This is the moment where we fumble the opportunity to avoid a repeat of Web 1.0's ad-driven race to the bottom
Look forward to re-living that shift from life-changing community resource to scammy and user-hostile
Look forward to re-living that shift from life-changing community resource to scammy and user-hostile
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!
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.
It's also why totalitarian regimes love it, they can simply train it to regurgitate a modified version of reality.
The $20 monthly payment is not enough though and companies like Google can keep giving away their AI for free till OpenAI is bankrupt.
Even if you take him at his word, incentives are hard to ignore (and advertising is a very powerful business model when your goal is to create something that reaches everyone)
1) The Pareto frontier of open LLMs will keep expanding. The breakneck pace of open research/development, combined with techniques like distillation will keep the best open LLMs pretty good, if not the best.
2) The cost of inference will keep going down as software and hardware are optimized. At the extreme, we're lookin toward bit-quantized LLMs that run in RAM itself.
These two factors should mean a good open LLM alternative should always exist, one without ulterior motives. Now, will people be able to have the hardware to run it? Or will users just put up with ads to use the best LLM? The latter is likely, but you do have a choice.
That step, along with getting politicians to pass it, is the only thing that will stop that outcome.
Also the current crop of AI agents are just utter crap. But that's a skill issue of the people coding them, expect actual advances here soon.
Decades ago I worked for a classical music company, fresh out of school. "So.. how do you anticipate where the music trend is going", I once naively asked one of the senior people on the product side. "Oh, we don't. We tell people really quietly, and they listen". They and the marketing team spent a lot of time doing very subtle work, easily as much as anything big like actual advertisements. Things like small little conversations with music journalists, just a dropped sentence or two that might be repeated in an article, or marginally influence an article; that another journalist might see and have an opinion on, or spark some other curiosity. It only takes a small push and it tends to spread across the industry. It's not a fast process, but when the product team is capable of road-mapping for a year or so in advance, a marketing team can do a lot to prepare things so the audience is ready.
LLMs represent a scary capability to influence the entire world, in ways we're not equipped to handle.
replace LLMs with TV, or smartphones, or maybe even mcdonald's, and you've got the same idea. through TV, corporations got to control a lot of the social world and people's behavior.