The problem is choice. I don't care about Japanese/tacos - either would be fine, but Argentine would be better (I have no idea if it is even a thing, but if it is I want to try it). I don't want a chain (well maybe a local chain) - I have plenty of McDonald's near my house if I want that, I want something I can't get near home. Maps will put right at top all the big chains that pay for that top spot and I need to scroll through them. More than once I've seen something that might be interesting but then the map scrolls/resizes and I can't find it anymore.

But you're taking as a given that the AI is going to have any better idea than Google Maps, or be subject to less interference from marketing/paid placement stuff, when like... I'd be willing to bet a small amount of money that it's going to do what you're decrying: it's going to search $localized_area for "restaurant" and if you're lucky, maybe add -chain to it. What you want here are locals notions of what's good and not, and while I absolutely respect the shit out of that (and would love it myself!) I don't really know how to facilitate that at scale without immediately caving to the same negative influences that are screwing it up right now.

Like, really what you're wanting is legitimate information not bound to the whims of advertisers and marketers (and again, to be clear, don't we fucking all) but I don't think an LLM is going to do that for you. If it does it now, and that's a load-bearing if, I have a strong feeling that's because this tech, like all tech, is in it's infancy stage. It hasn't yet gotten enough attention from corporations and their slimy marketing divisions, but that's a temporary state of affairs and has been for every past tech too. Like, OpenAI just closed another funding round and it's valuation is now THREE HUNDRED BILLION. Do you REALLY think they and by extension/as a result, their competitors, are going to be thinking about editorial independence when existing established information institutions already can't?