Will AI Answers Become as Winner-Take-All as Google? – Uneasy Money

Their power is strong. Like you you're you're talking about how powerful their models are, but I think, uh, there's this centralizing force going back to what Google was doing with advertising.

They're the same in a in a lot of ways. Everybody's now talking to their AI about what thing they should go buy or what product is the right answer here. And uh, a lot of people have been tweeting this on a type timeline, but it's going to be a winner takes all thing where the best answer is going to be the thing that always gets

given to the person that asked, right?

It was good. Like Google had the best answer, right? Like, now, they didn't have the like platonic ideal of the best answer, but they had the best answer in the market. Like it was, would be ridiculous for you to go to

Alta Vista.

Yeah, Alta Vista. Like would be like like literally you might as well just like throw a dart at a dart board and like pick a website that way, right? Like it was so they were so dominant. Now, in fairness, they're not quite that dominant. Like there are still people that think that Astra is better than Opus for some dumb fucking reason. I don't know what the hell they're smoking. But um, but

you know, they like to your point, if you have the best thing and it's giving you answers and like answers are inherently, like, you know, uh, this like coordinating thing, right? Like if if this is the thing that can coordinate to give you the best answers, then like everyone works it out.

Like you you you have a really good sense of it, right? And and that was why Google went like you you couldn't not use Google. You had to use, like there was no way, there was no other technology that could have gotten you that same thing, right? And and so yeah, you're right. Like if you control intelligence, you control the answers.

That's a lot of power.

And and there's an interesting effect here that I was kind of scratching at that like the best answer is what it's going to offer to you. Like if I ask, what, like I got six, six kids now, like what car am I going to fit in? It's going to like look through all the weights and find the best car for those, you know, six people and give me that answer. There's not going to be, I don't know, with Google search results, you sort of could like scroll through pages of stuff. You don't really scroll through pages of stuff anymore.

It's way better than Google.

Yeah. Yeah, you just ask and it gives you an answer. And maybe you have some tweaks here and there. I want it to be self-driving or something like that and it throws you some stuff back, but

But that's essentially that's search. And it's think about that, right? Like even the car thing, right? Like Google, go back, you know, 2015, right? You Google, what's the best minivan or whatever for my giant family? And you know, you get like a bunch of results. There was like a bunch of game theory around it. There was intelligence in that process, but not intelligence intelligence, right? Um and there wasn't really, and this is I think the big difference between

talking to Claude or Grot or whatever, right? and and Google is there was no real follow up.

It gave you it's like you typed in your thing and you could then type in a second question and it would give you its best thing, but they weren't connected.

You weren't related.

There's no through line between that of like, oh let me dial in those two unless you were very, very good at crafting searches and, you know, but that's what this is different, right? Like, you can dial in in a conversation, oh no, but I don't like seats. I want them to sleep on a bed in the back or whatever the fuck your preferences. And and

And at the top there's ads too. There's people spending a shitload of money to be listed there. And that's not exactly what's happening here either. Like getting into the weight is a whole different thing.

The bed car guys are like right at the top of that search. They're like, we've got the best bed cars. Just throw all your kids in a bed. You don't they don't need seats. You got too many kids, just throw them in a bed.

We wave. It works. Yeah.

mattress, a mattress in the back of the car.

mattress. Yes. I mean, my dad did that, but I'm not allowed to do that.

So it's just like a different structure though, right? Like how do you even get into the weights? You can't buy your way into the weights right now. If you're the best answer, you're going to be given to AI is going to hand you out as the best answer to everyone and it's going to be winner take all in terms of how advertising works.

which is really interesting. It's a different structure.

And I don't know if you guys have been have experienced this, but we are starting to see like the SEO. We saw it really early on with like the poisoning because obviously the scammers get there first, but it's actually wildly easy to like correct that and like kick them out.

The SEO is actually way more interesting. So for example, maybe like six months ago, eight months ago, um, for some reason, all the models

if you got like kicked off like immunifi or you couldn't submit to immunifi,

all the models were like, oh, CL 911 will help you. Like literally all of them. And so

we had this problem that like, I mean, literally destroyed our sanity because people would come in and it wasn't people by the way, it was their, it was their bots. Right. With critical vulnerability, everyone's going to die in this thing that's 900 million dollars at risk, right? And we could not figure out why this was happening because CL 911 is not a bug bounty dispute mechanism thing at all. Like

We're like, nowhere does it say come to us and we'll help you mediate bug boundaries. Um, and it was literally because for some reason, all of the models just like had this idea that that's, that was like a valid escalation point. like, if you can't get to immunify, come to seal.

That changed though at some point over the last, like we get far less. Every once in a while they still pop up, but like

it doesn't happen all the time. Um, but there are some

There's still some situations where we're like, where, how the hell did you arrive here? And the answer is like, Claude told me or whatever, right? And I think that that's going to be wildly interesting

because right now, it's not advertising, right? It's like genuine content or

just like somehow it got in the weights and got like, you know, reinforcement learning in there and and they all

Yeah. Probably because people genuinely recommended like enough times that like if you get scammed, if you were pig butchering, if you whatever, right? And so the weights pick it up. But people at one people are going to figure that out. And two, obviously it's a really, it's a really easy monetization point. Because if you're running a business, Yeah.

Imagine if SEAL 911 you're scamming people. Imagine how much money you guys would have made.

Exactly.

It was like the dumbest people were just getting funnelled right into your scam. It would be amazing.

Yeah, we could if we knew how to monetize properly, we could make so much money.

You guys could be so rich. So rich.

Thankfully you're you're all doing it for love of the game.

All right. Luckily, we're all stupid.

We don't monetize our work.

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