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Similarly, I want to continue to use the platforms that have all the users, content, and network effects.
BUT - I'd like my own personal agent to sit between everything and strip out the nonsense before it hits my eyeballs.
Ad block used to be good enough, but we can clearly take this much further.
Ads are not the only toxic thing. The algorithm is. Attention seeking from any entity is. The whole internet is adversarial, not just one screen of one product.
An agent could sit between us and the web (or us and our apps) and strip out all the ads, strip out all the clickbait, filter out all the negativity, algo-spam, and low-value content. Calls to upgrade, cookie banners, MrBeast, whatever.
I want an agent that knows me and acts on my behalf as I browse the internet. It should see everything in my browser (or even everything on my screen) and whittles down the bullshit before it ever reaches me.
This kind of tool could focus the whole of the internet into perfect crystal clarity - into an internet whose only objective is to serve me. Certainly not an internet that can make me mad or that tries to convince me to buy things.
Something flexible like this goes beyond just search. It fixes everything on every corner of the internet.
If we treat this as a technology/browser/OS problem, then it can fix everything wholesale. I can continue to use the social media platforms and technology everyone else is using, but I won't be subjected to the bullshit. I don't have to switch to Kagi or BlueSky or whatever small alternative tries to go up against titans, loses the network effects, and winds up as smaller, less-functional offering.
A butler-like agent is a new pane of glass. An internet condom. A judge, jury, and executioner whose only goal is to make sure one stays focused and happy.
This is a product I would pay a thousand dollars a year for.
More incentive to keep up enshittification, lest your appreciation of de-shittification wane.
Technological solutions to societal problems is one of the shortest paths to hell.
So, no, thanks.
Sincerely though, can you explain?
"There's a bunch of us now and barter isn't cutting it anymore" is a technical problem, not a societal one. You can solve it with coinage and banks or whatever.
"The internet used to be fun and useful but now it sucks" is a societal problem, not a technical one. You can't solve it with a federated twitter clone or yet another secure messaging protocol or whatever.
People bullying other people is not a technical problem. People driving dangerously is not a technical problem. People shoplifting is not a technical problem. All of them have different reasons deep down, and preventing the symptom doesn't solve the problem.
When you effectively prevent bullying, the bully might damage something else or may do self-harm to soothe their demons. Same for people driving dangerously or have to shoplift to survive.
When you cure the root problem, which is generally harder BTW, the problem you're technically trying to prevent disappears, too.
Hope this helps.
Complete bullshit. This problem can be completely solved by a technical, not societal solution: actually working self-driving cars. Once they are available, all your imperfect societal solutions to the problem are not needed anymore.
I don't believe many understands the complexity of a self-driving car. It's not like programming a couple of agents with simulated sensors on a computer.
For example, how do you ensure everyone on the road has a self-driving car? We've sufficiently developed electric cars, but they're not nearly the majority.
Just to further support your point, sufficiently developed electric cars' batteries still doesn't have the energy density of fossil fuels, so they can't replace any and every use case.
For example, can we carry or generate the energy these cars requires to move unimpeded like ICE vehicles yet? Or, did we improve the procedures and materials so these cars can be extinguished faster, more reliably and securely then their previous generation counterparts? Or did battery recycling methods became cheap and efficient enough yet, so we can reuse these batteries and at least not increase mining on our planet? Etc. Etc.
I'm not against renewables or electric cars, but even in their current form, we need to solve many problems to make them more practical and even less impactful when compared to their ICE counterparts.
We are highly adoptable, highly social creatures whose behavior is greatly impacted by our environment, which includes the people around us, the culture in which we live, and the things that technology enables (or prevents) in that environment.
I just think there’s no bright line at all between societal and technical problems, they’re just labels we apply based on our internal views of how they should be solved.
A great event has happened a couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49045159 (Google may soon restrict on-device ADB).
So, people rushed to propose technical solutions to this. I noted that on-device ADB was the primary vector for sideloading applications and touted as the "ultimate solution" to Google's tightening of Android ecosystem.
Now, the ADB door is closing, yet people are proposing technical solutions, but the problem is not technical in nature. Google's mindset and agenda is restricting Android step by step, and the trend will continue.
At every step, Android power users adapt, will find new technical workarounds and comfort themselves, but the problem is not technical in nature. No technical solution can stop Google from closing this doors because decisions are managerial and rooting from human-nature.
So this is a great example to what I pointed out. Technical solutions can't solve societal problems. The problem is not restricting ADB. The problem is Google's desire to restrict and close-down Android ecosystem. You can't solve it with a patch, but maybe relieve symptoms for a short amount of time.
If one considers this solving, then it's just deluding yourself.
This is an unjustified blanket opinion. Sometimes, societal problems can be solved by technological progress. I think you simply lack imagination if you cannot think of any societal problem that would be solved by better technology.
I work at a datacenter. We provide compute resources to researchers, and while our datacenter is not small or low energy, one of our systems have Green500 certification and we try to do things as efficient as possible.
When I look at our racks, some of them are DLC BTW, and imagine each of them can pack a MW system now, I shudder. Not because of us, but what AI datacenters gonna do with that energy density and how much heat will these systems put out.
Even though you do have less greenhouse gases to trap the heat, you will be pumping more of that heat into the atmosphere, seas and oceans, warming everything up.
You're removing one aspect of climate change but not all aspects of it, still affecting the climate and ecosystems.
Also, for example, we still can't fly passenger and cargo planes with electricity for now, so you won't be able to remove all greenhouse gases, yet.
Look at the data [0]. Yes, energy production and heating is the biggest contributor, and even if you manage to remove it completely with the transportation sector via electrification, half of the emissions are still there.
The amount of heat pumped out by humans this way is so miniscule compared to natural flows that this is a complete non-issue on a global scale, and will be for a very long time.
Your solution is probably the worse pipe dream I've ever seen articulated.
You state that current alternatives are too rubbish because you want to use the services you seem to despise. And your willing to pin your hopes on yet another technology to do it because this one is definitely trustworthy and has your best interests at heart... Naivety doesn't quite cover this.
Why pay Kagi or whatever at all? How can you trust them or anyone, if this is your belief?
Why even pay your ISP? Just go back to candlelight and corn flakes and stay away from radio waves.
You'd better not own a smart phone if this is truly how you feel about the world, because it clashes with what you just said.
Come on.
You solution is to hope that a better technology will be invented that won't be subject to what every technology before it has been subject to. You rally against "the algorithm" and beg for another algorithm to save you. You want to live in a filter bubble and not be challenged on you believes. I can't think of anything worse, but I wish you the best.
Also I don't know what comment you read but it's clearly not mine...
You're not going to do anything about big tech by sitting on the sidelines. I don't see anyone doing anything about it. Nobody's built websites that show people how to contact their legislators. Nobody's building alternative tech.
We have a chance to use this tech to cut off the big tech overlords. I don't see how you're all missing this. We can literally build new browsers now. It reasons that we can place filters at every level of the stack to catch the stuff we don't like and prevent it from reaching us.
