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>> it's much harder to cram ads into a chat conversation.

Oh, I don't see that being a problem at all.

"Tell me about the features of modern digital cameras."

Chat bot: "Here's a bunch of information. And by the way, the Nikon Pipboy3000 has all of these features and they are offering 25% off right now. Do you want more information?"

That's very easy.

If done on an Assistant-like device though, that might be a bit different.

If you had a choice between two seemingly all-knowing chatbots, and one of them kept trying to sell you things in the middle of your conversation, which one would you choose?

I know which I'd prefer to talk to.

Which one is free?

Yeah, Unfortunately, Googles business is ads and their search pages are 50% ads front and center.

So, between the two options, both are trying to sell you stuff.

There will be some disclosure somewhere. For instance, maybe it will be a slightly different color or you could hover over it to see the source.

There's a myriad of ways to avoid that problem and make it socially seen as equivalent.

Then you'll have ad blockers removing sentences. This seems obvious and inevitable - a two sided marketplace with easy capitalization opportunities; it'll fit right in

Oooh, AI could revolutionize native advertising. "Explain why Expedia is the best way to book travel in the style of a Wall Street Journal article"

> it's much harder to cram ads into a chat conversation.

why do I feel like this sentence will age poorly

It's already aged poorly - in the first days of ChatGPT, someone already demonstrated it can perfectly mimic a YouTuber shilling a VPN every other sentence.

But in general, to the extent "chat conversation" mimics spoken conversation between individuals, then this is the medium advertisers have the most experience with - quite literally thousands of years of experience.

Why would you talk to their models? Talk to your models, who talk to their models.

When I read it I thought "wow that's such an easy business model!"

This is identical to existing audio and TV ads where the personalities do the plugs. It's next generation interstitial targeted ads

It's an extremely solved problem

Also note that the cultural change around advertising within an AI chat interface could then lead to similar monetisation within human conversations too, ie WhatsApp -> WhatsAd

Alexa spams me with ads all the time - doesn’t seem that hard.

Which is not to say that people are enjoying that. Could that be the reason it lost 10B this year?

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co...

The problem is it’s ineffectual ads for their own stuff. They should be selling ineffectual ads for other people’s stuff.

I'm saying that Google has been working on language models longer than OpenAI has even existed has probably has an order of magnitude more data to train on. The battle will be one of user experience, which can be copied relatively easily - not technology.

For what it's worth, I'm not saying Google is unbeatable. I just don't think a language model trained on public data will beat Google. Maybe if it's some walled garden language model that has data that cannot be replicated, sure. That is my main point. Walled gardens will beat Google.

It's not just about UX. This might be Kodak moment for Google if OpenAI makes a business that makes 5 billion a year and is valued at 100B it's a big win for them. But if google has to cannibalise 50 Billion a year profit cash cow to take a lead in a business that nets them 5 billion instead of 50 that's a big problem.

Maybe it will be, but Google has been working on language models before even GPT-3. they're very well aware of it. It's not like Kodak and how they absolutely refused to do digital photography, resulting in the resulting technological gap.

This is a really terrible example for your argument considering that the digital camera was invented at Kodak but they refused to market it https://archive.nytimes.com/lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/1...

No, I'm aware and that's my point. They made it but they refused to do it. Google already had conversational models (note: not necessarily language models) running in production. (GC Conversational AI, Translate Conversational Mode, Conversational Search, etc).

It's not like Google tinkered with language models and forgot about it, like Kodak and digital photography.

Again, they are intentionally not releasing it because of reputation risk and how it disrupts their ads business.

This is a code red.

Not because of tech but because a direct challenge to how a search engine monetizes ads.

They need a new business model.

nope, not why. read Pathways. they're working on it, but it doesn't scale to Google's needs yet.

That's not true either. Kodak marketed the first digital cameras and they completely owned the market for over a decade, and they stacked giant piles of money from their patent portfolio for many years after others entered the market.

