Cool, thank you. You seem to know quite a bit about this stuff.
If we do end up at a point without search engines, where AI does the search and summarizes an answer, what do you think their level of ability to tie back to source material will be?
I’m thinking in cases of asking about a technical detail for a hobby, “how do I get x to work”. I don’t necessarily want a response like “connect blue wire to red”. What I really want is the forum posts discussing the troubleshooting and solutions from various people. If an AI search can’t get me to those forums, it’s of little value to me and when I do figure out an answer acceptable to my application, I’m not tied into that forum to share my findings (and generate new content for the AI to index).
Related to that, I’m thinking about these stories of lawyers relying on AI to write their briefs, and the AI cites non-existent cases as if they were real. It seems to me, not at all a programmer, that getting an AI to the point where it knows what’s real and what’s a hallucination would be a challenge. And until we get to that point, it’s hard to put full trust into an AI search.