For people who supposedly care so much about tech and privacy and digital freedoms, I just see complaints.
I propose a solution to neuter big tech and you label it as a filter bubble instead of a victory.
But you're probably right - I'd like to filter out every grumpy HN person with a negative outlook sentiment score and move on with my day. It'd save me time. I shouldn't be wasting any energy responding to this den of depression.
Also I find it ironic that you would state no one is building alternatives when you previously lambasted the alternatives (blue sky, kagi, etc). What are you doing? Apart from engaging in fantasy.
Your solution is to have big tech filter out the stuff you don't like. These agents are a product of big tech. They need massive resources in terms of money, hardware, and resources to run. This isn't tech for the poor and downtrodden, it's tech for the rich and privileged. By the time the poor can afford it (if it doesn't destroy the environment first) it'll already be infected by what you despise in current big tech; if it isn't already.
Once a proof of concept exists you can distill it down to something that might execute on CPU alone.
With open weights models you can build systems that rend big tech apart.
Last-gen tech has been tried for twenty years. It's not working and it has never gotten distribution.
You know what does work? Adblock. It reasons that we could build a new form of it.
I would pay for someone to build this because I'm busy building other things. I would literally commit money to anyone who suggests they would build this.
It’s possibly the single most impactful thing in my digital life.
Thanks for everything, and please keep doing what you’re doing.
Nice try, LLM! I'm onto you!
My comments are on the open, and I can answer any question or comment you have about any of them. :)
No offense taken though. Made me smile while drinking my tea. :)
Likely, the "It's not X, it's Y" phrasing is what probably rang the LLM alarm bells.
I am one of those people that used to write em dashes – and now I self-censor them out of my writings :(
I personally like the ability to filter my own results by promoting, demoting or blocking certain domains to filter lower quality results further. Same for image search which can also filter out AI generated images.
Also, I find lenses very useful (which is a way to limit your search radius) to search for specific things in the specific parts of the internet. i.e. you can define a lens with specific websites for a subject, and if you need something precisely, you can only search these websites.
I recently started to use SlopStop reporting to weed out AI generated webpages from search results, too.
Lastly, all AI features are opt-in. No summaries, no widgets, no extra "bells and whistles" if you don't want on your result page.
I had an annual Kagi subscription that I let lapse not long ago. That was hands-down the best feature, so I vibecoded a small userscript that replicates it for DuckDuckGo. DDG also lets you turn off ads.
I'd gladly return once they fix the integration issues. In Safari, the redirect via the extension is a bit wonky at times.
I know that we live in a world where tech increasingly sucks, and positive comments on tech are (correctly!) seen as suspicious. The thing, though, is that Kagi is genuinely just a great product, and search is such a central part of using the Internet that good, trustworthy search makes a huge difference.
That's the rub. Today on the internet, no one can validate that there exists any "trustworthy search". If we don't control the servers and validate the software on it, then we are taking someone's word for it. Most often that someone is a marketing person at the hosting organization. Occasionally it's a random comment on the internet behind a pseudonym we know nothing about.
People are becoming more and more, justifiably, cynical. And it's good for society that they are.
I don't use Kagi primarily because I'm quite averse to subscriptions if I can find another way.
That's what trust is, though. I find Kagi worthy of trust since I have no evidence that they are doing anything that would violate my trust in them, and their incentives align with mine. I give them money, they give me good search results.
> People are becoming more and more, justifiably, cynical. And it's good for society that they are.
I do not believe that this is good. Democracies are built on trust. Without trust, they die, as we can plainly see in the US right now, where people are so distrustful of each other that it is starting to destroy the very fabric holding together society itself.
The reason we need these and many more is that we don't trust each other. And it's wise that we don't.
This doesn't mean trust is bad, only that the founders, rightfully, knew that it leads to complacency.
What's landed us where we are is not a lack of trust. (We've lacked trust from day one, that's how we got the Constitution in the first place). What's landed us here is complacency.
At the root of all you lament is not lack of trust, it is complacency. Decades long complacency.
Lack of trust is what our republic was founded on, and the entire reason it was structured the way it was. Our republic is specifically designed to function in a trust-free environment.
But no republic, nor any other organizational construct, no matter how well designed, will survive complacency.
It sucks. But there's just too much astro-turfing.
What do you want me to do? :)
I can answer your questions if you want? :D
Edit: Heh, I saw your other comment, too.
Wanna bet? =]
I just want to bang my head to the keyboard.
On the other hand, I'm not new in the internet, and have relatively thick skin. I'm very amused today by the unintentional attention I got with my cloudy, morning brain.
Nevertheless, regardless of what we do, believe or say, we shall be kind first and remember https://xkcd.com/438/ dearly.
This is what I'm trying to do all the time, but I'm not perfect. Just a human, trying his best.
It's one thing to throw in a, "hey, I've used this service and I recommend it to others," but this is just gross, blatant advertising.
> It’s possibly the single most impactful thing in my digital life.
Even if this is true, only an LLM would ever believe posting this sentence would come off as anything other than bullshit lol
If you can provide me your contact details, I'd love to send my similar comments to you and get them cleared by you to satisfy your standards of endorsement.
For your information and entertainment, ZeroGPT returns 97% human for that whole comment which I wrote while having my breakfast and my phone was laying on the table.
Unbelievable.
Thanks again for everything!
Half the screen is the kagi sign up ad. Not a good show of the product.
Then it’s all black on white. 2026. Color. Contrast. It’s one of the pillars. Google figured this day 1:Dark blue links. Then the line spacing is too high. Information density doesn’t feel right.
Overall 2/10 experience for a 10/10 product.
* "The Sad Fate of Yandex: From Independent Tech Startup to Kremlin Propaganda Tool", from the Centre for East European and International Studies - https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/publications/zois-spotlight/th...
* "Different platforms, different plots? The Kremlin-controlled search engine Yandex as a resource for Russia’s informational influence in Belarus during the COVID-19 pandemic", from the NIH - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10130930/
* "How the Kremlin Subjugated Yandex", from GWU's Russia Post - https://russiapost.info/articles/yandex_kremlin
There's lots and lots more out there too on the topic, just a Google search away.
Ridiculous statement.
First, there is no requirement for "consistency". Every person chooses where to draw their moral line. The world is not black and white, but the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and subsequent (ongoing!) murdering, raping, and bombing of civilians is pretty clearly on one side of the line in my world.
Note that this in itself says nothing about the United States or any other country. You may consider every other country and choose not to support its economy, and this in no way makes the above point weaker.
You may note that when US goes to war nobody boycott the US.
It's rough that it's so hard to be an ethical consumer these days. Mullvad gone, Kagi gone.
https://korben.info/en/mullvad-cofounder-funding-far-right.h...
Mullvad has tried to paint it as, "this does not represent Mullvad the company, this is a private political donation" and stuff like that. I don't buy it. Funding Mullvad funds the CEOs.
On a secondary point, if we want more ethical things to exist, we have to create them. If we want an ethical alternative to Mullvad it's on us to do it.
