Tides of Change

Many of us hate change, especially when somethings going well.

The green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm – Confucius.

That’s the story here too. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not predicting the end of search engines. They are too embedded in our lives.

Just that the signals are so profound that it will never be the same. For those search engines that fail to bend in the wind, will break.

The future will be more about asking, not searching. The future will be answers, not links. Check out the ChatGPT homepage – doesn’t already look familiar? (Wink, wink.)

With this initiative (aeohive), am hoping to document, hypothesise, evaluate and ultimately serve a crowd willing to observe and capitalise on this change.

Lets talk about some more headwinds that supports this notion.

Few happy accidents – Although Deep Learning had some major breakthroughs as early as 2012 (interested? more here) and continued over the years that followed. There was some major inflection points during the period 2019 to 2022 that led to AI and its potential getting some serious investor and consumer attention. The common man started noticing (and even using) to be blown away for the first time.

For the first time, there was trust – We’ve all made fun at Siri for years and talked about how most AI assistants lacked “common sense”. ChatGTP was launched in 2022, and in 5 days it got 1 Million users. Then went on to gain 100 Million users in about 2 months of launching. Phew! Such trust and validation from users are only seen when there is solid underlying matter.

Staying in the arena – Similarweb indicates ChatGTP has 250 Million engaged monthly active users and even some smaller (but promising) players like Perplexity.ai have 10 million active users every month. In the past 2+ years this idea has been in the arena where it has been tried, tested, and validated – an indication they are here to stay.

Witness traditional goto’s change – Most of us reading this (in 2024) are all from the Googler generation where we default to a Google search for almost anything. Are you noticing a shift to that? I and many I know no longer use Google on a daily basis instead go to ChatGPT or Perplexity when they want to learn something. Our gotos are shifting, simply observe.

Change is the only constant in life, yet we often remain unaware of its silent transformations, shaping us in ways we cannot see until we pause to reflect. – Inspired from Heraclitus

Changing Marginal cost (ingredients that drive such changes – compute, energy) – there has been a lot of innovation in improving the efficiency with code, hardware and energy in the past decade. This particular advancement is the nitro boost to make Answer Engines the next frontier.

We are now ready for hands off, conversational searching – after decades of futile efforts, we are there. It was like trying to cook without the right ingredients. Now with powerful AI models, the compute, and attention of the most talented minds – we are ready. Once the answer engines are matured for general purpose searches (asking), then it will be easier to hook them onto IoTs to support humans. This wont be quick, but we have started to see how this is taking shape.

What then?

Circling back to our original thought, when the way we ask / search changes, the way we optimize (market) has to change too. Stick with us through this journey as we learn, explore and share. Our efforts will be shared through this newsletter, and later published / archived on this blog.

Thanks for spending your time reading, stay tuned for more.

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