BrightonSEO: AI, large language models and the future of search

Wow, that was an experience. Claimed to be the world’s biggest search conference it was certainly impressive. The Auditorium was massive and all the sessions I went to were very well attended. Lots of the buzz was obviously about AI, there seems to be a fear that Google (and every other major corporation) is going to automate everything and this could be the beginning of the end for most of us. The mantra of one of the speakers was “If it can be automated it will be automated” and if you think about it, we’ve been dealing with these kind of step changes since the dawn of the industrial age and AI is just another leap forward to possibly the next “age” in our development.

There was some disgruntlement on the way the LLM’s (Large Language Models) have harvested all the work we’ve put onto the web since the beginning of it all and interesting figures were thrown about eg. The $60mil Google pays Reddit, Inc. annually and the “Strategic Partnership and licensing agreement” The Financial Times signed with OpenAI…all the data has to come from somewhere.