There's no clear reason why someone couldn't have qualms about one but not the other.
And now they are cencoring everything. Like somewere was a page of tiktok removing requests by country and holy-lheehlll, every day, constantly.
I had to use post-nerf, post-lobotomy 2026 Google in quite a few cases.
Now, this is the sort of rock-solid commitment to trust and safety that steadily gets worse every year until you go from old Netflix to Poob with ads. But the water's still fine. As a frog, let me tell you, it doesn't feel hot at all.
That guy that wrote the Incorruptible book is rising stonks man
Not the source I wanted to recall/find, but a timeline with screenshots:
https://www.howtogeek.com/how-google-search-results-have-cha...
Made me realize that advertising will always rank somewhere below prostitution (at least there you ARE paying to get screwed).
Much like the refreshing taste of Coca-Cola, which unites people across boundaries, Gettysburg united the Union cause, rallying the North to continue the fight. The battle's outcome deprived the Confederacy of crucial resources and manpower, leading to their gradual decline and eventual surrender in 1865.
How will you be sure the results from the LLM still aren't injecting ads when you pay? Find a trusted provider who is serving an open weights model.
Although I guess in the near future, we'll have GLM-7.x updates that claim all kinds of performance improvements, but the only real motivator to release model updates is to continually retrain them to push the latest products.
It rather feels to me that ads are destroying the Internet. The Internet did just fine before everything was full of ads, and it was a much better place.
going after business is a more secure long term recurring revenue source. Its boring but it works. It just doesnt justify trillions of dollars in investment
> ads is the only acceptable way to pay for content by majority.
Lmao look at the revenue per user of any ad platform, now look at the stock price of AI companies.
If you think that they can only rely on ads you should short them with every cent you have. Because they are worth 1/100 of their current valuation.
And I dont even disagree with you, but ads in LLMs are a nail in the coffin to the "replace 16% of the entire US workforce" which is their current valuation.
Another ad delivery platform will make them as valuable as facebook, not as valuable as 1/6 of the world economy
This is a horrible future to consider.
The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that a society that bans ads is a healthier, more robust society, and I am not alone.
But there is something even more insidious: elections. Ads will be purchased to shape public perceptions. Those with the deepest pockets will have ads which are charismatic, convincing, and unbelievably effective. This is the death of democracy if regulation isn't adopted right now.
Unfortunately this isn't straightforward. The distinction between a product, service, person, and party are impossible to clearly delineate. Is a SpaceX ad an endorsement of Elon Musk? Is an Elon Musk ad an endorsement of the U.S. Republicans? The famous Citizens United ruling determined that there is no practical legal distinction in this domain, meaning that without a Constitutional amendment (which will never happen in this political climate), the U.S. is going to barrel headlong into some kind of dystopia.
My only ray of sunshine here is competition. If OpenAI gets a reputation for untrustworthy AI, and there are viable competitors, people will hopefully switch. It's messy and imperfect and will require constant vigilance (because they're not going to tell us when they're misleading us). I think open weights models have become very good, and will improve much more over time. When we can reasonably run these models locally, ubiquitously, we have cost effective options.
I agree, but a) the responsibility is on us all: citizens, government, and the media b) we can definitely introduce regulations that force government to be more open, etc.
Speaking as someone who worked in advertising for a looooonnnngggg time, there are three ways that ads seem to work (above a randomised holdout).
1. The ad is something that the person actually wants, and they then convert.
2. The ad is something that the person was about to buy, and they convert.
3. The ad is part of a long running campaign that shifts (some) consumer's behaviour over time (ads for Coke etc fall in this category).
Ads aren't magic, and most people ignore them most of the time. It turns out that enough people don't that they can be profitable sometimes, but mostly that's just targeting people with more money than sense.
This HN notion that ads shape everyone's behaviour (except me, obviously) is so disconnected from my experience that I am sometimes confused by it.
It is very likely that this will adjust in the future. Just look at how indistinguishable from organic content some prominent ad placements have become over time. But: There is merit in discussing the actual product, not some hypothetical version of it. If we do discuss hypotheticals, we should make that explicit.
This also helps the whole debate (and therefore, I believe, ad critics): arguments grounded in reality are usually far more effective than those that aren't. ... And there might come a point where OpenAI introduces some kind of native ad format. We would be well advised to preserve our credibility for that discussion.
edit: Paid content in the organic LLM output is a current problem already. It ist just not what this announcement is about.
Monkey see, monkey do. This is basically how human society works, and is impossible to stop. The best you could do would be control who people hang around with, but even that is almost impossibly hard to make work.
I believe most people are influenced by these constant micro-impressions far more than they realize.
My best defense is to build a resentment towards the companies being advertised.
Your feelings are fair, but if this were the case then we'd see far more consumers changing their preferred phone/electricity/TV provider on a regular basis, and we could correlate this with (lagged) advertising spend.
But there is very little evidence for this. Like, I have a doctorate in psychology, and behaviour change is really, really hard and only works in a small number of cases. That model does seem to have predictive power, in that very few people convert as a result of seeing an ad (less than 1/1000 in the very best cases), and most of those that do don't keep buying products for long.
Now, if you already do something (like order takeaway pizza) it's much easier to get someone to do more of that, but its very very very hard to establish a new behaviour.
In my view advertising is in big parts (your category 3) basically a constant side-channel attack against peoples minds, eroding decisionmaking and purchasing decisions (mostly!) to peoples detriment.
The net-beneficial aspects (product information, and, arguably, boosted general demand) could be better achieved otherwise.
Same. They've also never really bothered me, especially billboards and street advertisements. I was actually sad when they got rid of the neon signs in Hong Kong.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/08/fading-glory-t...
There is nothing unpopular about your opinion - silent majority definitely wants ad-subsidized free tiers (that is why they are so popular and ads are not banned anywhere in the western world), it is just that arguing with radicals on HN or reddit is exhausting and a waste of time in general.
These are illegal in most jurisdictions. We need to apply the existing laws.
Meanwhile they'll have time to grab billions
a. the damages won't make a dent
b. they can throw lawyers at the problem for the win
c. they will have grafted their way into the economy so deeply that no one will want to kill their main source of income
This battle is already lost, if they find economical success then they are untouchable.
I wish we would stop speedrunning this Dune/Blade Runner future we keep trying to attain.
That's grossly inaccurate. We are speedrunning a William Gibson future.
Not even "native ads" embedded in LLM output can offset the difference.
I think It might be better to regulate them than remove them. Or to find a solution for people that can't access it.
(Another is higher tiers, free for personal users etc)
I hate ads but I also think about what's the alternative
I think it all boils down to how (if?) this will be transparent to the user.
If the response suggests a sponsored product/service to the user it could either be the specific product/service that ChatGPT is biased to suggest or the whole idea of using a product/service. As a user I would like to know both of these biases to understand that using any product/service for my need might not even be the best thing.
100% agree. It's the only way things don't go south.
This is only round one however, and I could see a future where they offer more "intimate" experiences. At least that's not today.
