151–160 of 763 posts
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In the 1980s, the American Heart Association listed many contributors to heart disease. A missing one: smoking. At some point, it was revealed that Big Tobacco was a major contributor to the AHA. They now list tobacco as a big risk factor.
"friends of the earth" was originally funded by the oil CEO Robert Anderson to oppose nuclear power.
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You won’t just be viewing an ad, you will have to actively engage in a minute long sales talk with the LLM.
In my head, it'll be like the high pressure timeshare sales pitches or the dreaded car sales transactions, where they pull out all the tricks to convince you to buy something you don't actually want or need, regardless of whether you can afford it.
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> I think people who kept saying there is no moat in AI is about to be shocked at how strong of a moat there actually is for ChatGPT Given one can (at least for the moment) export one's entire chat history from ChatGPT, what exactly would stop a ChatGPT user from switching to an alternative if the alternative is either better, or better value?
The answer is friction. What % of this billion of users will bother to export their chat history (which is already a lot) and import another another llm. That number is too small to matter.
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> I think people who kept saying there is no moat in AI is about to be shocked at how strong of a moat there actually is for ChatGPT Given one can (at least for the moment) export one's entire chat history from ChatGPT, what exactly would stop a ChatGPT user from switching to an alternative if the alternative is either better, or better value?
No one normal will do that. And I'm betting that OpenAI will get rid of that functionality soon.
Google Chrome did it. They can do it again.
I guess this could also have a knock-on effect, in that ChatGPT will steer it's users away from topics advertisers might find distasteful Like it might not want to tell you about negative health effects from McDonalds, if McDonalds becomes a major source of ad revenue
In the 1980s, the American Heart Association listed many contributors to heart disease. A missing one: smoking. At some point, it was revealed that Big Tobacco was a major contributor to the AHA. They now list tobacco as a big risk factor.
Big Tobacco never funded the American Heart Association.
AHA never purposefully ommited smoking as a cause of heart disease. In fact, they were at the forefront of the research to prove a link between smoking and heart disease. They met with the The Surgeon General in 1961 to request the formation of the Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health. Report can be viewed here - https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/tobacco/nnbbmq.pdf
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> - Extremely personal data on users - Novel way of introducing and learning more about sponsored products Doesn’t anyone think this is really, really bad idea? We managed to radicalise people into the rise and fall of entire countries through analog ads, can you imagine how devastating it would be to infuse every digital product with all that?
No, I don't think it's really bad. Most of the world doesn't care. Only in a small tech niche on the internet do they care a lot.
Paying $200 for Pro at the moment. If a single ad shows up anywhere I'm out. In the free tier? Well.. it's sad but inevitable.
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I agree 100% with you. In this niche forum people keep saying “there’s no moat”. But the moat is the brand recognition, if I ask my 70yo mum “have you heard of Gemini/Claude” she’ll reply “the what?”, yet she knows of ChatGPT. Does Coca Cola have a moat? Some company could raise $1B to create a new cola beverage that beats Coca Cola in all blind tests imaginable yet people will keep buying Coca Cola. Did people switc…
I wouldn't call ChatGPT "brand recognition". People know the term ChatGPT, but I don't think they associate it with OpenAI or any company in particular, in the same way that people might associate Civic with Honda. Instead they'll associate it like they do the terms Bandaid, Kleenex, etc., as a catch-all term for LLM chat interfaces, regardless of who is providing the service. When OpenAI starts ads, I imagine people…
- ~1 billion users in just 3 years - Extremely personal data on users - Novel way of introducing and learning more about sponsored products - Strong branding for non-techie people (most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are) - An app that is getting more and more addictive/indispensable I think OpenAI is going to kill it in ads eventually. This is why Meta and Google went all in on AI. Their lucrative di…
My guess: they would lose a ton of cultural cachet.
Turning OpenAI into an ads business is basically admitting that AGI isn’t coming down the pipeline anytime soon. Yes, I know people will make some cost-based argument that ads + agi is perfectly logical.
But that’s not how people will perceive things, and OpenAI knows this. And I think the masses have a point: if we are really a few years away from AGI replacing the entire labor force, then there’s surely higher margin businesses they can engage in compared to ads. Especially since they are allegedly a non-profit.
After Google and Facebook, nobody is buying the “just a few ads to fund operating costs” argument either.
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Spinning up an all-new ad network is pretty tough. I would think OpenAI would need to beat Meta/Google on basics like CPM in order for the network effects to make it desirable for ad vendors over Meta/Google. Ad budgets are fixed and zero-sum and vendors (in my head, I don't know) would prefer to spend their money on the best network giving the best results. I don't know if ads in LLM chats can get there.
I'm betting that they can. Here's an idea that just popped into my head: ChatGPT shows a sponsored entry in chat history list with a colorful border around it to get users to click. This product is something that ChatGPT knows the user desperately needs from previous chats. The user can chat directly with the product and learn more about it. The advertiser specifically sent OpenAI information (like a RAG) about their…
OpenAI just has to be transparent and they’ll have 100% of our funding.