This is the part I find most perplexing: Search is the crown jewel of Google. It's wild that they're risking its reputation for an unhinged AI feature. They've spent decades building trust in Search. Trust is easy to lose, and hard to regain once you've lost it. It just doesn't seem worth it.
Yeah, def eating the seedcorn on some level.
I also wonder if they feel that they dominate search so completely that there’s no credible alternatives?
I also wonder if they think they can get training/use data so much faster this way than with small pilots that it’s worth the reputation cost.