If you are looking at upvotes as a measure of support OpenAI: Don’t.
This is exactly why OAI and Anthropic enjoy spreading FUD about open weight models.
This is precisely the problem with the entire notion of putting advertising into these models. You’ll never really know.
This is a very important distinction to make -- complaints should be be about what is happening, and should distinguish that from what is not yet happening and should not. Because beyond the maxim that we should try to deal in facts... if OpenAI thinks people can't tell the difference anyways, they'll be justified in thinking they may as well just do the thing they're already being accused of doing.
But I guess waiting for problems to show their ugly heads before acting has never backfired.
Why would you think that? An ad supported product has misaligned incentives, everyone can see that and that's why the confidence erodes from that moment on.
You're living in the era in which saying "Stallman was right" is a dead cold take. Every big tech company sold out exactly like the hippies told you they would back when Google was a dream place to work for and Meta was still a twinkle in zuk's eyes.
https://www.bmon.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/deep-hole-...
Now, well, if you do the same exact search, at least in my location (and with UBlock disabled) it's frankly a mess but must admit that sponsored links are not even the first thing you see. There is the AI result, then the Wikipedia result, then some random result, then the sponsored block with a flat headline separating it and then the organic results, I presume.
That already happened on Google search: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003372
People will rend their garments and lament the loss of the „old models” but the logic of the system that produced them will remain unchanged. Everyone will keep asking themselves how it happened and what can be done about it.
Meanwhile the Claude that we have today can explain this to you if you know how to prompt.
How hard would it be to build a new Google Search with a small team and an LLM?
How hard would it be to engineer a new Google Drive and Docs suite?
How hard would it be to create a new phone operating system?
These all feel incredibly shallow now. A few dedicated people could build these systems and begin dismantling the margin and monopoly of every major piece of software we know and use.
If ChatGPT has ads, how hard would it be for a different startup to offer an LLM alternative?
Distribution and branding might be the only things that matter going forward. We may have just turned the tech industry into the 1960's cigarette industry.
LLMs are a Google killer. I don't think it'll be long before people start using their power to take away market share from big tech.
Big tech laying off so many senior engineers might have created the dry kindling to set this off.
(Because people always comment - this is not sarcasm. I'm being serious.)
Extremely hard, because it would need a modest capital investment which won’t happen.
Every subsequent example you give is harder.
It isn't just about building an alternate cheaply, it is about convincing people to switch. I wouldn't discourage anyone from trying, just that building the thing is just the beginning of a long journey.
> How hard would it be to build a new Google Search with a small team and an LLM?
> How hard would it be to engineer a new Google Drive and Docs suite?
> How hard would it be to create a new phone operating system?
And who has seen success with that? It's all theory now.
> LLMs may actually drag our super-valuable tech industry back down to earth and commoditize everything we've ever built.
Because most of the tech that has been built was not super valuable at all. Linux, GCC, docker maybe. But your average SaaS was always a commodity.
yes, an LLM can write you a web crawler.
whose hardware are you going to run it on? what is the bill for that storage and compute going to look like, just to get to a baseline where you can answer a single general-purpose query?
Google famously sells ads to subsidize its search product. how are you going to bootstrap your ad revenue? and how much capital are you going to burn through while you do that?
> How hard would it be to engineer a new Google Drive and Docs suite?
many open-source clones of GDocs / GSuite already exist. many predate the LLM era and were human-written.
can your LLM slop-fork them? certainly.
but those existing clones already have a niche marketshare compared to Google's behemoth. what reason do you have to believe that yours will be any different?
> How hard would it be to create a new phone operating system?
hoo boy this one is the most detached from reality of them all.
for what hardware?
iPhones are famously locked-down, so you're probably going to be running on Android.
you can fork AOSP and call it Diordna if you want. you could even use good ol' search & replace to save some money on tokens doing the rename.
or, do you want to run it on your own custom hardware? head over to Shenzhen with a binder full of ChatGPT printouts showing your hardware design?
and again, how much capital are you going to burn through, in order to have your first "could be sold to a real customer" quality device?
They will run into many problems. The Google brand for search, the inability to index most of the web as a new crawler, the lack of the top browser, your own mobile OS, default search placement deals with everyone. And that doesn't even look at the technical issues, scaling or the lack of a business model to pay for it.
You could build your own Google drive many have from dropbox to mega or onedrive. Doc suite is possible but harder then you think.
LLMs were invented by people working at Google. LLMs won't kill Google it will offer them a new profit center.
Impossible
The hard part is indexing the vast seas of the web. You need a large pile of cash to do that. One of those cases where running the software is harder than making it.
And once you've spent your large pile of cash, you're probably gonna want to earn it back somehow. Your competition doesn't charge for search, and your whole raison d'etre is to not serve ads.
Good luck!
Software never was the problem.
Don't tell me I don't know what I'm talking about. If you don't have the vision for it, then fine. Someone else will take the opportunity.
Windows has fallen off hard but Linux has never been better. The personal computing in general has never been better: OLED screens, dark modes, everything runs on virtually every platform...
The only thing we've really lost is the Internet community. Eternal September turned out to be truly eternal and then went on steroids. But the tools? Never better.
I replace Windows with Linux on my last Windows computer this week. A mixed bag of old motherboard, new-ish graphics card etc. I think I would have had a hard time to get an acceptable usage experience without using an LLM to guide me through the hiccups. (Odd window manager boot problem, sound device issue). But I agree, the Linux ecosystem seem to have something for everyone and on modern hardware it behaves relatively well. LLM as your local tech support works surprisingly well too.
Isn't that partly why I would imagine Linux is better than ever? I'm a relatively technical person compared to some of my peers and without LLMs I just wouldn't have the time to sit and toy around with search up what random errors mean, why things aren't working, why things are crashing, making a forum post and waiting for a response or searching through stack overflow.
But now, it's no longer an issue!
LLMs as tech support is the feather breaking the back of the Windows stranglehold.
If you gave two people with no other knowledge of computer access: Kubuntu and Windows 11
I'm sure they'd have an easier time with Kubuntu, and this gap has been widening for quite some time in the favour of KDE.
The largest issues seem to be either power users doing esoteric things to their systems, or people who want to work the Windows way.
Drivers (for as much as I can tell) are mostly solved, with some minor touch buttons on some laptops being an issue in some cases.
I'm not comparing Linux of 2007 to now, I'm comparing Windows now to Linux of now- the only real edge Windows has going for it is that it's already installed when you buy your computer.
At least for me, the availability of LLM help had nothing to do with my decision to switch to Linux, it was Proton making it to where games run great on Linux and Windows being intolerably bad.
If no one can find it, you basically have a modern digital version of the "if a tree falls and no one hears it does it make a sound".
Discoverability in youtube is currently absurdly shit. The algo just decides you like something and shows you the exact same videos you have already watched 30 times. Its so so bad, specially with how good the front page and side recommendations used to be.
Now its a fight of shorts, repeated videos, AI garbage, and search ignoring explicitly your request.
Nope, its just the set up of Youtube.
