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If instead of building LLMs, tech companies had spent billions of dollars designing new competing search engines that had no ads but might take a few minutes to run and cost a few cents per query, would the result have been more or less useful?
I think that would require text comprehension too. I guess it's an interesting question if you can build an AI that can comprehend text but not produce it?
3Karl Krueger
My impression is that the decline of search engines has little to do with search ads. It has more to do with a decline in public webpage authoring in favor of walled gardens, chat systems, etc.: new organic human-written material that once would have been on a public forum site (or home page!) is today often instead in an unindexable Discord chat or inside an app. Meanwhile, spammy content on the public Web has continued to escalate; and now LLMs are helping make more and more of it.
But most of LLMs' knowledge comes from the public Web, so clearly there is still a substantial amount of useful content on it, and maybe if search engines had remained good enough at filtering spam fewer people would have fled to Discord.