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Comment by materielle | Hacker News Reader

I think investors would certainly love this. So why hasn’t it already happened?

My guess: they would lose a ton of cultural cachet.

Turning OpenAI into an ads business is basically admitting that AGI isn’t coming down the pipeline anytime soon. Yes, I know people will make some cost-based argument that ads + agi is perfectly logical.

But that’s not how people will perceive things, and OpenAI knows this. And I think the masses have a point: if we are really a few years away from AGI replacing the entire labor force, then there’s surely higher margin businesses they can engage in compared to ads. Especially since they are allegedly a non-profit.

After Google and Facebook, nobody is buying the “just a few ads to fund operating costs” argument either.

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Yup, it’s essentially an admission of failure. I think the people who were expecting AI to improve exponentially are disappointed by its current state, where it’s basically just a useful tool to assist workers in some highly specific fields.

Highly specific fields? They are trying to get you to reach for ai when an emailed “ok, thanks” would do. They want you to lose your ability to write and formulate thoughts without the tool. Then it is really over. That is the golden goose. Not a couple data scientists.

> it’s essentially an admission of failure

A multibillion dollar failure is fine by investors. Altman hasn’t been peddling the AGI BS to them. That’s aimed at the public and policymakers.

Is a trillion dollar failure okay with investors?

Aka you need them deep enough into the trap they can’t escape, before you trigger it.

Yes and there are layers. Remember when google ads had yellow backgrounds? I'm sure OpenAI will find a way to do ads "ethically"... for a while, until people get comfortable, and that's when they will start to make ChatGPT increasingly manipulative.

Gotta make that line go up and to the right!

> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.

- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

Can anyone explain to me what ChatGPT does that traps people? I get the value as tools, I like using copilot, but ChatGPT doesn't offer me value that any other LLM can't. Given that everyone is quickly rolling "AI" into their own stuff, I don't see what's ChatGPT's killer app. If anything, I think Gemini is better positioned to capture the general user market.

They make it a habit to use them, by offloading that part of their thinking/process to them. It’s similar to Google Maps, or even Google itself.

When was the last time you went to an actual physical library, for instance? Or pulled out a paper map?

Gemini is a competitor, yes. But most people still go to Google at this point, even if there are a ton of competitors.

That is what the race is about (in large part), who can become ‘the norm’.

> Gemini is a competitor, yes. But most people still go to Google at this point, even if there are a ton of competitors.

Yeah, that's my point. If Google is good enough I don't think people are going to want to do those extra steps, just as in your google maps example. There might be better services out there, but google maps are just too convenient.

> When was the last time you went to an actual physical library

My eyesight is making paper books harder and harder to read, so I don't go to libraries and bookstores as much as I used to. But I think libraries are still relatively popular with families, because they're sites of various community activities as well as safe, quiet places to let kids roam and entertain themselves while the parents are nearby.

When I was a kid, my parents went to the library much more often than they do now, because they were taking me and my sister there. And then we would all get books before we came home.

Not saying you're entirely wrong, but there's a significant part of this that is "changing rhythms of life as we age", not just "changing times".

It used to be, people went to the library to look things up, and as a primary source for finding information they needed. Not just as a community center.

That is my point.

I also wouldn't underestimate Google's ability to nudge regular users towards whichever AI surface they want to promote. My highly non-technical mom recently told me she started using Google's "AI Mode" or whatever it's called for most of her searches (she says she likes how it can search/compare multiple sites for browsing house listings and stuff).

She doesn't really install apps and never felt a need to learn a new tool like "ChatGPT" but the transition from regular Google search to "AI Search" felt really natural and also made it easy to switch back to regular search if it wasn't useful for specific types of searches.

It definitely reduces cognitive load for an average user not needing to switch between multiple apps/websites to lookup hours/reviews via Google Maps, search for "facebook.com" to navigate to a site and now run AI searches all in the same familiar places on her phone. So I think Google is still pretty "sticky" despite ChatGPT being a buzzword everyone hears now that they caught up to OpenAI in terms of model capability/features.

The branding is so strong and it works well enough (I’d say, according to the perception of most people) that it’s just the first “obvious” choice.

Akin to nobody getting fired for choosing AWS, nobody would think poorly of you using ChatGPT.

I don’t think Claude has that same presence yet.

Google has a reputation for being a risk to develop with, and I think they flopped on marketing for general users. It’s hard to compete with “ChatGPT” where there’s a perceived call to action right in the name; You don’t really know what Gemini is for until it’s explained.

Would've happened if Claude and Gemini weren't things. But they are.

Regardless of AGI, being known as the only LLM that introduced ads sounds very bad.

It also is impossible to work properly: either they also screwup the entire API to break everyones programmatic access to coding and regular apps, or else everyone just starts making wrappers around the API to make without-ad-chatbots

Why would they need ads on API though, API is paid usage. They just need a few years of scaling for it to be profitable. Some models are already a net profit on API usage.

I agree but even if AGI is possible within 5-10 years it must be hard to justify maintaining or even increasing this level of burn for much longer.

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