I mean google was always an ad company and search engine. SOOOO hasn't changed much.
Google can still (albeit with enormous difficulty) die as a company. If LLM search eclipses SEO and Gemini doesn't work out they're in trouble.
Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company
121–130 of 178 posts
Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company
#122The explicit ads angle is only half the story. Even without paid placements, these models already have implicit recommendations baked in.
We ran queries across ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity asking for product recommendations in ~30 B2B categories. The overlap between what each model recommends is surprisingly low -- around 40% agreement on the top 5 picks for any given category. And the correlation with Google search rankings? About 0.08.
So we already have a world where which CRM or analytics tool gets recommended depends on which model someone happens to ask, and nobody -- not the models, not the brands, not the users -- has any transparency into why. That's arguably more dangerous than explicit ads, because at least with ads you know you're being sold to.
Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fundamental problem with a lot of this is that the legal system is absolute: if information exists, it is accessible. If the courts order it, nothing you can do can prevent the information being handed over, even if that means a raid of your physical premises. Unless you encrypt it in a manner resistant to any way you can be compelled to decrypt it, the only way to have privacy is for information not to exist in…
> Unless you encrypt it in a manner resistant to any way you can be compelled to decrypt it, In the US you it is not legal to be compelled to turn over a password. It's a violation of your fifth amendment rights. In the UK you can be jailed until you turn over the password.
At Amazon, their travel trainings always recommended giving out your laptop password if asked by law enforcement or immigration, regardless of whether it was legal in the jurisdiction. Then you were to report the incident as soon as possible afterwards, and you'd have to change your password and possibly get your laptop replaced.
That kind of policy makes sense for the employee's safety, but it definitely had me thinking how they might approach other tradeoffs. What if the Department of Justice wants you to hand over some customer data that you can legally refuse, but you are simultaneously negotiating a multi-billion dollar cloud hosting deal with the same Department of Justice? What tradeoff does the company make? Totally hypothetical situation, of course.
Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only is it improbable, it's a complete fantasy. It's not going to happen. And personally, I'm of the opinion that having AI be a constant presence in your life and relying on it to assist you with every minor detail or major decision is dystopian in the extreme, and that's not even factoring in the inevitable Facebook-esque monetisation. >when the world is so gloomy, seek something nice, even if a fantasy I don't…
> I'm of the opinion that having AI be a constant presence in your life and relying on it to assist you with every minor detail or major decision is dystopian in the extreme Could that be because you're putting some extra substance in what you call an "AI"? Giving it some properties that it doesn't necessarily have? Because when I'm thinking about "AI" all I'm giving to it is "a machine doing math at scale that allow…
I can imagine a lot of ways we could be using the new tech advancements of the last decade or two in really great ways, but unfortunately I've seen things go in very bad directions almost every time, and I do not have faith that this trend will stop in the future.
Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company
#125Contextual irony aside, this is a big reason why the proposal of leveraging AI agents for workflow processing in lieu of using them to develop fixed software to perform the same functions has always struck me as weird, and of late come across as completely nonsensical.
If you're paying someone else to run the inference for these models, or even to build these models, then you're ultimately relying on their specific preferences for which tools, brands, products, companies, and integrations they prefer, not necessarily what you need or want. If and when they deprecate the model your agentic workflow is built on, you now have to rebuild and re-validate it on whatever the new model is. Even if you go out of your way to run things entirely locally with expensive inference kit and a full security harness to keep things in check, you could spend a lot less just having it vomit up some slopcode that one of your human specialists can validate and massage into perpetual functionality before walling it off on a VM or container somewhere for the next twenty years.
The more you're outsourcing workflows wholesale to these bots, the more you're making yourself vulnerable to the business objectives of whoever hosts and builds those bots. If you're just using it as a slop machine to get you the software you want and that IT can support indefinitely, then you're going to be much better off in the long run.
Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Unless you encrypt it in a manner resistant to any way you can be compelled to decrypt it, In the US you it is not legal to be compelled to turn over a password. It's a violation of your fifth amendment rights. In the UK you can be jailed until you turn over the password.
At Amazon, their travel trainings always recommended giving out your laptop password if asked by law enforcement or immigration, regardless of whether it was legal in the jurisdiction. Then you were to report the incident as soon as possible afterwards, and you'd have to change your password and possibly get your laptop replaced. That kind of policy makes sense for the employee's safety, but it definitely had me thin…
Totally.
Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if the answer is that it is stored and processes in a way that a human can’t access or read, like somehow it’s encrypted and unreadable but tokenized and can be processed, I don’t know how but it feels possible.
It wouldn't matter of you did all that because you could still ask the AI, "what would my friend Bob think about this?" And the AI, who heard Bob talking in his phone when he thought he was alone in the other room, could tell you.
Right but that’s where the controls could be, it would just pretend to not know about Bob due to consent controls etc, but of course this would limit the usefulness.
Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company
#128- new startup idea: sound proof boxes for all your electronic devices
- put them inside the soundproof box and they cannot hear anything outside
- the box even shows the amount of time for which the device has not been able to snoop on you daily
Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company
#129- new startup idea: sound proof boxes for all your electronic devices - put them inside the soundproof box and they cannot hear anything outside - the box even shows the amount of time for which the device has not been able to snoop on you daily
I already have a refrigerator. Thanks. :)
Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company
#130I’ve moved to Opencode, and I don’t see myself ever leaving it (if there were no alternatives ie AI glasses etc)
I've been using it a bit as well. I'm trying to figure out how they're making money off free tier users though. Any ideas?