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I feel this. I had a very productive convo with an LLM today and realized that a huge part of the value of it was that it addressed my questions in a focused wa

I feel this. I had a very productive convo with an LLM today and realized that a huge part of the value of it was that it addressed my questions in a focused way, without trying to sell me anything or generate SEO rankings or register ad impressions. It just helped me. And that was incredibly refreshing in a digital world that generally feels adversarial. Then the thought came, when will they start showing ads here. I like to think that if we learn to pay for it directly, or the open source models get good enough, we could still enjoy that simplicity and focus for quite a while. Here’s hoping!

danenania 1y ago
The "good" thing is this is all way too expensive to be ad-supported. Maybe there will be some ad-supported products using very small/cheap models, but the leading edge stuff is always going to be at the leading-edge of compute usage too, and someone has to pay the bill. Even with investors subsidizing a lot of the costs, it's still very expensive to use the best models heavily for real work.
- aylmao 1y ago
  Subscription services can sell ads too. See Hulu, or Netflix. Spotify might not play "radio ads" if you pay, but it will still advertise artists on your home screen. These models being expensive leads me to think they will look at all methods of monetization possible when seeking profitability. Rather than ads being off the table, it could feasibly make ads be on the table sooner.
  - danenania 1y ago
    Maybe it could happen, but the revenue that can be made per user from ads is basically insignificant compared to the compute costs. They’d be pissing off their users for a very marginal benefit.
- toxik 1y ago
  It is guaranteed that the models will become salespeople in disguise with time. This is just how the world works. Hopefully competition can stave it off but I doubt it. It's also why totalitarian regimes love it, they can simply train it to regurgitate a modified version of reality.
- advisedwang 1y ago
  There's no such thing as too expensive to be ad-supported. There might be too expensive to be ONLY ad-supported, but as a revenue stream ads can be layered on top of other sources. For example, see that the ads shown on a $100/mo cable package!
sumedh 1y ago
> I like to think that if we learn to pay for it directly The $20 monthly payment is not enough though and companies like Google can keep giving away their AI for free till OpenAI is bankrupt.

danenania 1y ago

The "good" thing is this is all way too expensive to be ad-supported. Maybe there will be some ad-supported products using very small/cheap models, but the leading edge stuff is always going to be at the leading-edge of compute usage too, and someone has to pay the bill. Even with investors subsidizing a lot of the costs, it's still very expensive to use the best models heavily for real work.

aylmao 1y ago
Subscription services can sell ads too. See Hulu, or Netflix. Spotify might not play "radio ads" if you pay, but it will still advertise artists on your home screen. These models being expensive leads me to think they will look at all methods of monetization possible when seeking profitability. Rather than ads being off the table, it could feasibly make ads be on the table sooner.
- danenania 1y ago
  Maybe it could happen, but the revenue that can be made per user from ads is basically insignificant compared to the compute costs. They’d be pissing off their users for a very marginal benefit.
toxik 1y ago
It is guaranteed that the models will become salespeople in disguise with time. This is just how the world works. Hopefully competition can stave it off but I doubt it. It's also why totalitarian regimes love it, they can simply train it to regurgitate a modified version of reality.
advisedwang 1y ago
There's no such thing as too expensive to be ad-supported. There might be too expensive to be ONLY ad-supported, but as a revenue stream ads can be layered on top of other sources. For example, see that the ads shown on a $100/mo cable package!

sumedh 1y ago

> I like to think that if we learn to pay for it directly The $20 monthly payment is not enough though and companies like Google can keep giving away their AI for free till OpenAI is bankrupt.