Search Disrupted Newsletter (Issue 18)

Apple’s Ships on Device AI Search

Apple made such a quiet announcement about AI on its device this week that it was almost lost in the flashy “Liquid Glass” UI improvements that were announced at WWDC.

They still have their partnership with OpenAI, and the framework explicitly lets you toggle between the two models.

But this means that every application going forward on your Mac or your iPhone will have native, local “search” and reasoning capabilities as a standard feature.

Additionally, we’re going to see this baked into all of Apple’s first-party apps, like Siri, Maps, and Photos.

I see this as one of the biggest incoming fractures in the search world.

Where in the same way that Apple moves around how tracking, privacy, and data collection have worked on the paid ads front, we’re going to see a similar shift in how search works.

• More local, on-device search
• Less directly attributable search analytics
• Internet search is a feature in every app

Link: Apple’s Machine Learning

Fight! Anthropic vs. Reddit

Reddit just sued Anthropic for allegedly training Claude on user data without permission, calling the “white knight of AI” company anything but that in their filing.

There’s a lot to be cynical about in this filing and tons of weirdness in the details.

• OpenAI and Google are currently paying Reddit millions a year for access to their data
• OpenAI and Google both have agreed to also honor data requests for removal of Reddit content (this is a frequent GDPR concern)
• Reddit has launched its own competing AI search engine, “Reddit Answers.”
• Sam Altman (OpenAI) was previously on the board of Reddit (leaving in 2021)
• Reddit previously promoted a very “open web” ethos, and they themselves benefit tremendously from other people’s work being shared and discussed on their platform.

My personal worry is that we’re going to see a balkanization of the Internet where it’s not possible for new search players to get access to the data they need to compete.

Link: Reddit’s Anthropic Lawsuit

Knowatoa Updates

We shipped a great new feature this week: multi-user teams.

To invite a team member:

1. Login to your existing Knowatoa account
2. Click your email address in the top right of the navigation bar.
3. Choose “My Team” from the menu options
4. Enter the email addresses of the team members you want to invite.

Read the full details here.

Intelligence too cheap to meter

Sam Altman wrote a new post on the “Gentle Singularity,” and it’s a very nuanced take on the future of AI, so naturally, the current human-run Internet took an offhand comment about AI water usage and went nuts.

Ignoring that, the post does a good job of underlying one of the major blindspots that I still have, which is just how much cheaper and more efficient AI processing has gotten in the last couple of years.

The models everybody used for search a few years ago were miraculous at the time and now are literally 1000x cheaper. That’s a cost deceleration curve significantly better than Moore’s Law.

This is why I’m so keen on making sure that Knowatoa is tracking as many different models as possible, as the technology is pushing out into new applications and new services at a wild rate because it’s now so cheap to run.

Link: Sam Altman on the Gentle Singularity

Thanks

Thanks this week to our new video production team…who you may not thank when you see how many new videos we’re making.

p.s. It would really help me out if you could Follow me on LinkedIn