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Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

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Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#461

Post by Vortigaunt »

aniviacat wrote: post #385
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…

Alternatively, DRM for websites will start being a thing and remove any possibility of blocking ads.

Yeah some form of google's Web Integrity API will be forced one of these days

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrit...

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#462

Post by yalogin »

OpenAI has to be in panic mode, because google is stealing its market. Google for the big apple slice. Anthropic’s got the coding market mindshare. OpenAI has a decent chatbot share but I am sure it’s a declining business. They have fully squeezed everything out of the trump alignment, not sure there is much left there either. Also musk is probably going to get the federal government llm service money. They have to go vertical, and that is the reason why they are throwing shit at the wall with Johnny Ive and hardware.

I was initially rooting for OpenAI hoping it can challenge google and Apple. However they showed to being unscrupulous and seem to have a moral compass at the same level as meta.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#463

Post by dyauspitr »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #458
dyauspitr wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads are what capitalism runs on. It would be next to impossible for a new business to get off the ground without ads.

I’m not really against ads. I think the problem is in the influencer style business model. People are making a living fighting to get clicks by driving negative emotions. That’s the problem. ‘Influencer’ should not be a legitimate job. There is definitely a way to allow business to advertise without the negative externalities. It just requires regulation, which is basically impossible in the modern political climate.

This whole economy and way of living has turned into people selling themselves in any way possible. Regular folks couldn’t do that in the past but now everyone can mass sell themselves. It’s a sorry state of affairs and I hate influencers as much as the next person but everyone is struggling. I don’t know what the solution is but maybe completely shutting down social media or making it so everything online is deanonymized.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#464

Post by pdntspa »

gruez wrote: post #241
csense wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertising spend being too high is a symptom of a supply glut. Too many products in the marketplace, not enough consumers to buy them. In a different world where there are higher wages, more people would have more spending power. Then companies wouldn't have to spend as many dollars on advertising, which they could split between higher wages, higher margins and lower prices. Alas, the short-term single-firm directio…

>Maybe Henry Ford was on to something when he shocked the world by paying his employees enough to afford the product they were making (more than doubling many workers' wages)... That's a nice story to tell, but the economics never works out if you do the math. Whatever extra wages you pay, you only get a fraction of that back in increased sales. How much percent of a worker's income do you think is spent on a car? As…

Why do you argue against paying people more when we are stuck in a society that increasingly fucks over workers with blithe logic and one-sided presentations of data?

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#465

Post by pests »

simianwords wrote: post #356
ben_w wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

To bring it to fruition.

They had claimed money would be worthless, etc, all investors should consider it a donation in a post-AGI world, blah blah.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#466

Post by majormajor »

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…

Let's say you skewed income distribution a bit more like 1950s US, when high marginal tax rates resulted in more equal distribution of revenue through mechanisms like deductions or simply not taking that extra bump from 3 to 4 million. Now the upper 1% has lower income, but they were already mostly not-limited in purchasing power by their income. The upper 5-10% gets more. They go out to eat more, etc, etc.

We tried that experiment after passing "soak the rich" taxes in the early 20th century, and it seemed to work out pretty well for economic growth and living standards. But then we moved back towards "let there be oligarchs with immense wealth" instead. One of the claims was that the "investments" from allowing the powerful to keep most of the revenue streams for themselves would foster enough development to make it more than worthwhile, but instead... the broad base of consumer spending power has tanked, so businesses to supply the masses haven't found spending power to justify new investment/development outside of ad-powered ones participating in an arms race for the constricting consumer spending power that remains (or those industries benefiting from wildly subsidized-in-weird-ways spending like healthcare/pharma). And so it has also inflated asset classes across the board as there aren't enough startup ideas to eat up all the investments because of the general decline in spending power. Which hurts spending power further. (IMO the ability to capture higher and higher amounts of corporate profits as personal income also correlates to the massive financialization, outsourcing, and other short-term number-juicing moves we've seen.)

We can point to a lot of problems that have occurred from taking revenue shares away from the average worker, so it shouldn't be rocket science to think that returning a greater share of revenue to workers would return some purchasing power and guide the economy back towards development and growth instead of zero-sum asset bubbles.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#467

Post by majormajor »

gruez wrote: post #292
roughly wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Suppose you're on an island where the economy only produces coconuts. This is why nobody takes economists seriously. What you lose in simplifying down to this model is literally everything. The coconut economy has zero predictive power. In the real world, distribution effects dramatically affect the functioning of the economy, because workers are also consumers and owners of capital are siphoning off the purchasing…

>This is why nobody takes economists seriously. What you lose in simplifying down to this model is literally everything. The coconut economy has zero predictive power. A simplified model is needed otherwise rigorous analysis becomes impossible, and people make handwavy arguments about how paying workers more means they can spend more, which means factories, and it's a perpetual growth machine! >we’re already massivel…

> No we're not. If we weren't, we shouldn't have seen the massive inflation near the end of covid. The supply disruptions hit almost immediately, but it wasn't until the stimmy checks hit that inflation went up.

