> AIs are much better at responding to my intent, and they rarely attempt to sell me anything
Yet. It's only a matter of time before AI becomes ad-riddled and enshittified.
Yet. It's only a matter of time before AI becomes ad-riddled and enshittified.
Model weights are snapshots, and we can preserve them.
It would be like if we could keep a snapshot of the search index for google every 6 months. Doesn't matter if the "current" version is garbage, if my search target exists in an older copy that's not as corrupted, and I can choose to use that instead.
And at least this time around, I think this was built in from the start - you pin against a specific model for most serious business use-cases.
I can store open model weights locally, cheaply.
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So I 100% agree that the ads are going to come (I can't forsee any possible alternative outside of banning ad based content promotion - which as an aside... I'm strongly in favor of proposing as serious legislation, particularly in the context of AI).
But this time the ad riddled version still has to be better than the old version I can boot up and run.
It'll be interesting to see how that tension plays out.
Sky TV makes 10 times as much from subscription as adverts but spends 30% of the time showing you adverts. London underground revenue is a similar ratio - for every £9 tickets they make £1 in adverts. If I go to the cinema they spend 20 minutes showing adverts to people who spent £50 on tickets and popcorn.
Companies shave very little incentive not to make things shit with adverts. The measurable cost to them is tiny, the cost to the rest of the world is massive. Odeon won’t attribute lost revenue from my reduced visits to their adverts, but will measure the 50p or whatever they get.