1. They've mostly given up on innovating on computer interface. This LLM craze is in many ways an extension of the previous voice assistant one;
2. LLMs are expensive and they salivate at the idea of you being dependent on them (see cloud storage);
3. They're Google, exceedingly self-conscious and irrational. Managers saw people on Reddit and HN bigging up OpenClaw, Claude, etc and feared they're not 'innovating' enough. So they innovated (copied).

It's all about data collection and controlling access to information freely available on the internet.

They realized there's a subset of Internet users who bypass their ads entirely with adblockers, despite their best efforts to stop that from happening in recent years. That's why they'd rather replace their search engine with Gemini to get folk's personal data that way. It also serves the interest of the billionaires to obscure access to info that would "radicalize" folks, by having a chatbot presenting curated and digested "search results" while keeping tabs on who's asking for such things.

This also seems to coincide with their efforts to lock down Android as well. Can't have folks "sideloading" apps to bypass all of this, now.

Then they'll shut it down for unclear reasons and we can all touch grass.

Similar to the keywords that currently plague the search results on every major platform.

And with no traffic there will be no websites. Just those platforms like amazon, google, facebook and the like.

ah yes that sounds very accessible. very low barrier to entry. you know, like buying some ad space.

They also gain the ability to have companies pay to produce desirable slop machine outputs. The possibilities are endless.

Remember AMP?

I'm not sure if I understand exactly what the endgame is, but that's what it looks like. Maybe they hope that people eventually start posting to Google?