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Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

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Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you genuinely believe the economy didn't function prior to the invention of the advertisement?

I'm baffled that so many people think advertising is a recent invention. Do you genuinely believe there were economies anything like the modern luxuries we enjoy that also didn't have advertising? That advertising was an add-on that appeared at a later date? We have plenty of archaeological evidence of advertising in ancient civilizations. Advertising isn't new.

I didn't mean to imply it was a recent invention. However, the almost total centralization of advertising in a few companies on the internet IS new. Their parasitism and malevolent monopolistic omnipotence is pretty obvious to anyone who runs any kind of business with an internet presence. This severely inflates advertising costs and transfers profit that should be going to businesses who actually add value to companies that simply exploit their control of the platforms. Competition being introduced into this space, which at this point is only possible via government force, would make advertising cheaper and bring more exposure to companies and their products, which I fail to see as anything but a good thing for the economy.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you genuinely believe the economy didn't function prior to the invention of the advertisement?

Possibly? There have been advertisements for at least 2500 years. It's very likely that as long as there has been an economy as such, there have been business owners promoting themselves.

Right, but the unprecedented control of the public discourse on the internet by just a couple megacorps PREVENTS businesses from promoting themselves, unless they pay through the nose for the privilege. This destroys small competitors by design and leads to more and more monopolization of every industry, which is an absolute nightmare scenario for everyone involved in the economy but a tiny handful of people.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you genuinely believe the economy didn't function prior to the invention of the advertisement?

Yeah they probably had fewer advertisements back in the good old days, but they also had a much smaller economy, producing a whole lot less than we produce today. [1] And you might not like everything about the world today, but living in a vibrant economy where people create wealth by building new businesses has led to more comfortable lives for the large majority of humanity. [1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher…

All these hyperscalers do is control the internet and suck money from companies that actually add value via that control. I can name on one hand the amount of successful products GOOGLE has natively launched (without acquisition). This predatory behavior has the opposite effect on the economy you're claiming here.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t assume that at all. I’m saying that they just need to capture the vast majority of people, which has happened many times. For instance, Linux is available to everyone and would end a lot of frustrations and headaches they currently experience with macOS and windows. But for many reasons it still remains in the low single digit percentages when it comes to adoption, a lot of which is inflated by the steam deck…

> Linux is available to everyone and would end a lot of frustrations and headaches they currently experience with macOS That is a very bad argument for the AI thing, because as a Linux fan (started in the late 90s with Linux) I am using a Macbook because the Laptop story on Linux is not at all a success story. The headaches macOS causes would just be exchanged for the headaches Linux does.

But that is entirely my point. You are merely trading headaches off because a solution like “running your own local LLM“ is never going to be as turnkey as simply paying a subscription and throwing down your questions on ChatGPT. Certainly not for the “average” user. It’s not a real solution. They will accept tons of compromises for it to be that simple.

They want an up-to-date answer with a modern/user-friendly interface. ChatGPT is as simple as Google search, I’ll give them that. Go to the site-> type -> receive an answer (of varied quality to be sure). We have seen this over and over again. You can’t throw the average person in front of LM Studio, tell them to go to town, and expect them not to open a browser and fire up ChatGPT at the first sight of that interface. You’re placing too much value in local control/customization for the “average” user.

At the end of the day a computer is “the thing that gets you to the thing.” Most people want it to just do that as intuitively as possible. Local control and customization more often than not bumps against that. It’s a decision that compromises ease of use for functionality, something that you and I value but most people do not.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube premium is not ad-free.

It is. I don't why people say this. They even include their own version of sponsor block, which is generous, because technically sponsor segments aren't even part of youtube, they are purely the creator deciding to make the ad part of their content. Also, just to put it out there, many creators would likley be able to cut sponsored content if the 40% of viewers not viewing ads paid up. Not every creator is a greedy r…

Creators can also stop uploading videos if they are not OK with adblock users viewing them. We would still have more than enough videos to watch if all profit-motivated creators stopped and I'm not sure the average quality would be any worse.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi is a niche product at best, with revenue literally orders of magnitude lower than Google's.

Yes, but it is still a valid counterexample to: > I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers

I don't think a seven your old company is a counterexample to the inevitability of anything.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#527
post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't. Both perfectly competitive markets and monopolistic markets are part of the broad term capitalism. Capital consolidates over time and seeks to influence policy-makers to create anti-competitive regulations. Every single time.

Like most words, capitalism has multiple definitions. Among the popular ones, the one that is about capital doesn't concern itself with markets, only capital, so you are quite right that any kind of market goes. It could even be centrally planned! But another popular definition is about the "invisible hand". Rent seeking is absolutely considered to be at odds with the "invisible hand". This is most likely what the pa…

> And no doubt there are a bunch of other definitions that aren't so popular, so the parent commenter could even be using one of those. It might even be his own pet definition that he just made up on the spot right now.

This is an absolutely insane take if you want to be taken seriously in a conversation. Making up definitions on the spot and "getting to choose what a word means" is deliberately acting in bad faith.

Rule #1 of logical debate is to agree on definitions, otherwise you're just yelling past each other.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#528

I do not understand why this is a big deal. There is no world in which ads are embedded in LLM answers, because you'd need another LLM to determine whether the "placement" was correct and included all the information that the advertiser wanted (and it still won't work 100%). They are putting ads on the side, like they've always done, leveraging all the tech that already exists to do this. This is pretty much a no-bra…

Why is this a problem? You don't need an LLM; you need a "model for detecting whether and where the given context appears". We're so used to LLMs now that we forget these NLPs problems have been worked on for a long time and they don't require a huge computational beast and it takes a few ms to run (on only the response, while it's being streamed).

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#529
post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like most words, capitalism has multiple definitions. Among the popular ones, the one that is about capital doesn't concern itself with markets, only capital, so you are quite right that any kind of market goes. It could even be centrally planned! But another popular definition is about the "invisible hand". Rent seeking is absolutely considered to be at odds with the "invisible hand". This is most likely what the pa…

> And no doubt there are a bunch of other definitions that aren't so popular, so the parent commenter could even be using one of those. It might even be his own pet definition that he just made up on the spot right now. This is an absolutely insane take if you want to be taken seriously in a conversation. Making up definitions on the spot and "getting to choose what a word means" is deliberately acting in bad faith.…

> Making up definitions on the spot and "getting to choose what a word means" is deliberately acting in bad faith.

Not quite. Not taking the time to understand what someone means when they use a word is acting in bad faith. Using a word as you understand it, even if that does not match how others understand it, before the word is contextually defined cannot be in bad faith. Nobody can read minds. It is impossible for one to predict how the reader thinks the word is defined. You can only work with what you know. Fundamentally, the onus must be on the reader to ensure that they have full knowledge of the author's intent.

> Rule #1 of logical debate is to agree on definitions

Agreed. The bad faith actor with the username antisthenes that I replied to earlier failed to do that, putting in absolutely no effort to find the necessary common ground. He assumed the definition and then came up with a ridiculous comment built up around that false assumption. Hence why I called him out on his bullshit.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#530

We need to massive restrict when and where ads can be shown in all aspects of our society. No ads in ai at all. Ever. No targeted ads, no unskipable ads, limit ratio of ads to content in video, no roadside billboards, reign in the size of ads on buildings. Ads are a blight on our society and purging them from many areas will greatly improve quality of life.

“Only on TV and radio. And in magazines and movies and at ball games, on buses and milk cartons and T-shirts and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams. No, sir-ee!”

Simpler times…
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