and then manually read them one at a time when I can instead just ask an AI to tell me the answer?
If Google doesn't adapt, they could easily be dead in a decade.
That's funny. I stopped using ChatGPT completely and use Gemini to search, because it actually integrates with Google nicely as opposed to ChatGPT which for some reason messes up sometimes (likely due to being blocked by websites while no one dares block Google's crawler lest they be wiped off the face of the internet), and for coding, it's Claude (and maybe now Gemini for that as well). I see no need to use any other LLMs these days. Sometimes I test out the open source ones like DeepSeek or Kimi but those are just as a curiosity.
If web-pages don't contain the answer, the AI likely won't either. But the AI will confidently tell me "the answer" anyway. I've had atrocious issues with wrong or straight up invented information that I must search up every single claim it makes on a website.
My primary workflow is asking AI questions vaguely to see if it successfully explains information I already know or starts to guess. My average context length of a chat is around 3 messages, since I create new chats with a rephrased version of the question to avoid the context poison. Asking three separate instances the same question in slightly different way regularly gives me 2 different answers.
This is still faster than my old approach of finding a dry ground source like a standards document, book, reference, or datasheet, and chewing through it for everything. Now I can sift through 50 secondary sources for the same information much faster because the AI gives me hunches and keywords to google. But I will not take a single claim for an AI seriously without a link to something that says the same thing.
Given how embracing AI is an imperative in tech companies, "a link to something" is likely to be a product of LLM-assisted writing itself. Entire concept of checking through the internet becomes more and more recursive with every passing moment.
