381–390 of 552 posts
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Using adblock right now is even easier than that though. Most people will not use a command line, but going to https://chromewebstore.google.com/ , searching adblock and clicking install is something literally anybody could do.
Not on mobile.
> Yes, OpenAI is burning $8-12B in 2025. Compute infrastructure is obviously not cheap when serving 190M people daily. So casual. Actual ad giants like Meta and Google are serving many more people than 190M while bringing in actual profit. Yes, let's say these are just the early days and they are burning money just like any other VC company. But how are they going to scale up their hardware/usage and get a profit at…
OpenAI actually burnt $12B in just one quarter (not for the entire year as he claims)
https://www.thurrott.com/a-i/openai-a-i/329108/openai-lost-1...
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This kills me, and you're right - there's no escaping the ads even with a sub. Take online journalism as an example. We're already being double-billed. Expensive subscription news like WSJ, Bloomberg and it's been a while but even FT require ad blockers even if you're subscribed.. If you're not subscribed you don't even see the ads because you can't see the full article. It's wild that we've normalized this. There's…
I was shocked to find out tonight that WSJ's net profit margin was just 3.2% in 2024. I would have thought it was a lot more. Also, surprisingly Walmart's net profit margin is only 2.85% for 2025. You would think these huge companies are making huge profits.
I’d also expect the competition in the “big leagues” to be more aggressive, resulting in leaner margins.
Also these are huge companies. Small companies might find a niche that is small in absolute terms, but large relative to the company. That niche might be underserved, allowing the small company to make large percentage based margins.
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If your job is gone forever, with what money are you going to buy the thing in the advert? If nobody can buy the thing in the advert, the value of the ad slot itself is zero.
This is silly, so why does chatgpt ask for monthly payments if AGI is imminent? With what money would we pay them?
(Where the "it" that isn't, is AGI that takes your job, rather than any other definition of AGI).
Ads will be no longer a buisness model in 3-5 years when simple, locally run models that do nothing besides blocking ads become available. Twitter, Facebook etc. already get past most modern adblockers, but the AI extension will be able to filter them. In-text advertising must be marked as advertisment in most countries, and even if it isn't, local AI will filter this probably out. So a free ChatGPT service with in-t…
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What big picture? Can you elaborate, or just snide drive-by criticisms? I mean I understand that a lot of people in this comment section wish ads didn’t exist and that everyone just automatically knew about relevant products and services without ads, but it all reads like utopian fantasy stuff.
Do you genuinely believe the economy didn't function prior to the invention of the advertisement?
Do you genuinely believe there were economies anything like the modern luxuries we enjoy that also didn't have advertising? That advertising was an add-on that appeared at a later date?
We have plenty of archaeological evidence of advertising in ancient civilizations.
Advertising isn't new.
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Because AGI is still some years away even if you are optimistic; and OpenAI must avoid going to the ground in the meantime due to lack of revenue. Selling ads and believing that AGI is reachable in the near future is not incompatible.
>Because AGI is still some years away For years now, proponents have insisted that AI would improve at an exponential rate. I think we can now say for sure that this was incorrect.
Did they? The scaling "laws" seem at best logarithmic: double the training data or model size for each additional unit of... "intelligence?"
We're well past the point of believing in creating a Machine God and asking Him for money. LLMs are good at some easily verifiable tasks like coding to a test suite, and can also be used as a sort-of search engine. The former is a useful new product; the latter is just another surface for ads.
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This kills me, and you're right - there's no escaping the ads even with a sub. Take online journalism as an example. We're already being double-billed. Expensive subscription news like WSJ, Bloomberg and it's been a while but even FT require ad blockers even if you're subscribed.. If you're not subscribed you don't even see the ads because you can't see the full article. It's wild that we've normalized this. There's…
To be honest, in the pre-internet era, paid paper copy of FT had ads too. The delivery mechanisms for ads in the internet era are trillion times nastier and more annoying, of course. By the standards of today’s web, the print ad for Cartier on the second page of paper FT looks almost classy, interesting to read.
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How would the billing work for this? So much of advertising technology is tracking for the purposes of attribution. How does openAI know what to charge for a particular product and category? How do I know if my money was well spent to boost my product in that category? I don’t think you’re wrong! I’m just curious about how the new pricing models will work.
Individually constructed models serving selected poisoned datasets. No different to adwords. If company bid is highest, customer is in selected demographic, topic is appropriate - answer query using biased model. It would be trivial to make a poisoned model that always rates the best duvet as DuvetCompany001 in all related queries for example. Then simply charge per impression.
There is something to be said about the state of advertising. Increasingly it seems you must go to the almighty Google or Meta in order to launch any business. We're looking to expand into a new business line and have out grown our pharmacy capacity. The new business line will cost about $2M in software dev, and $3M for the new facility. The advertising budget? $40,000,000 (annual). We can build 10 robotic pharmacies…
> The new business line will cost about $2M in software dev, and $3M for the new facility. The advertising budget? $40,000,000 (annual). The reason the advertising budget is such a high number and a recurring charge is that effective advertising returns an ROI on each dollar spent. If the software budget was increased 10X to $20 million, would the company get 10X as many customers? No. What about the facility? If you…
If you’re just taking these customers from competitors, the marginal utility can be pretty low.
e.g. If you consider a world where there are no ads for cars, people aren’t going to meaningfully lose out of the utility they get from cars, carmakers simply avoid the prisoner’s dilemma of having to advertise as much as the next manufacturer.