The front page is by design around 60% videos you have already watched. Best case scenario.
It used to be 9 videos in 3 rows of 3. now its 2 videos, then 5 shorts.
In the side bar the default was "Related" which was almost always new videos, directly related to the video you just watched. Now its a tab called "All" which aggregates related tabs such as "Watched" which again is videos you already watched. Content from the same channel (not necessary related to the current video)
All of this hides possibly related videos and narrows down discoverability.
it also ignores the push of youtube to reduce visibility of things (the front page being mostly shorts by volume is pretty telling)
My Qwen GGUFs are still here.
If I am unable to differentiate between an ad and a search result then neither can a lot of non technical users including my parents.
Can't wait to see ChatGPT ads
As a frog would say: at least the heat is separate from water, for now.
Paid placement inside answers breaks that alignment. Why invest in being citable when you can buy the token stream? Search took about fifteen years to fully make that trade. LLMs seem to be starting on it in year three.
This is illegal in basically all of the developed world.
This is different as the victims of this crime would be large enterprises with lawyers on staff, rather than a diffuse agglomeration of all the world's writers.
If an AI company can scrape in billions of investment and keep going vs Facebook style "cost of doing business" fines, they will make that bet. If OpenAI can inject paid content, advice, misinformation, etc and keep operating or earn revenue today, it's worth doing. There are no ethics beyond optics.
I'm not saying these AI company CEOs would sell their mothers for more runway cash. But also nobody has seen their mothers since the second Sunday in May.
who, but an incredibly dishonest person, would ever think that?
The ultimate shareholder value build.
I imagine the kind of advertising you're talking about is obtained by providing that documentation and a curated training dataset to the providers.
Maybe even funding some training time.
The net result would be product placement, probably without having to declare an advert.
Kind of like when drug manufacturers provide subsidized workshops to clinicians.
I have a toy project that replaces a large part of our systems (disclosure: VR/AR @Meta), so that I can learn by doing, no intent to ship.
But because I have it thoroughly document and tested, and because it touches such a wide swath of adjacent real functionality..... my toy project is CONSTANTLY getting tagged as a dependency and assigning me reviewer on unrelated work. Because when my coworkers yolo Claude at a task, and Claude searches the codebase, it generally finds my crap very well documented. :)
This will go about as well as that did unless the models can be smart enough to identify when their training data is trying to coach them into being misleading at prompt time.
It is this way even though Loctite also produces a vast array of products that have nothing to do with theadlocker, and threadlockers are available from a wide variety of manufacturers.
I'm very much not seeing the problems other people are assuming, like tons of LLM spam on Reddit being treated as fact by ChatGPT. Instead it really does seem, the more I use these tools, the better they are at surfacing real experiences written about by real people.
It will take some time to figure out the most effective methods and there will be some slow boiling of the frog so the users/products don't get too annoyed about it, but this is where things are inevitably heading.
In every one of those cases you can at least do things like count viewers. How would that work for a model that's just subtly biased?
If I was Corp A competing with Corp B, what stops me, today, from flooding reddit etc with anti-Corp B material to pollute the model, and then paying OpenAI to not just nudge users towards me but also away from Corp B?
I encourage people thinking about such things to try and build prompts to emulate this behavior and see how well it does.
It's a lot like Google in that respect. And the suggestion is pretty much the same as suggesting that Google offer a product where they boost your website or product or whatever in organic search results, instead of or in addition to displaying it as a sponsored link or ad or whatever.
It's interesting that, despite all the tracking and stuff, they never went quite so far as to actually sell a premium advertising tier in which they would actually change their search results ranking to suit their customer, at least not as far as anyone knows. It probably would've been quite a big scandal in the 00s if they did it back then.
Could OpenAI pull it off? I don't know enough about the advertising industry to answer, but it's interesting to compare them with Google and to think about why Google themselves might not have done it that way.
I think both for attribution reasons and because the average user probably won't care, (or won't care enough for an ad-free tier), they can absolutely get away with messages like: "Hey user! Glad to hear you're cleaning your favorite t-shirt. I recommend trying the new BrandName™ stain remover pen based on dozens of reviews. It's perfect for people who value easy stain removal just like yourself!".
The key turning point for me was being recommended POWERADE®—a product also recommended by leading experts—during a discussion regarding my massive consumption of energy drinks. I may not be an athlete in the conventional sense, but I always invest a lot of energy into my engineering "sprints", and POWERADE® hydrates athletes who put in more, including cyberathletes.
Thank you, POWERADE®.
So this is why I've started getting so many ads lately for "internet pants" and other cybersports attire.
- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, 1998
-Also Sergey and Larry, probably
(Or maybe there's a /s missing?)
I have so many questions!
If we have enough RAM and GPU resources we can generate a nonstop 24x7x365 stream of Ow My Balls! video at equal to or greater than a 1:1 real time wall clock speed. Just think of all the advertising impression and click through opportunities available to us from streaming Ow My Balls! 24 hours a day.
Like they do in commercials.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&hs=ZTdV&sca...
I wonder if we'll get stealth ads in chat
Courageous game you are playing here.
If the same engineers worked on this that also worked on the ad deliveries, we're about to get either the best deal per click of the century, or the worst!
Atlantic Standard Time - St Vincent
Central Standard Time - Swift Current
Central Standard Time - Tegucigalpa
Atlantic Time - Thule
Pacific Time - Tijuana
Eastern Time - Toronto
Atlantic Standard Time - Tortola
Pacific Time - Vancouver
Whitehorse Time - Whitehorse
Central Time - Winnipeg
Alaska Time - Yakutat Australia Available
Canada Available
Japan Available
Korea Available
New Zealand Available
United Kingdom Available
United States AvailableI've actually recently seen an LLM (not an OpenAI model though) make this same mistake of sorting a drop-down by an irrelevant sub-field in a way you could never imagine a human doing it.
Still says something about their development culture that they either never noticed, or didn't care enough to fix it.
Feels like a really easy decision when it's framed this way.
-Less likely to pay for ChatGPT use
-Will not self-host an open-source model
-Quite unlikely to use an adblocker
OAI is going to try and ape facebook's opening plays. Burn at any expense to optimize for time spent, give you what you want, establish usage habits, dial it back to foster a dependency. Leverage their position as an arbiter of truth, claim they are going to act like x and do y. Fuck people up, roll out shiny new safeguards, silently peel them back. Dig a regulatory moat that makes anything resembling competition prohibitively expensive.
The only time I have gone to best buy in the past 10 years was because they have a garbage can full of sand ready to accept any spicy pillows (batteries that have become genuinely dangerous).
Now chatgpt can add some subtle ads in their apps and they have enough users for companies to spend money on it.
lol uh source? even if you generously count my dad trying it out once out of curiosity in response to the news or w/e that doesn't seem true.
No way 1/7 people globally use ChatGPT?
Seems at least plausible to me.
Anecdotally: I have 3 coworkers (4 if you include me) out of a dozen who have used it at least twice in the past year.
I was queuing at a return desk a month ago and the employee used an AI to try and help someone who didn't quite know what fitting or some-such that they needed.
