The bet is that the cost for delivering the same results will go down, through hardware or software advancements. This bet still seems reasonable based on how things have gone so far. Providers right now are willing to burn money acquiring a customer base, it's like really really expensive marketing.
The AI lifestyle subsidy is going to end
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Re: The AI lifestyle subsidy is going to end
#12I am somewhat baffled at the economic models of LLMs right now. Ever since MS decided to gift me a copilot on my desktop that appears to have no limits and is entirely servicable for a range of tasks I'm failing to immediately see the monetisation.
I feel like even trying to game the LLM into creating product placement is a relatively complex feat that might not be entirely reliable. Some of the groups who spend the most on advertising have the worst products, so is it going to be successful to advertise on a LLM that is one follow up question away from shitting on your product? I imagine instead of product placement, the token tap might simply be throttled and a text advert appear in the text loop, or an audio advert in a voice loop. Boring, old-school but likely profitable and easy to control. It lets us still use adsense but maybe a slightly different form of adsense that gets to parse the whole context window.
Re: The AI lifestyle subsidy is going to end
#13I don't think this is correct yet. At the moment the various companies are still competing for customers. Model scalability seems to still be improving and local models are still somewhat feasible on high powered devices.
I expect that somewhere between where it is now and superintelligence is where the consumers get cut off from intelligence improvements.
Re: The AI lifestyle subsidy is going to end
#14The bet is that the cost for delivering the same results will go down, through hardware or software advancements. This bet still seems reasonable based on how things have gone so far. Providers right now are willing to burn money acquiring a customer base, it's like really really expensive marketing.
The bet is that costs will go down enough so that ad-supported AI will become profitable. This is not a positive outcome, a large part of the article is about the evils of ad-supported.
Re: The AI lifestyle subsidy is going to end
#15Even if unintentional, pushing of products is already happening. If you ask any AI for a tech stack to create a web app you'll get recommendations for Vercel, AWS and co. This is going to be the new SEO
This is basically the new "nobody got fired for buying IBM".
Re: The AI lifestyle subsidy is going to end
#16The zero-interest-rate money went into stocks. The stocks have now grown to monstrous valuations able to subsidize free products for decades. If in danger, there is a loot of leeway for layoffs in all tech companies. Whatsapp was 10 employees. The subsidy will go on
Re: The AI lifestyle subsidy is going to end
#17So what exactly is the "AI lifestyle subsidy"? The article doesn't seem entirely clear on it seeing as the last line essentially asks this same question. Some friends and I have been taking advantage of cheap GPU time from a company trying to break into that space, and of course lots of AI tools are being sold below cost but is that really it? Compare "GPU time is cheaper" to the classical "$10 steaks delivered directly to your house", I'm never going to get steaks delivered at the real price but I'm still going to rent a GPU when I need it even if the cost is sustainable. All these tools might get more expensive, or the models will get better so you don't need top end one, or maybe we'll just figure out how to run models for cheaper, but real steak prices and the cost of delivery have only gone up. I just don't think this is quite as comparable.
Re: The AI lifestyle subsidy is going to end
#18The bet is that the cost for delivering the same results will go down, through hardware or software advancements. This bet still seems reasonable based on how things have gone so far. Providers right now are willing to burn money acquiring a customer base, it's like really really expensive marketing.
Even if the cost goes down it will not change the fact they need to recoup like a trillion dollars before AI starts generating any profit.
And there's really no timeline for costs going down. It seems the only way to get better models is by processing more data and adding more tokens which is only increasing the complexity of it all.
Re: The AI lifestyle subsidy is going to end
#19I just released a very minor update to one of my iOS apps.
The approval took 3 days. It hasn't taken 3 days in almost a decade.
The Mac version was approved in a couple of hours.
I'm quite sure that the reason for the delay is that Apple is being deluged by a tsunami of AI-generated crapplets.
Also, APNS server connections have suddenly slowed to a crawl. Same reason, I suspect.
As far as I'm concerned, the "subsidy" can't end fast enough.
Re: The AI lifestyle subsidy is going to end
#20The bet is that the cost for delivering the same results will go down, through hardware or software advancements. This bet still seems reasonable based on how things have gone so far. Providers right now are willing to burn money acquiring a customer base, it's like really really expensive marketing.
The bet is that costs will go down enough so that ad-supported AI will become profitable. This is not a positive outcome, a large part of the article is about the evils of ad-supported.
Is that really the bet? Is it not enough for a $20 per month subscription to be sustainable with the free level being a trial for that subscription?