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Comment by v4dok | Hacker News Reader

Google is an advertising business. Can you sell more ads with AI? I would say no. And even if you can, having an automated smart assistant being able to "cut" through the BS is certainly not as good for Google as clicking a bunch of sites trying to battle SEO.

However the judge is still out in regards to how much can AI allow Google to squeeze the profit margins of businesses by offering even better conversion rates. Personally, I don't think it will make a big difference, the AI will not make you buy more. I suspect Google makes more money by having multiple companies fight for the same customer than actually making a conversion.

IMO best case scenario for Google is to keep their search market. Table stakes is keeping search relevant at all.

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Wouldn't this help google on second order effects tho? I guess having an AI summarizing the web would lead to less incentive to create the type of SEO junk that made searching in Google so awful in the past years.

Also for queries asking for product recommendation, where ad price is quite high, they could still plug ads into an LLM and have it write a summary back to you similar to what magazines do with sponsored content.

>I guess having an AI summarizing the web would lead to less incentive to create the type of SEO junk that made searching in Google so awful in the past years.

Main part of Google's business is selling infrastructure for that SEO junk, AdWords et al. Sure, you meant the _other_ SEO junk, but from AI point of view both would be noise to be separated from actual content.

> Can you sell more ads with AI

Companies like Google and Meta have been relying on AI to display ads for years now. It’s been central to their strategy.

ChatGPT was just a shiny toy. A very cool, shiny toy, but a toy nonetheless.

I wouldn't call something a toy that has shown the most impressive growth rate for a commercial product since the invention of the internet.

To be more than a toy it needs to be profitable and have a moat.

OpenAI just implemented something (well) that was developed in other places.

LLMs are indeed very cool and maybe even revolutionary, but their main accomplishment was beating big tech to the punch.

They didn't beat them because they are faster. They beat them because it was something big tech did not want to happen. The space you have for ads is severely limited and the fact that no moat exists means that you will need alternative ways to fund it (or skyrocket the ad costs).

I suspect that those who don't care about privacy or can't afford to pay, will be swarmed with AI-seo results from an ad-supported model, but people will FINALLLY have the choice to pay and avoid this ad-fest. And who knows, maybe when open-source catches up, it will even be affordable enough that ad-tech will shrink considerably.

> They beat them because it was something big tech did not want to happen

Yep. Google didn’t want a chatbot telling kids how to cook meth, so they weren’t in a hurry to release. Meanwhile, releasing a chatbot is one of the few cards a much smaller company like OpenAI can play.

I dont know if you are sarcastic, but the solution to kids cooking meth is not hiding the recipe. Hiding knowledge is a sign of a problematic society, not "God's work"

This is mostly unrelated to the chatbot conversation, but hiding sensitive things from children is basic parenting as practiced in all cultures everywhere. The only difference is not everyone agrees on what’s sensitive content.

Kodak invented the digital camera. Being first doesn't mean much. New competitors don't have anything inside the moat (their existing business) to protect and can move faster.

Can you sell more ads with AI?

100% Yes. We can (because people are going to ask how to do X in postgres and AI can reply how to do that in postgres with a side-note that this Sponsored product does it out of the box). however, can you sell more ads (by tagging them as "ads" or "Sponsored") - That is where the gray area shows up (IMO).

Obviously, this is still evolving but I guess something along that lines could be done, if one is too serious to monetize it. In my personal opinion, I think right now companies are focussed around capturing market than monetization.

I don't think so. Google had Lambda for quite some time internally. If it was a slum dunk on selling more ads, it would have been out way before chatgpt.

Google has maximized their ad revenue with their current model. You don't have the same ad real estate in your example and that is a problem. Now they get money for impressions on a whole page, and clicks from people trying to find the right fit among the seo. I believe that google wants information filtering but not too much as it needs current estate for ads.

Any chatbot that has ads integrated into the responses will face an uphill battle against competing products that simply have banner style ads.

> Google is an advertising business. Can you sell more ads with AI? I would say no.

Oh, you optimist!

It's ALWAYS about incentives. Aka money.

Companies will use AI to squeeze garbage (aka ads) in every nook and cranny of the observable universe now. Think of all the thankless tasks that required a human to do them until now.

Guess what? Now that AI can do them 100000x faster and probably 2-5x better.

Our lives are about to be flooded by a stream of -pardon my French-, adshit.

I don't see how my life could me MORE cluttered with adshit than now. Literally everything is an ad space. And I have to navigate into a lot of it to actually find something useful.

This post is a culmination of a trend I'm been seeing where LLMs are made synonymous with AGI. AFAIK you can't use an LLM to drive a car.

In the context of this thread, I don't think Google could sell more ads with an LLM which is why they sat on this technology. It disrupts their current business, while being more expensive and harder to monetize (charging a subscription to consumer is worse than a monopolized ad business charging hundreds of millions to corporations).

Can't they massively improve their ad-targeting by analyzing conversations with the AI?

People are already freaked out plenty by the idea that googles products spies on you to sell ads. To start doing it outright will definitely kill uptake of any AI service they provide.

I wonder, does the general populace really freak out of it, since everyone I've known don't really do

>People are already freaked out plenty by the idea that googles products spies on you to sell ads.

The inverse is true - people continue using Google products despite being aware that they are spying on them. Doing it outright won't make them suddenly start caring.

Tech companies have been running all your data through AI for years now to show you targeted ads.

It’s what the whole house of cards is built on.

To me building the automated smart assistant seems like insanely lucrative place to put in ads. When you order the assistant to solve a problem or buy some product google can show you something even better or a things that solve the issue.

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