It just goes counter to the way I think about LLMs. It assumes end-products will merely be thin wrappers around an API, perhaps with some custom prompts. It's like thinking of the internet as a faster telegraph, instead of understanding that it's an entirely new paradigm. The most interesting applications of AI will use search as just one ingredient, one input, that will be sliced, diced, and pureed as it is combined with half a dozen other sources of information.
When your intelligent email client uses Gemini to identify the sender of an email as someone in the industry your B2B company serves, deciding to flag the email as important, where is that HTML supposed to go? Where does it go in a product that generates slide show lesson plans? What if I'm using it to generate audio or video? What if a digital assistant uses Gemini as a tool a few dozen times early in a complex 10,000 step workflow that was kicked off by me asking it to create three proposals for family vacations complete with a three 5-minute video presentations on each option? What if my product is helping candidates write tailored cover letters?
It's bad optics for a company just ruled to have acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in "general search services and general text advertising," but worse, it lacks imagination.
