It’s unlikely LLM operators can break even by charging per use, and it should be expected that they’ll race to capture the market by offering “free” products that in reality are ad serving machines, a time-tested business model that has served Meta and friends very well. The fact that Atlas browser is (and they don’t even hide it) a way to work around usage limits of ChatGPT should ring alarm bells.
Atlas may not be the solution but I love the idea of an LLM that sits between me and the dreck that is today’s web.
I also believe noticing Baader-meinhof in the 90s is rather unsurprising, since RAF was just "a few years" ago. However, "dreck" as someone else noted is documented since the early 20th century. So I dont think me noticing this just recently isn't a bias, rather a true coincidence.
I think we should note that this is a situation created by the businesses more than the consumers. By offering "free" products they drove paid products out of the market. They didn't have to do that. But if I'm going to be as fair as possible, it's only regulation that could have stopped such a niche feom being exploited. One business or another would have eventually figured it out.
The web was supposed to set us free and you cry out for chains?
It's in your hands. It's literally in the hands of this entire forum. There is nobody else to blame.
I guess you did say "the idea of" not "the reality of".
It feels like $10 / month would be sufficient to solve this problem. Yet, we've all insisted that everything must be free.
But I can't actually make that payment - except maybe by purchasing a paid adblocker - where ironically the best open source option (uBlock Origin) doesn't even accept donations.
I think the most telling is the breakdown of Average Revenue Per User per region for Facebook specifically [1]. The average user brought in about $11 per quarter while the average US/CA user brought in about $57 per quarter during 2023.
[1] https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2023/q4... (page 15)
It’s closer to $100 than $10 though, for all the services I pay for to avoid ads, and you still need ad blockers for the rest of the internet.
- Kagi
- YouTube Premium
- Spotify Premium
- Meta ad-free
- A bunch of substacks and online news publications
- Twitter Pro or whatever it’s called
On top of that I aggressively ad-block with extensions and at DNS level and refuse to use any app with ads. I have most notifications disabled, too.
It is a lot better, but it’s more like N * $10 than $10 per month.
But, doesn't Youtube Premium include Youtube Music? So why pay for Spotify premium too?
YouTube Music is both better and worse: UI has some usability issues and unfortunately it shares likes and playlists with the normal YouTube account, as a library it has lots of crap uploaded by YouTube users, often wrong metadata, but thanks to that it also has some niche artists and recordings which are not available on other platforms.
It doesn't address the other reasons, but there are some free tools for moving Spotify playlists to YouTube.
I've also been using Spotify for longer than YouTube Music, or its predecessor that Google killed (as they do periodically) even exited.
Spotify (now) supports lossless.
Spotify connects to Sonos, wiim, etc. devices
Spotify supports marking albums and playlists for offline sync, including to my Garmin watch.
I participate in a number of collaborative Spotify playlists (e.g. on group trips, at parties, etc.). I’ve never seen anyone make a collaborative playlist on another platform, much less missed out on participating in one.
Shazam results have an “Open in Spotify” button and Shazam adds everything it identifies to a Spotify playlist.
When I’ve used it, the YouTube Music UI has felt like it’s not really designed for people who listen to music the way I do at all.
I’m not willing to go without YouTube just to spite Google but I’d rather not give them money or attention/usage if I can avoid it.
I don’t know how many of these would also be ok with YouTube Music, but it’s clearly not all of them and I suspect it’s close to zero. I’m fortunate that the cost of Spotify is not a burden for me, and I’d much rather pay it to get closer to the experience I want than try to get by with YouTube Music.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/llms-privacy.html#llms-privacy
That said, don't be lured, you know they're already working on ways to put ads and trackers and what not inside ChatGPT and Atlas, those 20$ sound won't pay enough to recoup all that investment and cost and maximize profits.
So I think we should be careful what we wish for here.
This is kind of surprising, because those are precisely the ways I would say that a Web search is better than ChatGPT. Google is generally sub second to get to results, and quite frequently either page 1 or 2 will have some relevant results.
With ChatGPT, I get to watch as it processes for an unpredictable amount of time, then I get to watch it "type".
> ads free
Free of ads where ChatGPT was paid to deliver them. Because it was trained on the public Internet, it is full of advertising content.
Update: Example query I just did for "apartment Seville". Google completed in under a second. All the results above the fold are organic, with sponsored way down. Notably the results include purchase, long-term and vacation rental sites. The first 3 are listing sites. There's an interactive map in case I know where I want to go; apartments on the map include links to their websites. To see more links, I click "Next."
ChatGPT (MacOS native app) took ~9 seconds and recommended a single agency, to which it does not link. Below that, it has bullet points that link to some relevant sites, but the links do not include vacation rentals. There are 4 links to apartment sites, plus a link to a Guardian article about Seville cracking down on illegal vacation rentals. To see more links, I type a request to see more.
For all the talk about Google burying the organic links under a flood of ads, ChatGPT shows me far fewer links. As a person who happily pays for and uses ChatGPT daily, I think it's smart to be honest about its strengths and shortcomings.
That being said I've never really come across on what are some good general ways to Google to give me good results.
I know some tricks e.g. Filetype:PDF , use scholar for academic search, use "site:...". smth like "site:reddit.com/r/Washington quiet cafe" for most things people would want to do in a city, because people generally ask about those things on community forums.
But I have a poor time with dev related queries because 1/2 the time it's seo'd content and when I don't know enough about a subject, LLMs generally gives me a lot of lines of inquiries(be careful of X and also consider Y) that I would not bother to ask cause I don't know what I don't know.
If I’m trying to learn about a topic (for example, how a cone brake works in a 4WD winch), then ChatGPT gives me a great overview with “ Can you explain what a cone brake is and how it works, in the context of 4WD winches?” while google, with the search “4wd winch cone brake function explained”, turns up a handful of videos covering winches (not specifically cone brakes) and some pages that mention them without detailing their function. ChatGPT wins here.
If I were trying to book a flight I’d never dream of even trying to use ChatGPT. That sort of use case is a non-starter for me.
But if you were looking for any information about anything? Say, what's the average cost of an apartment in Seville? That's where on Google, yes the search result is fast, but then you have to click through the links and those websites are often very slow to load and full of ads, and you might need to look at a few of them to get the information you wanted.
If you have a few added follow up piece of information you're interested in as well, what's the typical apartment size, have the prices been going up or down, what is the typical leasing process, etc. You can bottom out with the info much faster on ChatGPT.
As it is, I find there are some things LLMs are genuinely better for but many where a search is still far more useful.
My mistake, you're completely correct, perhaps even more-correct than the wonderful flavor of Mococoa drink, with all-natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners!
Google used to be like that, and if ChatGPT is better right now, it won't remain that way for long. They're both subject to the same incentives and pressures, and OpenAI is, if anything, less ethical and idealistic than Google was.
But isn't this, instead, letting a third party strip that context away and give it its own context so that you can't make those choices and decisions properly? Information without context is, to me, nearly worthless.
And even if you believe they are neutral parties and have your own interests at heart (which, quite frankly, I think is naive), once companies like that know everything about you, you don't think they'll abuse that knowledge?
An AI browser is choosing to send all the stuff you browse, to a third party without a demonstrated interest in keeping it all private, and getting back stuff that might or might not be true to the original content. Or maybe not even true at all.
Oh and - Atlas will represent your interests, right up until OpenAI decides it's not in their financial interest to do so. What do you do when the entire web browser UI gets enshittified?