I know someone who read a web forum. People wanted an ad free paid version for years, so he eventually added it at a cost of $15 per year. Most users balked at the price. 'Why did you add this if it was so expensive'?
Well it turns out he actually earned more revenue from advertising to frequent users. He was actually losing money on each person who paid, and it was still too expensive!
My point being: I think we might underestimate how much our attention is worth. Most people are not willing to pay as much to avoid an ad as an advertise would pay for you to view it.
Does anyone have experience with Kagi or some background how they pull this off?
The founder was here about a year ago. [2]
In my case, I would be most interested in its ability to assist in my technical queries and replace indexed search entirely.
I made some back-of-the-envelope calculations as https://beta.sayhello.so (based on ChatGPT) results are often better than Google.
The energy alone will be really high for the amount of queries I do in Google. No idea how to make this sustainable.
Hopefully I'm wrong, or more efficient GPUs/TPUs come out in the near future.
What makes you think that getting paid by users will make them give up revenue from other sources?
I am hoping that ChatGPT will also become an API but using the existing ones its relatively trivial to build services. The main challenge for me is that the Codex API has a very tiny rate limit. But anyway text-davinci-003 is very similar in capabilities and output to ChatGPT.
people won't pay for it at the level for it to be sustainable.
I asked ChatGPT about a local notorious politician who was a machine-politics mayor who was a crook, racist and all around scoundrel.
ChatGPT used the local political party “hall of fame” to describe him as a progressive champion of human rights and good government. If I were Exxon, I’d pay a lot to be the source of knowledge for the AI.
Google has some transparency as far as the source. The AI gets to bury the source.