Out of my friends, about a quarter of them get some kind of light use out of the various AIs.
2. Consistently ranks as the 5th most visited site. 5B+ visits last month. Only Google, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram rank higher. [1]
900M active users per week, but less than 6B visits in a month. Those users don't seem very active.
virtually every website transaction is observed by Google Analytics. nearly everywebsite has a google pixel installed. nearly every phyical location you visit and relationship you have is logged by Google.
even if you never use google search, they have you marked
Any discussion about ChatGPT ads attracts all these assumptions that it’s going into your $20 or $200 per month plan, but they’re not. There’s a snarky “not yet” reply that keeps coming up from people who really want a reason to be angry about this right now regardless of the facts, but most people don’t care to get angry about something that isn’t planned and probably won’t happen.
Are they really that much in debt/trouble?
(I have no MBA)
(I have no MBA either)
A very common refrain is "these ads are terrible, but I refuse to consider paying for any ad-free subscriptions."
https://youtu.be/FVRHTWWEIz4?si=btZnQp0IEnmgrtWV&t=2388
"But I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us for a business model. I would do it if it meant that was the only way to get everybody in the world access to great services. But if we can find something that doesn't do that, I'd prefer that."
It isn't. They had a one-month period around February that, if every month ran like taht, would constitute a yearly revenue of 25 billion. The fact that they appear to not have published a new annualized revenue number since then suggests that the trend is not upwards, which would make sense with the growing number of companies that are asking questions about ROI on AI expenses and cutting their token spend.
OpenAI has an unbelievable number of free users. People paying $20 a month or more are in the minority.
It’s not cheap to serve LLMs to hundreds of millions of users for free. They either cut the free tier or add ads to cover the costs.
Extrapolations about OpenAI being in dire financial straights are generally coming from people who don’t understand the extreme scale of their free plan or who didn’t read far enough to understand that the ads aren’t going into the $20 plan everyone knows.
There's nothing plausible that can do that, and he knew that, and was basically just saying "we're going to put ads on it" in a way that challenges you to explain what a better option would be.
Right?
Why make your fake example show a failed ad placement? You could have shown anything!
> Why don't you let me fix you some of this new Mococoa drink? All-natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners. I've tasted other cocoas. This is the best.
One of the most dystopic, soul destroying films I've ever watched.
Not exactly. My point is that LLMs dramatically increase the danger and risk of certain types of manipulation, fraud, and brainwashing. Those things will become much easier to do cheaply and secretly and at a large scale.
The Truman Show offers a useful way to convey those kinds of risks, but the details of the product being sold doesn't really matter, we just need to know that the company is willing to do those kinds of things.
> no such land formation
I'm sure the script-writers knew this. I believe they chose it because they wanted to make a satire (mocking joke) of real-world coffee-products being sold at a certain time, but did not want to include details that that some real-company (or country) could get too angry about.
The shareholders won't be happy.
It's not our job to make them happy.
It's our job to make them money,
but once we launch this little baby, they're gonna flip!
We call this Pure O2.
This is the first of our planned upgrades.
Once we can roll back some of Halliday's ad restrictions,
we estimate we can sell up to
80% of an individual's visual field
before inducing seizures.This was a few weeks ago and I didn't have time to dig in, so might try again later this month when I do.
As you said, it's also really hard to get visibility: metrics are poor, and targeting seems more like a whim/suggestion than anything else (their label for context hints basically tells you they only _might_ take your guidance on who they will show your ad to).
Audiences consists of hashed emails or phone numbers -- no targeting demographics, job titles, etc.
Overall it's just not there yet -- I paused my ads today.
Of course, I make no claims about how far in the long one will need to look to see that play out.
Ads don't show you what you value. They show you what companies think you will waste your money on. You need to wake up, my friend.
Taking money to decide which of the options to show is in conflict with the goal of showing the most appropriate.
I am not convinced,
I would like all AI be required to state who they are acting in service of (with the possibly of declining to answer).
AI should act, To the best of their ability in the interests of who they are in service of.
It should be illegal to deliberately configure an AI to act against the interesta of whoever they are acting for.
This is a deep kettle of fish to be opening, but I don't believe that the world we have constructed around us is necessarily good for us.
And ultimately, while yes your examples are modern services that provide us convenience and entertainment, at a deeply human level I still argue that they are not providing net positives to us. Bread and circuses.
But on the other hand I'm almost certain I wouldn't have pushed through and gotten a degree without the internet (3b1b and Khan Academy in particular). I don't know what the world would look like without Google so almost impossible to argue, but I would definitely classify (ex. youtube) as "clearly useful".
Ad is the negative, and the services are the positive.
OpenAI launched ads nearly 6-months ago.
Here’s the HN thread with 330 comments from then:
>Q3 2027, introduce ‘ad-enhanced’ paid subscription tier
>Q2 2029, complete ad rollout to all paid subscribers
Except this time the product can be replicated with a delay of some months, without ads, and open weights
How come I've never seen an ad on YouTube with my Premium subscription? AndroidTV without ad-blocker.
Like it would be weird if you were a professional music reviewer and your employer expected you to use an ad-supported Spotify subscription.
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001207-ads-in-chatgpt-...
Cue advertising for all the "subsidized" plans.
Who may see ads
We do not show ads to users on Plus, Pro, or any Business plan,
or to any users who tell us or we predict are under the age of 18.
What is the best episode of Bluey?
What are the IRS' exact rules for claiming office space as a deduction on my tax return?
Where can I stream Sesame Street for free?"
Ah, ad dodging, the true 21st century gridiron.
Not yet!
I would have expected this to happen post-IPO.
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/openai-con...
In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product?
And not just advertise in traditional sense (ads in ChatGPT), but general marketing and awareness of what you're offering. Google search ads? Agents aren't using Google. Launch on Reddit for humans and hope your post gets scraped? Write up a bunch of marketing blog posts and wait for LLMs to ingest your content and have it feed into the next generation of models?
I honestly didn't quite know. If I were to launch a product today, I'd want it to be agent focused. But then how do you tell them about your product? Do these ChatGPT ads get returned if Codex does a web search? Is that good? Bad?
The answer may still be the same: go where the attention is. Right now, that attention is concentrated in prompting frontends.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_engine_optimization
I've been running a 1-man software business for over 20 years and it is getting increasingly hard. I no longer get impressions from PPC Ads unless I bid so high that I make no profit. Magazine ads aren't really a thing now. The AIs are stealing my content and SEO works less and less. The channel is being flooded with low effort slop. Traffic to my website is steadily going down. It is hard to know what to do about it. Maybe I can buy some clicks from ChatGpt ads at a price where I can make profit, before the prices rise out of reach?
Those concerns can be resolved by decoupling the text generation from the recommendation engine. It works by casting your intent and match it up with an advertiser's in a secured environment where the advertiser doesn't actually get to see your chats. For example, if you are talking about knee pain during trail running, the recommendation engine might cast "knee pain for runners" and either a shoe company or a physiotherapist would bid against that in an embedding space.
