Apple's on device AI search, Anthropic vs. Reddit, Knowatoa's new team features, and the Gentle Singularity
Search Disrupted
Join thousands of forward-thinking SEO professionals getting weekly insights about AI's transformation of search.
SHARE
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.
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.
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.