Because it’s so powerful and versatile. The other day my wife took a picture of our living room and chathgpt picked out the perfect rug. That’s both a better search and avoided, say, an interior decorator. In that scenario it’s kinda both.

But only a small part of AI applications are that search-like. I mean we could even argue if this is still only search, but that's semantics and boring. But even if we would, there are a lot more applications than pure search. So the GP's original claim that it's just an improved form of something that doesn't put people out of a job, and also puts large amounts of people out of a job, doesn't make sense. Framing tax advise as "yeah it's just a better way to search tax codes" is in the same boat. It's such a massive improvement of both searching and synthesizing that it's a bit weird to call it that. Like saying a 2026 car is just an improvement of a Model T.