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Google has sent internet into ‘spiral of decline’, claims DeepMind co-founder (www.telegraph.co.uk)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/technology

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Google has plunged the internet into a “spiral of decline”, the co-founder of the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) lab has claimed.

Mustafa Suleyman, the British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind, said: “The business model that Google had broke the internet.”

He said search results had become plagued with “clickbait” to keep people “addicted and absorbed on the page as long as possible”.

Information online is “buried at the bottom of a lot of verbiage and guff”, Mr Suleyman argued, so websites can “sell more adverts”, fuelled by Google’s technology.

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[–] Chunk 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, if your argument is: "any company that becomes a monopoly will abuse monopoly power", then sure I agree with you. You got me there!

My argument is: "given a reliable financial alternative to advertising, a company will be able to resist enshitification for a long time, as long as there is no absolute tyrannical monopoly."

I assumed the last part was implied and I'm sorry for the confusion!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Makes sense, but yea it didn't really answer the overall question of "if it hits peak market penetration how will it avoid going the Google route" since google also started with the same premise. I suppose the answer is hope it doesn't become a monopoly

[–] SamBBMe 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's also privately owned by one guy, so it doesn't have to submit to investor pressure.

Steam, for example, is basically a monopoly for PC game sales, but hasn't enshittified because it is privately owned.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

While I agree that this does avoid enshitification, it's always possible for a privately owned company to IPO. That's why all of us are even here to begin with

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It's also certainly possible for a privately owned company (even one owned by a single individual) to undergo enshitification, it is only (if anything) less likely.

[–] SamBBMe 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's probably as good as we are going to get.

The best options would be an open source, donation supported search engine, but the money required to host/develop that is immense.

We are all freeloading off of Lemmy right now, unless you are donating to the people who are running the servers. The cost to run a search engine is much higher though -- kagi pays (iirc) double digit cents for each search, even before development costs, with the average user doing 700 searches a month. The costs are way higher.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They can't be spending $70 per user per month, let alone more than that, their pricing won't make sense

[–] SamBBMe 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I looked it up*

https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#kagisearch

It's $.0125, so 1.25 cents not double digits like I thought. They also average 27 searches per day per user. So an average of 821.25 searches per user per month, meaning a cost of $10.27 per month.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, the number just stood out as too high to me