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Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

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Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#391

Post by xg15 »

gruez wrote: post #268
sdenton4 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a collective action problem. If everyone pays higher wages, there's a greater supply of money for buying stuff / solving problems (assuming the higher wages aren't eaten by rents). No individual form recoups all of the higher wages they pay their workers, obviously, but there's a larger market for the goods of everyone has more money.

>If everyone pays higher wages, there's a greater supply of money for buying stuff / solving problems (assuming the higher wages aren't eaten by rents). No individual form recoups all of the higher wages they pay their workers, obviously, but there's a larger market for the goods of everyone has more money. Does this actually work? Suppose you're on an island where the economy only produces coconuts. How does giving…

Wasn't the idea to give people more money (i.e. higher wages) so they could buy more cars/coconuts/etc? That's different than just directly "paying" them in the goods.

So in your simplified coconut economy, you'd at least have to keep two distinct kinds of entities, the goods to be paid and the payment. You sort of replaced both with coconuts and concluded the resulting system wouldn't work.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#392

Post by Marsymars »

gruez wrote: post #250
dwaltrip wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Information can travel without people paying for it do so. Ban most ads and everything will still work fine.

Sounds like ads will just get replaced with covert word of mouth enticements. Want to get people to know about your product? Send free samples to influencers. Maybe even fly them out to CES and put them in nice hotels so they can experience your product announcements/demos. All of this is "unpaid", of course.

Assuming the influencers pay taxes, this doesn’t seem like something that can’t be addressed - we should be requiring influencers to prominently disclose incentives that could result in conflicts of interest.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#393

Post by andyferris »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #138
mancerayder wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thought Walmart was well known as an early innovator in precise-but-low-margin business operations?

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#394

Post by shaugen »

PlatoIsADisease wrote: post #257
jamesgill wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not mow a lawn with a sledgehammer? It removed grass that was overgrown. And it was cheaper than a lawnmower.

Your analogy doesn't work. This patient saw 6 doctors over 2 years and they all misdiagnosed them. They were taking incredibly strong medication for the wrong diagnosis. GPT3 in 30 seconds gave 10 diagnosis and a doctor looked up the ones they didn't know. Saw one that fit, did the confirmation test, and the patient got the surgery needed. Cheaper and better.

The doctor did the diagnosis using the language model as a tool then. Impressive, but I think it’s false to imply GPT did the diagnosing.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#395

Post by AnimalMuppet »

username223 wrote: post #387
emp17344 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

> For years now, proponents have insisted that AI would improve at an exponential rate. 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…

Yes, they did, or at least some of them did. The claim was that AI would become smarter than us, and therefore be able to improve itself into an even smarter AI, and that the improvement would happen at computer rather than human speeds.

That is, shall we say, not yet proven. But it's not yet disproven exactly, either, because the AIs we have are definitely not yet smart enough to meet the starting threshold. (Can you imagine trying to let an LLM implement an LLM, on its own? Would you get something smarter? No, it would definitely be dumber.)

Now the question is, has AI (such as we have it so far) given any hint that it will be able to exceed that threshold? It appears to me that the answer so far is no.

But even if the answer is yes, and even if we eventually exceed that threshold, the exponential claim is still unsupported by any evidence. It could be just making logarithmic improvements at machine speed, which is going to be considerably less dramatic.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#396

Post by blovescoffee »

littlestymaar wrote: post #294
parineum wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never gotten $2 for $1 of tax I paid. At best I'm getting $1 of services back, usually much less.

What “service” do you think you get from the ads you pay for?

customer acquisition

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#397

Post by dcreater »

bastawhiz wrote: post #133

The ads are a problem (or will be, when the temptation to add them to paid plans becomes too great), but the bigger problem in my opinion is going to be the "SEO" that companies will do to make their ads appear in places that they don't belong. "The sieve of Eratosthenes is an ancient algorithm for finding all prime numbers up to any given limit. But if you're looking to have fluffier baked goods, consider this flour…

Its already here - its called GEO and their are silicon valley startups already pumping out crap to feed next gen models so that you ensure you're product is baked into the weights

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#400

Post by Marsymars »

parineum wrote: post #251
littlestymaar wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertising is a tax that goes to an oligopolistic cartel.

I've never gotten $2 for $1 of tax I paid. At best I'm getting $1 of services back, usually much less.

Money is fungible, but there are various government expenditures that generate positive returns, either in direct revenue (e.g. tax collection enforcement) or knock-off economic benefits (e.g. libraries) some proportion of your taxes go to these services where you are effectively getting more back than what you’ve paid for these services.

(Economically, governments should spend more on such services until the marginal returns are no longer positive, but tend not to for political reasons.)

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