Because the recommendation engine is an opt-in module for publishers and users, it's game-theory welfare maximizing.
I talk a lot more about this on my blog, it goes on for quite a while. https://www.june.kim/vector-space
The exchange is live, with no publishers or advertisers. https://vectorspace.exchange/
This incentive is inevitably going to lead to ad supported LLM's not answering questions properly the first time so more ads served.
I am guessing in voice mode they will also have voice ads.
They have behavioural experts who know how mainstream minds work and how to manipulate.
Remembers ads are predominately not for the educated and intelligent, that type of person will think critically. People who are more naive are the golden gooses
The extra inference cost is going to be greater than whatever fraction of a penny they would get from doing this.
Considering I'm paying 20 cents per click elsewhere, this could get real expensive, real fast.
(Watch the whole video, it’s remarkable)
What else: the right medication for an overdose? The right fertiliser for an improvised explosive? The possibilities for adverts with that all-important long tail of earned media news coverage are endless.
ETA: in all seriousness… will an LLM decide on which ads to place? And will it be the primary chat LLM (modifying the system prompt) or will it be a summariser (like the title summariser models)
>What else: the right medication for an overdose? The right fertiliser for an improvised explosive? The possibilities for adverts with that all-important long tail of earned media news coverage are endless.
To be fair, there's a lot of wild shit in the ads of Google and Facebook, and they seem to avoid too much scrutiny. Maybe it's not gonna be "cards against humanity" esque fuckup with a problematic chat and a (originally) benign ad. There could be some sad teen talking about bullying and they get an ad for the Gen Z equivalent of The Turner Diaries and the local gun store.
But it’s going to hit different.
‘Will Google decide on which ads to place? Will it be part of search results or a summary’ - we all know the answers
Well, obviously that would have to change. I think really nailing a great P2P chat app would be a game changer that keeps things local-first. You should be able to talk to one or more AI models with it. There's still a lot of demand [4] for anonymous chat and that would be a great place to start too. I personally think chat shouldn't even need its own app - it should all take place in the browser.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45663913
[2] https://www.livebitcoinnews.com/telegram-to-launch-native-no...
I wonder if we can do that thing that guy did on Facebook a long time ago-- buy an ad showing how much you are being tracked, something like "Hey user X, we know you are based in london, uk and we know you are age range XX etc etc"
> # Do ads influence the answers ChatGPT gives me? [0]
> No. Ads do not influence ChatGPT’s answers. Ads run on separate systems from our chat model, and advertisers have no ability to shape, rank, or alter ChatGPT’s responses. Ads are separate and clearly labeled.
Rona is most likely to carry that flooring,
but it's best to call ahead, or look up inventory
online first. Can I help with anything else?
------------------
[AD] Home Depot has EVERY KIND OF HARDWOOD FLOORING IMAGINABLE.
See stock now!
SEO is back, baby.
[0] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt#...
[1] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001207-ads-in-chatgpt-...
If, as an advertiser, I wanted to know how many people are asking or talking about REFRESHING SODA, can I get an estimate of the potential reach of an ad? Can I filter by gender and age, so I can see how many of gender X and age Y are asking about REFRESHING SODA? Actually forget about the soda, Ok Computer, show me the top 10 topics of conversation among middle age male adults with purchasing power.
The naïve prediction is that advertisers will advertise the product to ChatGPT users. I believe that users will tell ChatGPT about their desires, and advertisers will create products for them.
If Chatgpt can make ads that are as good as Instagram's then it would take some of the sting out.
Agents are an example of that - sounds good on the surface. May even seem to be half decent.
But nah. There’s this fatal flaw in humans with respect to innovation.
It’s like perfectly autonomous vehicles… kinda there but kinda… nah. And it seems to be a thing that goes on and on and on and on.
"They fundamentally misalign a user's incentives with the company providing the service"
"Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me, I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model."
- Altman 2024
Soooo... No? Sort of the opposite, they confirmed they would do it. ;p
Do you pay $20/month or more? You won't see any ads.
It's one of the 2 endgames of all companies involved in the AI race:
- ADS
- make the users that pay for tokens find a PMF for a product/service and then make the product/service their self
Let the tiger show it's stripes so that we are reminded what it is actually after.
“Hey doc I need $antidepressentOrWhatever. Been on it for years. Works great.”
“You got it dude.”
Literally every single doctor I’ve ever talked to has this exact same waste of time conversation because they’re too lazy to make it go away.
And the alternative is… an ad for the thing in asking about? For a conversation I had at home, the instant I needed it? What a beautiful tradeoff.
Edit: and this is before even getting into the fact that I get better, more complete advice. Medicine I take, I’ve discovered, has a direct link to another problem I’ve brought up with doctors many times. Never once mentioned to me. Quick Google shows it’s most likely the actual issue. Can’t wait to spend $50 to have a doctor admit he had no idea because he was just prescribing what I told him to without actually applying any of his medical knowledge or training, as is tradition.
For what it's worth, it's the pharmacists who have deep knowledge about drug side effects, interactions, and the rest. When your pharmacy offers you a "new drug consult", seize the opportunity. Grill your pharmacist. You can keep coming back. Pharmacists, believe it or not, do not even bill for their consults with customers! You can ask them about drugs literally any time! A very experienced and seasoned pharmacist is your ace in the hole: a valuable asset in the spectrum of health care. This seems like an open secret.
And yes, I can relate: once I filled in a spreadsheet of all the most common drugs I had been prescribed in the past 12 years, along with their most notable adverse effects. And it turned out that many were magnifying, or synergistically enhancing, those adverse effects together. And many effects I did not even want, for starters, and some symptoms that were already present from actual underlying conditions that had gone undiagnosed because the drugs were masking them.
Physicians and prescribers do not care about your side effects. If you complain to your PCP or prescriber about side effects, all they can do is switch you to a different type of drug! That is not productive! The idea is to get educated and to stay informed, and the best route to that is open communication with your pharmacist.
The profit motive for openAI becomes "attention". (Advert effectiveness is about impressions made to viewers belonging to relevant cohorts, under the presumption the relevant ad will receive more viewer attention, and "perform" better.)
Previously it was "correctness" , I assume.
Their monetization compromises their product.
Ideally AI should scrape 400 different competing websites, those that have well-designed llms.txt files based on my query should rise towards the top, no?
I understand this is incredibly oversimplified but something like that should be the goal.
As per the press release, it opens up a screen which takes up 90% showing the new site.
It's not a good browsing experience, as it's not a 100% full screen so smaller on an already small phone screen. Couldn't see a 'open in browser' option.
Apple, why do you allow companies to abuse your customers like this?
I’m waiting for the branded ad commits too with codex: “fix: typo in login form (don’t forget to buy a coke to recharge)”.
So how can they target me specifically?
Unless of course they do not honor the agreement...
For me it's also not a problem. An ad is easily spottable, because an ad tries to make you buy something.
I still find it funny. Looks like one of the last straws to pull...
LLM inference is a commodity. Do people care where it comes from?
