Unbundling of Google
Yev Barkalov
November 28, 2024
In the late 90s, the world was forever changed with the introduction of craigslist and its impact was so imminent that it resulted in, years later, getting “unbundled”. We believe the same is occurring presently but with the unbundling of Google.
Every couple years a new exciting social platform comes around and impresses everyone with how rapidly they accumulate tens of millions of eyeballs. Recently, ChatGPT was the exciting phenomenon and it without doubt opened the world up to a flurry of hundreds of venture backed startups (I’d go as far as to claim it heftily impacted the world for a similar reason as BlueSky but I’m mildly salty Mastodon couldn’t figure it out).
Whether you want to go with the Thiel’ism of avoiding overdeterministic questions or notice a pattern with many things that took place in the past:
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
It’s difficult to put an exact label on the way in which ChatGPT really changed the world but one thing’s for certain: people see computers as easier to talk to than they did before when the only viable chat bots were ones in customer support flows. Similar in tune to how Google profoundly impacted the world when people first saw computers as more capable of understanding what they’re interested in looking for.
Starting with the mission to organize the world’s information and incurring an entire industry to circumvent checks for relevance, Google’s deviated from being the source of truth in our pockets to being the website you go to when looking for the actual website you want to find something on. The first blow was with the initial release of GPT-3 when the world’s information was more conversationally accessible than ever before. We believe another critical blow was with the release of Anthropic’s MCP which is a jab at the same “brain” that fuels Google Cloud Search plus Google Squared. Google will of course always have a place in the world like how Craigslist still exists but, with millions of people opting for an LLM-wrapped Google, times are clearly evolving.
In similar vein to how Jonah Peretti (founder of Buzzfeed) anticipated the division between content and advertisement on the internet to blur, we anticipate the division between humans and autonomous agents on the internet to blur. It follows from how, if there’s a protocol or spec a programmer can follow, it becomes possible to reach a Turing test where it’s nearly impossible to distinguish AI from humans. Sure we technically passed the Turing test a while ago but it’s safe to assume we’ll be repeatedly elevating the bar in a way that’s similar to an “AI of the gaps”.
Let’s for a moment look at history as a horse carriage you (once you lose ahold of) cannot catch up with. It then becomes clear to see people could benefit from improved tooling for grokking and operating the post-GPT web. The future we envision is one where people/computers are able to communicate more fluently on LSD; our progress on this so far includes ethereal browsing plus the capability to DIVE into sub-pages and we’re excited to share some quickstart tutorials shortly!