This regresses the incentives back to what we had with search engines where what I need (answers) and what OpenAI needs (money from ads) are at odds.
Search engines used to be very useful too until the endless profit a/b testing boiled us all
Search engines used to be very useful too until the endless profit a/b testing boiled us all
This is the culture of America in a nutshell. Steve Jobs was a weirdo in that regard and an outlier.
Owning a few shares is not the same thing as actually making all the money someone at the top of Google is making.
Even if OpenAI needs to feed the VC beast, they will always be open source LLMs that can be used freely inside home-made search engines.
There is also plenty of research going on to make models more efficient and powerful at small sizes. So that shift in the power gradient seems like it’s going to continue.
And this is not a bad thing, otherwise you can only image how many businesses will close when google traffic stars to decline.
Everyone likes to hate on ads but the reality is that without ads 99% users even on hacker news would be jobless as the companies where they work will have no way to find clients, and even if they manage to find some - those clients won't be able to sell and will go out of business.
Agreed.
Tech companies always do this. With Ads, we’re back into speculation territory, and the “how do we pay for and justify all this shit?” can gets kicked down the road.
Can’t we actually solve problems in the real world instead? Wouldn’t people be willing to pay if AI makes them more productive? Why do we need an ad-supported business model when the product is only $20/mo?
This was always a fake reasoning (ads are there because people want everything for free!), but then paid HBO started ads, your purchased smart TVs started ads, cars that you bought with money started ads...
([some business model] + ads) will simply always generate more profit than [some business model] (at least that's how they think). Even if you already pay, if they also shove some ads in your eyes, they can make even more money. Corporations don't work the way humans do. There is no "enough". The task of the CEO is to grow the company, make more profit each quarter and is responsible to the shareholders. It's not like, ok, now we can pay all our bills, we don't need more revenue. You always need maximum possible revenue.
> Merchants pay a small fee on completed purchases, but the service is free for users, doesn’t affect their prices, and doesn’t influence ChatGPT’s product results.
This is called affiliate marketing and it’s toxic.
And have you noticed what sellers on Amazon are doing? Foreign companies are setting up distribution in the US and registering their US companies with Amazon as "small businesses" and "minority-owned businesses", making those labels utterly useless.
Sure, this may in Google-style-monopoly direction or an Amazon-style-monopoly direction. I don't know which. I would indeed expect a large dose of enshittification would be involved.
You're welcome to argue this leads to ads. But jumps to this is ads and getting a dozen pearl-clutching is a symptom of hn's own crude enshittification, jeesh.