What? The first Covid stimulus checks were April 2020. 271 billion in 2020 here per here: https://www.pgpf.org/article/what-to-know-about-all-three-ro.... 135B of the second round by Mar 2021. The third started about then. Inflation - and consumer activity in most areas - was low because nobody was going anywhere still, but at least we did a fair job of avoiding mass unemployment and homelessness.

Then inflation started accelerating during the economy's broader reopening in April 2021 (2.6 -> 4.2 percent from March). It didn't peak until near the end of 2022. Those stimulus checks were LONG gone by then for most people, since a huge portion of the country lives paycheck to paycheck, and the stimulus checks weren't available to people making more than 80-100k (single or avg-per-person in a married couple), which is the higher-income demographic that would have the disposable income to really drive inflation across the board by a "let's buy stuff we wouldn't otherwise" splashy purchase.

Instead, inflation was driven by people getting back out and doing/buying all the shit that had all been scaled down. The first stimulus checks didn't drive it because people weren't purchasing as broadly yet, and were still more in panic mode. Textbook bullwhip effect; at steady state we produced more than enough and never saw shortages, then in Covid demand types and volumes shifted enough to cause shortages of certain things and surpluses of far more other "non-quarantine consumer" things, so production changed, and then when things started to go back to normal ALL those things got hit again. I don't know if I'd agree that we're "massively" overproducing everything now that we're not in a quarantine scenario again, but the consistency of supply of most normal things suggests a lot of excess capacity in the system to absorb normal fluctuations in a way that nobody ever has to think about where their next roll of toilet paper is coming from again.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#468

Post by majormajor »

gruez wrote: post #291
sdenton4 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how we had a major boom in middle-class wealth int he US post WW2. If you are only selling coconuts, a single raw material, yes, you will run into supply constraints such that prices go up. But that isn't how economics works. Your zero-sum economics example is only applicable in short-term scenarios: over the longer term, new industries develop to solve persistent problems that people are willing to pay to so…

>This is how we had a major boom in middle-class wealth int he US post WW2. The fact that Europe got bombed no doubt helped too, same with the elites being concerned that communism was on the rise and giving workers a better deal in an effort to stave that off. >Your zero-sum economics example is only applicable in short-term scenarios: over the longer term, new industries develop to solve persistent problems that pe…

> The fact that Europe got bombed no doubt helped too, same with the elites being concerned that communism was on the rise and giving workers a better deal in an effort to stave that off.

Workers got a better deal because the US intentionally passed massive top-end marginal tax rates pre-WWII with the goal of leading to less income-hoarding (or at least more charitable giving etc) at the top-of-the-top.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#469

Post by majormajor »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #457
gruez wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is how we had a major boom in middle-class wealth int he US post WW2. The fact that Europe got bombed no doubt helped too, same with the elites being concerned that communism was on the rise and giving workers a better deal in an effort to stave that off. >Your zero-sum economics example is only applicable in short-term scenarios: over the longer term, new industries develop to solve persistent problems that pe…

It's a frequent refrain, but I actually don't believe that blowing up European factories would really make Americans materially wealthier.

It smells of the "if we go break the windows and sink the yachts of all the billionaires, it'll create a lot more jobs!" logic that the top-0.1%-of-earners doesn't seem to endorse...

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#470

Post by majormajor »

gruez wrote: post #287
tjr wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the economy is 100% coconuts — all supply is coconuts, all demand is coconuts — then coconuts are all. Business owners sell coconuts in exchange for coconuts in order to acquire more coconuts. Employees are paid in coconuts which they trade for more coconuts. Paying workers more coconuts gives them more of what they want, which is coconuts, that they turn around and spend on coconuts.

That's exactly the problem. At the end of the day, unless you increase production of "stuff" (or coconuts), there isn't going to be magically more "stuff" (or coconuts) to go around just because people are shuffling "stuff" (or coconuts) around.

Nobody will increase production of stuff if all the money is increasingly concentrated into a shrinking percentage of people who have far more than they can spend on stuff.

That's how you get high asset inflation and "K-shaped" stuff as the rich increasingly look for any value-storage vehicle to "invest" in, since they can't get a return on producing stuff to sell to the people with less money...

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