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Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

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Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#321

Post by asdff »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #319

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…

Sad truth is vast majority of users today are not savvy enough to install a good adblocker. We live in a bubble here in technology where we assume people know to do things like block ads. Really at this point people don’t know what files are anymore or even what a website actually is.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#322

Post by littlecranky67 »

asdff wrote: post #321
littlecranky67 wrote: post #319

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…

Sad truth is vast majority of users today are not savvy enough to install a good adblocker. We live in a bubble here in technology where we assume people know to do things like block ads. Really at this point people don’t know what files are anymore or even what a website actually is.

True, but some 20 years ago, I already could (and did) use photoshop to cut out the head of a woman (celebrity or from my social group) and put it onto a naked or bikini body of a woman. This is an old problem, but the bar to achieve that was too high and required tech savyness. The second Grok does it on twitter available for every idiot, suddently politicians see this as problematic and want to pass laws against it [0]. My point: Whatever local AI that you will have on your computer or browser, will react to "do not show me ads and filter all product placement in content out" as a single line prompt. And if we won't have a local AI capable of doing it in 5years or more, the whole investement into AI are clearly a bubble and AI will face another winter.

[0]: https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/gesellschaft/ki-kuenstliche... (sorry, german only, but this is an AI thread and you know what to do...)

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#323

Post by luckman212 »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #319

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…

I pray you are right. Still, there's no guarantee that the next business model won't be an order of magnitude more user-hostile.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#324

Post by krackers »

emp17344 wrote: post #288
andy12_ wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The original AGI timeline was 2027-2028, ads are an admission that the timeline is further out.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#325

Post by Havoc »

Ads I'm not to worried about.

It's ads after they've got some sort of lock in that is the problem. e.g. some sort of system that "knows" you and makes it hard to switch to another provider.

Once they've got that hold on you being force fed ads at max rate is guaranteed.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#326

Post by pessimizer »

mmaunder wrote: post #218

I’m fascinated at how out of touch that NYT article is. It’s as if it was written by someone who just spent 3 years on the moon. “The next big thing will be agents: The models will fill digital shopping baskets and take care of online bills. They will act for you.” Golly Mr two times Pulitzer nominee, do tell us more! There is a kind of liberal arts elite that seems to not be using AI very much and not be buying any…

I have no idea why so many people think that an argument that AI works is the same thing as an argument that AI will be profitable.

The better AI gets, the better the training techniques get, and the better the algorithms get will result in fewer processors needed to run something of use. All of the advances will end up in the public domain if not immediately after or before they are even implemented, soon after. There will not be many economies of scale between having 100M customers or 10K customers, so no way to keep out competitors. They will all compete on price. If the models get really, really good, a "good enough" model will end up running on your old laptop and you won't have to pay for anything.

Saying that AI will be productive - which is yet to be seen, I don't know how much polishing or complete rethinking your code will have to go through before it can ship as an actual product that you have to stand behind and support - is not the same as saying that AI will be profitable.

We actually don't even need that many computer programs. Hypothetically, a ton of excess LLM coding supply might allow us to take out a few layers of expensive abstraction from our current stacks, and make more code even less necessary. They kept telling us that all of that abstraction was a result of trying to save developer labor costs, right? If AI is productive and rentiers can't manage to extract that productivity due to competition, that equation changes.

In the end, we say that the dot com bubble resulted in a huge amount of productive capacity that we were later able to put to use. But that doesn't mean that putting a quarter of a billion 90s dollars into DrKoop.com was a good idea; nope, still dumb.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#327

Post by shimman »

parineum wrote: post #256
achierius wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If monopolies are "non capitalistic", then why has every capitalist economy in history had such a tendency towards creating large monopolies? The same cab certainly not be said any those economies producing, say, worker control of the means of production.

Every economy tends towards monopoly because people like power and will corrupt and exploit any system to gain abd hold it. That's a human problem.

Nice and did humans create these markets or were they emitted by the sun?

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#328

Post by Eisenstein »

parineum wrote: post #246
anal_reactor wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that most businesses used to be local. This naturally limited competition and gave your business a chance, even if it sucked. Nowadays the competition is global.

People don't really care to address that most of the mom and pop businesses that went out of business because Walmart/Amazon weren't offering better products or services. They got their products through the same retail suppliers, just at higher costs and the variety of choices was much lower. They also had much less generous return policies. There's a personal touch that people opine for but I think that's rose color…

> People don't really care to address that most of the mom and pop businesses that went out of business because Walmart/Amazon weren't offering better products or services.

In a local mom and pop store, the mom and pop owned the store and were invested in the community, Their money was spent back in the same place it came from. They had a personal stake in their reputation and knew the customers, and the customers knew them. This is how a community operates. You are thinking about it as a dry 'products and services' offering, when it is much more than that. You don't live to buy products and services, you live to do other things, and a community fosters that part of your life. The 'spending money to get things you need or want' part is to facilitate the rest of your life, not the other way around.

> They also had much less generous return policies.

Why is this an issue? People who consistently rely on generous return policies are either buying shoddy goods or abusing it at the cost of everyone else. Figure out what you want before you buy it and then it won't be a problem.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#329

Post by tyre »

throwaway150 wrote: post #36
KellyCriterion wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stumbled upon this one as well, but I do not understand it really: Why is my job safe if Ads prove there is no AGI? Because even if there would be AGI, they could (and would?) serve ads anyway?

Yes, I don't understand it either. I think the opposite is true. If AGI happens and it becomes immensely successful, it would be the best medium to deliver ads and at the same time our jobs wouldn't be safe. Perhaps the people who like that quote can elaborate why that quote makes sense and why they like it?

AGI would be able to exponentially improve at much, much better money making schemes like high frequency trading. It would beat every online business. It would run 24/7/365.26 farming out tens of thousands of conversations at once, customized to the person it's talking to, for sales, supplier negotiations, marketing, press, etc.

Its costs would be frighteningly low compared to human employees, so it's margins could remain fine at lower prices.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#330

Post by Anon1096 »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #32
atorodius wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google realized this a long time ago; there is no ad-free paid version of Google Search. well there is also no 200$/month Google Search subscription

That is exactly my point: there easily could be, but there isn't. Based on how many commenters on HN and similar sites bemoan how Google Search quality has precipitously declined and yearn for the Google of ~10 years ago, I think there'd be nontrivial demand for a $200/month ad-free Google with no-nonsense comprehensive results. Such a product does not exist because it would ultimately be a net loss for Google.

I'm going to guess that a big reason it doesn't exist is because a. people who claim to be willing to pay 200/mo for it won't actually open their wallets given the opportunity, and b. even for the miniscule number of people actually possible in the market to do so, they moan and groan about any perceived problem with the product to the point that it's not worth trying to capture the market. Just look at the comments in this very thread complaining about YouTube Premium and how it isn't perfect because it can't block creator inserted ads. There's no pleasing people. And that's an order of magnitude less than 200/mo.
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