As LLMs become the go-to for quick answers, fewer people are posting questions on forums or social media. This shift could make online searches less fruitful in the future, with fewer discussions and solutions available publicly. Imagine troubleshooting a tech issue and finding nothing online because everyone else asked an LLM instead. You do the same, but the LLM only knows the manual, offering no further help. Stuck, you contact tech support, wait weeks for a reply, and the cycle continues—no new training data for LLMs or new pages for search engines to index. Could this lead to a future where both search results and LLMs are less effective?
I haven’t looked into many LLMs, but Microsoft will use your data for training the next version of Copilot. If you’re a paying enterprise customer, then your data won’t be used for that.
I suspect Google is also using every bit of data they can get their hands on. They have a habit of handing out shiny new stuff in exchange for your data. That’s exactly why Android and Chrome don’t require your money.