I came away thinking if those were presented as affiliated links, that conversation could have been monetized in a mutually beneficial way.
I keep thinking of that interaction whenever the discussion of ads on chatbots crops up. In an ideal world, model providers could better capture the value they provide. Unfortunately, I suspect such conversations are too rare, and often harder to monetize. (Like that time free tier ChatGPT helped me recover $500 in compensation for an airline delay. Great value for me, but no upside for OpenAI.)
Unfortunately given the amounts and timelines of returns that investors expect from OpenAI, and their scale, and with ChatGPT constrained to its “Free Consumer-facing Internet App” form factor, they are doomed to have to trade in the reserve currency of the web: ads.
I also ask LLMs for product recomendations. But the moment I suspect they are hidding the best items (not paying for the ad) to push the second best (not even talking about pushing shit as good products because they pay more) is the moment the LLM loses its value as recomender.
If they want to capture some of the value they provide, they should do it the standard fashion where they directly capture value from me by having me pay.
> If they want to capture some of the value they provide, they should do it the standard fashion where they directly capture value from me by having me pay.
That would be ideal, and that's what their subscription products are for, but even their free versions provide so much value that is hard to capture. That's what I meant by chatbots being constrained by their "Free Internet app" form-factor... Consumers on the Internet largely just are not willing to pay, nobody managed to get micro-payments to work, and so the reserve currency of the web is ads.
Have you considered a world where the ideal outcome _doesn't_ involve making the most money?
But realistically speaking, billions of investor money means that nothing short of the "most money" will be good enough.
They’re both better described as conventions, but whatever.
Trying to buy things like GPUs or SSDs are a joke. I really wish even one vendor would just implement an actual waiting list, locked to an account with a verified address and purchase history. I'm fine to wait for my purchase, but having to race bots for a lottery ticket purchase is a pain.
Assuming you visited this "not a well known site" directly, you did not use the "ChatGPT checkout" feature discussed in TFA