An educated guess is they're doing a similar number of searches today.

More to the point it's trained on copyrighted material, so why entertain any use at all on that front if anything.

If it's trained on the world's information, give the world the model.

It doesn't need a tech company to pilfer everything and charge X if we're going to ignore the IP.

Mitigating seemingly has devolved to trade wars and protectionism.

The genie is out the bottle with AI though. So perhaps decentralisation of it puts us all on a new level playing field.

And in a more indirect way, spamming Google's autosuggest feature to shape what people search for, though that perhaps is more open to factual/real-world information.

Github stars is akin to 'link popularity' or 'pagerank' which is ripe for abuse.

One way around it is to trust well known authors/users more. But it's hard to verify who is who. And accounts get bought/closed/hacked.

Another way is to hand over the algo in a way where individuals and groups can shape it, so there's no universal answer to everyone.

You'd want to discard a lot of the noise in the bottom 20% of linking power. You want to focus more on the 'trust' factor.

A lot of the time other web stores can offer the same value.