as Dr. Bender says upthread, the Rethinking Search paper just says this explicitly, also AMP, etc. I only mildly edited their figure here

The shift to "search journeys" is just another way of referring to "whole life immersive surveillance" where the intention is to slowly train you to expect more and more of your personal information to be visibly injected into search results as a surface for "personalization" and eventually move towards "zero-query search" where advertisements-i-mean-helpful-information are proactively volunteered to you.

this language appears in full form as early as 2018 and was chilling even then:

The zero-query search paradigm can be expressed with the slogan “the query is the user.” In practice, the context of the user is used to infer information needs. (Entity Oriented Search)

There IS NO LLM USE not associated with the project to seize all information as a product. That is the WHOLE gamble being made that is driving all those billions into getting as many people as possible dependent on the most preposterously expensive and inefficient model of computing ever devised. It is only worth it if the upside is owning the whole economy.

Every step you take towards building LLMs into your daily habits and work ratchets the spring tighter on the mousetrap until, surprise! It clamps shut while your whole ass is wrapped around the cheese. Don't make me laugh with local models nonsense, if you think that those don't get deprecated the moment they pose the slightest whiff of a threat to the profit model - meta isn't releasing weights to be nice, it's to capture labor and control the tooling space. Don't be a sucker.

@joshbuddy @jonny

Also almost every time I see local models mentioned it's someone using them to derail a conversation about the harms of LLMs. Makes them a very useful tool for those big companies to keep doing all the damage they want and then just have someone say "but local models" when the companies' extremely antisocial policies are hilighted.