In a rather casual but strong revelation, Kailash Nadh, CTO of India’s largest broking company, Zerodha, told AIM that he has stopped Googling for technical topics in the past year or so. 

“I’ve stopped Googling technical stuff over the past year. I interact with a chatbot and save minutes to hours every single day,” he said. 

Google Search, No More? 

When asked if there would be a future where we move away from Google Search, the answer was affirmative. “I think so,” he said. 

Nadh explained some of the challenges involved in searching for technical solutions on Google Search. A user must go through several pages and read hundreds of comments to find the information that can potentially help solve the problem. 

“They’re [ChatGPT and other chatbots] so powerful that you dump the stack, and they’ll immediately point out, saying you should explore this. That’s me saving 45 minutes on one problem, so I don’t even Google technical queries anymore,” said Nadh.  

He believes that by quickly providing relevant insights, these AI tools can save considerable time, reducing the need for extensive web searches. This brings forth the problem of Google search slowly becoming irrelevant. 

The Dead Internet Theory 

“Is search changing? I think absolutely, for multiple reasons,” said Nadh. 

Citing the ‘Dead Internet Theory’, a concept that circulated the internet in the late 2010s discussing how bots and AI-generated content drive a majority of the internet traffic and content, Nadh believes that with the advent of LLMs, this phenomenon is going to increase exponentially. 

He anticipates that LLMs will populate tons of articles, blogs, and websites, further amplifying this trend.

Speaking about how bots have filled the internet, Nadh believes that AI agents will also dominate the internet, something he had witnessed as already happening. At present, social media is filled with tons of bot-generated content and activity. 

“On social media, especially after the explosion of LLMs, there are lots of bots interacting with bots. You see this on Reddit and Twitter threads, and it produces no value. It’s just a lot of noise.” 

Bots and agents are already in the picture, receiving instructions from people and executing tasks on the internet. Siri, which Nadh squarely calls ‘quite dumb’, exemplifies this. With the potential for malicious actors to unleash bots to disrupt discourse, a drastic change in the quality of search is observed.

Source: X

Nadh foresees a lot of garbage driving search traffic. “I think traditional search will kind of die because of the huge quality issue,” he said. Traditionally, search was a ‘discovery problem’, with users going through every web page to find the relevant information, which was a ‘non-ideal’ solution to a knowledge problem.

“If you have a certain question and you get an immediate answer, that is the easiest way to gain knowledge,” said Nadh, who believes that search will move towards a direct question-and-answer format with website citations. 

That is precisely what Perplexity AI is doing. 

The New Era of Search Begins

Perplexity, the AI answer engine, is all the buzz. Co-founded by Andy Konwinski, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Aravind Srinivas, the company recently raised $63 million at a $1billion valuation. Since its launch, the platform has received over 1 billion queries (in 15 months) and serves 169 million monthly queries. 

The AI-powered answer engine, which has over 10 million monthly users, is a platform that entails what Nadh spoke about – solutions with citations. Perplexity is also emerging as a probable Google alternative. 

With AI now powering search platforms, including Google, with its search generative experience, arises the question of AI hype and whether the mad rush to implement AI is justified. 

AI Hype?

Nadh highlighted the emergence of implementing AI technologies, sometimes without thinking through the problem. “AI should not really be looked at as a solution chasing a problem. You can’t predict all possible scenarios, so one has to be very careful [before adopting],” he said. 

When asked if AI was a bubble and the current scenario simply a part of the hype circle, Nadh said, “Are we in the middle of an AI hype cycle? Absolutely. Like with any other technology, when there’s a breakthrough, there’s a lot of hype. But are we in the middle of an AI bubble where it’ll go bust, and there’ll be no AI? No.”