Users sometimes want a factual answer. Usually they want to go to a page. Pages are not just sources of information. People interact with pages to do real stuff connected with off-line activities. E.g. chatty paragraph won't connect me with the government/medical/banking/restaurant/shopping/whatever page I'm too lazy to search for through its own URL and portal.
At best, you can have this: if it looks like the user is typing a question into the search box, an AI-generated side bar can complement the answers.
The web search side of it cannot go away, otherwise you just have a sophisticated Eliza.
If I'm going to see a factual answer, I want external references for those facts before I trust it. I'm likely not a subject matter expert, if I'm asking about something; I can't tell when the AI is bullshitting.
Now if the AI-powered search engine had an intelligent index of all the texts of all the crawled web pages such it could do some basic reasoning about it to serve up those pages based on sophisticated questions (and not simply serve up original prose based on those texts), that could be a game changer.
At best, you can have this: if it looks like the user is typing a question into the search box, an AI-generated side bar can complement the answers.
The web search side of it cannot go away, otherwise you just have a sophisticated Eliza.
If I'm going to see a factual answer, I want external references for those facts before I trust it. I'm likely not a subject matter expert, if I'm asking about something; I can't tell when the AI is bullshitting.
Now if the AI-powered search engine had an intelligent index of all the texts of all the crawled web pages such it could do some basic reasoning about it to serve up those pages based on sophisticated questions (and not simply serve up original prose based on those texts), that could be a game changer.