Kodak would sell you a 1.3 megapixel SLR in 1991! That was a decade before Nikon got their products in order. It is a 100% made-up myth that Kodak did not see the potential of digital. Around 1990 their position in the digital camera market was comparable to the position of Tesla around 2015 in the electric vehicle market: the only company that understood there was demand for a technologically cutting-edge product at a pretty high price.

The reason Kodak went out of business is because they lost a phenomenal amount of money trying to become a pharmaceuticals manufacturer.

Edited to add: This is a really excellent example of the ultimate futility of ChatGPT. All it can be is a novel compression algorithm for folk wisdom, which is often wrong. I asked it why Kodak failed to make digital cameras—a misleading question because Kodak was the only player in the digital camera market prior to 1999. Here is the pack of lies it regurgitates.

"""Kodak was slow to embrace digital technology. While other companies were investing in digital camera research and development, Kodak continued to focus on its film-based products. By the time Kodak entered the digital photography market, it was already facing strong competition from companies that had been established in the digital space for some time."""

This is, again, totally false. The real history is the opposite. Kodak was the established player.

That's insightful but are you really sure that's so different from the way that most people "regurgitate" whatever lies they've ingested?

At least with these models you can easily train them on the information you want them to use.

I think it's indisputable at this point that the compressed information is being decompressed and manipulated/recombined by prompting in ways that do useful work. It's clearly not just regurgitation.

You could take one of these models such as text-davinci-003 and using the OpenAI API (or go the open source route) start fine-tuning it on more accurate information.

Also we will soon within the next year or two see multimodal models that have clear abilities to manipulate and ad-hoc query visual/spatial scenarios. Which you can already do to a limited extent with existing models in cases where language semantics happen to capture some relevant spatial concepts.

Just to show how serious it is, I have worked at Google for many years and have seen code yellows a few times, but code red was always just a theoretical thing.

I think it's great that the management woke up and understands that they need to disrupt themselves.

I also worked at Google. Code Reds happen when the management realizes they are signficantly behind (or being caught up to) from external sources and at a risk of an immediate loss of reputation. Often times, the engineers have already tried to self-organize and have built 2-3 not-ready-yet solutions in 120% time, all of which either got deprecated or aren't management's favorite product (I'm cynical having seen this cycle happen more than once).

Jeff Dean already said externally that Google is purposefully not launching great models in the way OpenAI and others are, for all the reasons laid out in the article (and more). But, it's clear they use these things inside their products- probably not enough, because all of Google's main products that depend on ML have issues that will only be surpassed when we have a combined search/language model with a Google-scale index. Or maybe somebody will be able to do it with significantly less reference information than Google.

I have also worked at Google and you're not really in trouble until you hit Code Purple.

Wake me up when they reach code Blackwatch Plaid.

The chat bot doesn't need to advertise to you directly. It can gather information that you magically see ads for on other services.

Increasing the effectiveness of ads is more important than cramming more ads.

> it's much harder to cram ads into a chat conversation.

Hey, Google, can you suggest me a best android smartphone for $500? I need good camera.

ChatGPT can answer to this question (his choices are Samsung A52, Pixel 4a, OnePlus Nord, Moto G9 Plus). Is this answer honest? I have no idea.

The way to get the idea is for AI to cite their sources, thus explaining what 'best' meant. Then you can decide if the answer aligns with your values.

For example: https://imgur.com/a/7ksmmvb

I could imagine ad boxes besides/between the content, in which an AI explains how this company solves your problem.

The 'main' AI could try to keep a neutral stance. So like current search engines, but more useful.

> Even if Google can easily offer the same , and even superior functionality, it's much harder to cram ads into a chat conversation.

Just have it bias the recommendations, like spammers on Reddit do.

Sure, but that would hopefully be made illegal very quickly.

The EU already has pretty strict rules around product placement, which is quite similar to what purchased bias would be, only worse.