The point of this thread is that you cannot replace search engines with an LLM. If your example is an LLM using a search engine as a tool call, you have not replaced the search engine. It’s still there.
Yes. An external search engine is still there, for now.
But the user doesn't necessarily know anything about that, and they don't necessarily care.
If/when the time is reached when external search engines are no longer present in the LLM loop, it seems likely that regular folks won't even notice this shift. As long as the answer-making machine keeps making answers, they won't have any reason to pay attention to this kind of back-end minutiae at all.
