Most of AI usage could be easily (with a little bit of effort) replaced by just searching for the info you need, but those days search results are so poor that asking AI gets so advantageous for the average user (that don’t care / don’t know about privacy and other costs and risks that come with it)
Do you think they did it on purpose?
I like to think so.
The entire premise developing agi isn’t about a “new scientific breakthrough” as much as it is a way to surveil and profile people.
with web search, you have the option to opt out of cookies, which basically doesn’t allow trackers to track you on websites. were not even taking into account adblockers such as UblockOrigin or privacy badger, which has been an ongoing war with big tech.
Anyways, with LLM’s, they have control of your prompts, they have access to your account and they can target advertisements or sell your data to the highest bidder.
So, when google announced that search will be depreciated and replaced with their Gemini AGI, that to me was the first real indicator that their intentionally making search shitty to boost usage of their AI.