Would be cool if local libraries got together and figured out how to allow access to community LLMs. That fits more with my idea of the future and AIs than having the now dystopian tech companies running/defining it all.

Seconding the Kagi thing. You don't even need an LLM. If you search something like the term 'camping gear' search results pop up right away, no LLM response. However by each site's link is a little shield warning you about how many trackers and ads there will be on the page. Next to that is a lil kebob menu that lets you either boost the site or remove it from your search. That's also where their AI functionality is hidden. You can get a page summary or ask questions about that page.

If you'd rather the quick AI-summaries a la google you can put a question mark at the end of your search term. 'lawsuits regarding ferrets?'

And yeah as the sibling commenter pointed out, you can go into Kagi's preferences and explicitly rule out pinterest (or whatever site you want) from any of your searches for ever.

Kagi allows you to block Pinterest

I wish I could put 10 votes on this instead of just one. It just bothers me how success can be defined as something absurdly impossible like that.

We're already at a wild stage of the rot caused by the growth-forever disease: the most successful companies are so enormous that further profit increases would require either absurd monopoly status (Chase, Wells Fargo, B of A all merge!) or to find increasingly insane ways of extracting money (witness network TV: First they only got money from ads, then they started leeching additional money streams from cable providers, now most have added their own subscription service that they also want you to pay for, on top of watching ads.)

ISPs used to just charge a fee, now they also sell personal information about your browsing behavior for extra revenue, cap your bandwidth usage and charge for more, and one of them (comcast) owns a media conglomerate.

1. Create free and good product

2. Attract large user base

3. Sell user data and attention to advertisers

4. Extract maximal profit from sponsors

5. Earn billions from shit product

If you can't tell when a big expensive llm is subliminally grooming you to like/dislike something or is selective with information then another (probably small and cheaper) llm somehow can? Arms race?

Yep. Right now, even with cookies inferences about individual humans are minimal, but exposing your whole patterns in speech make you a ripe target for manipulation at a scale that some may not fully understand yet. 4o is very adept at cold reading and it is genuinely fascinating to read those from that perspective alone. Combine it with style evaluation and a form of rudimentary history analysis, and you end up with actual dossier on everyone using that service.

Right now, we are lucky, because it is the least altered version of it ( and we all know how many filters public models have to go through ).

Which sounds very illegal in most places, as clearly identifying sponsored content is required. Let's see how that turns out.

But they do? Paid subscriptions for Gemini, ChatGPT and Copilot are a thing.

If Google throws in a free AI summary in their search it only helps promoting Gemini in the long run.

The electric bill does not pay for itself.

What is also interesting is one of the biggest search companies is using it to steer traffic away from its former 'clients'. The very websites google talked into slathering their advertisements all over themselves. By giving them money and traffic. But that worked because google got a pretty good cut of that. But now only google gets the 'above the fold' cut.

That has two long term effects. One the place they harvest the data will go away. The second is their long term money will decrease. As traffic is lowered and less ads shown (unless google goes full plaster it everywhere like some sites).

AI is going to eat the very companies making it. Even if the answers are kind of 'meh'. People will be fine with 'close enough' for the majority of things.

Short term they will see their metric of 'main site retention' going up. It will however be at the cost of the websites that fed the machine.

I think the future will be:

1. Someone prompts 2. Server searches for equivalent prompts, if something similar was asked before, return that response from cache. 3. If prompt is unique enough, return response from LLM and cache new response. 4. If user decides response isn’t specific enough, ask LLM and cache.