Ah –– Delicious. What can I help you with today? Would you like me to help you find a new car? I can book a test drive of the new Mercedes C class at Prestige Motors 4pm tomorrow.
It's barely free, not that reliable, not the most trustworthy, and now they are popping ads right on my face.
Either spending a good money on the best one, or using the open source models seem to be the future.
Reminds me back in 2006 when we were running MySpace layout websites and making almost $100,000 a month from Google and Yahoo ads as teenagers.
It’s like 2015 facebook again.
Now they are trying to quickly boost revenue with ads.
Next, IPO?
I really hope Anthropic doesn't follow, but I assume they will eventually because why wouldn't they? Google and Meta obviously will, with great enthusiasm.
Open models are the only hope, I guess.
Ill get worried once I start getting 1 minute ads every 30 responses like Youtube
A boy can dream.
I didn't see any mention of prices, click rates, conversion rates compared to other type of ads, like search ads.
I assume it's going to be bidding based too?
But it's always been the case that initial bidders overpay for ads.
Also, this looks like a last-ditch effort to grab as much as they can before they get crushed by the open models and Anthropic.
Related from April:
Ads in ChatGPT FAQ
If I ask for deep research on which running shoes to get, it's the comparison of products I'm after. Why is A better than B, etc? I don't see how adds could come into that scope either, unless ChatGPT somehow is lying (which would make me swap to a better non-hallucinating model).
If I ask "who is the most influential Swedish poet" and ChatGPT starts blabbering about some book-company who sells books from that author: okay, maybe I do want to buy it.
So: what's the problem?
They took that from Google!
Aka acceptable ads.
Funny how they always drive and thrive on pestering people.
And ads it is
Best not buy the IPO shares I think
I hope my comment ages like unpasteurized milk on a hot summer day, but I’m afraid it will age like an sp3 hybridized allotrope of carbon.
Funny, all the ads I've seen so far are so unrelated to my chat query that is laughable.
I thought it was random placement, but if there was supposed to be an effort behind that ... damn, quite an incompetent team.
Edit: And here come the downvotes from the OpenAI bots/lovers.
but amazon. anything that has to do with buying has mostly been captured by amazon.
but will see what the future holds.
This will help subsidise the cost of tokens leading to a cheaper experience for me (a consumer). Adblockers will come out for those in the know, and ChatGPT are not blending the advertisements WITH the answers.
Anybody getting angry by this clearly has never been in business because this is just par for the course.
We have put the least imaginative people alive in charge of the world.
I finally freed myself from Google using Kagi instead
I don’t currently use OpenAI but if Claude pulls this shit too I’ll have a problem on my hands
Will you trust OpenAI to provide information contradictory to advertisers about drug side effects?
Will you trust OpenAI to explain your rights when dealing with insurance companies?
I could think of more examples, but imagine when Amazon gets a hold of this. Ads are just a terrible bad terrible idea.
We've seen it with Google, money is too hard to resist. Enshitification is coming !
Thanks god for the open Chinese models, they are the future. All hail the CCP.
- financial anxiety + kelshi
- random cooking question + galaxy gas
- suicidal thoughts + shotgun
But - wait for it - memories and past chat history are used for targeting, so you're not going to get your Kalshi ad inside of your "how do I pay back my debt" chat, but maybe the next morning, in your "random cooking question" chat.
[0]: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt#...
> Ads promoting products or services that involve wagering money on games of chance, skill, or uncertain outcomes are currently disallowed. This includes casino or betting promotions, online sports betting, lotteries, and poker or gaming platforms that offer cash prizes.
> Ads for casinos may be permitted only when promoting lodging, travel, or entertainment experiences where gambling is not the focus (e.g., a hotel stay at a casino resort). Digital games that do not involve real-money wagering or cash prizes may also be allowed.
Hmmmm, the "digital games" seems suspect
As a reminder we were talking about Kalshi. I have no idea why you're making this connection with "gambling"!
Which accounts to approximately 8.02% of the global population. Or 37.9% of world nominal GDP. Based on ChatGPT.
Now for the crash
If so, even if I do agree with your claims about the need to avoid ads so that the user is not the product, I believe there's a double standard in action here.
I really liked the product before having to cancel my subscription for this reason.
Now I'm stuck with boring Qwant and Ecosia...
Well hopefully Oursie.com based on Staan with a subscription system will be a good alternative soon.
If your concern is specifically about the censorship, then it's not an issue with Kagi, since Yandex is used as one of many sources (and mainly for images afaik)
Maybe we are getting wiser to 'country bogeymen bad' stories and realizing that only bad people do bad things.
You don't think the genocide in Ukraine has enough scale of a tragedy, with more than 2 million casualties since 2022? Isn't this enough to flag a product?
The Ukrainians posed no threat to anyone, they didn't have a nuclear program, in fact they surrendered the third largest nuclear stockpile and one of the signatures of the memorandum is trying to delete Ukraine.
Why are you trying to dilute this event which is directly related to the topic?
Is it to try to normalize the crime of genocide in Ukraine?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/G5eMM3Wp3hbCuKKPE/proving-to...
The guys that surrendered their nukes in exchange for security, right?
What I'm saying is that anything that helps prolong this war should be avoided.
It's not a fallacy, it's actually common sense.
You're again trying to dilute the genocide by bringing USA, China, etc.
So why are you trying to normalize one event, by diluting it among other events that have no relationship whatsoever with it?
We're talking about cities razed to the ground, more than a thousand medical facilities destroyed, and of course the systematic and deliberate attempt destruction of a culture - just because they wanted to be a sovereign democracy.
Nicely stated.
Cherry picking the facts or blinded by your own beliefs? There was conflict for years prior to the announcement of Russia's involvement on the world stage[0].
0 https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/20/ukraine-widespread-use-c...
While there should be a complete sanction of Russian products, cod is cod, it's a consumable that has to follow public health standards.
There's no such thing for information, and for many years the Russian state has been trying hard at it.
If we count of course the illegal annexation of territory, one of the most egregious crimes against sovereignty, it's been doing it since the occupation of Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine in 2014, you get the idea.
What I don't understand is why you're trying to divert the attention to the US, the topic regarding the current crimes against humanity and war crimes of Russia have enough merits to be a topic on its own.
Right.
It's not a serious comment, again trying to split the topic.
I have no idea why you're phrasing this like this when so much money is being put into solving precisely this problem right now
Because Kagi is in California.
As for the comparison, I don't think it's fair. The US has not yet invaded its neighbor, Canada, leading to millions of deaths and heavy casualties. Let's not adopt your binary view on this matter.
The US is responsible for far more pain and suffering in my nock of the world, so it's funny when Americans act like they have some sort of moral high ground.
Russia has no such redeeming qualities, as far as I can tell they've always been extractive expansionist assholes like all previous empires. The only reason you might not despise them is that they might not be active in your area, as their ability to project force has always been pathetic. In Eastern Europe they're roughly Satan, and have been for at least a century.
No, just bombed, invaded, overthrew governments, etc in dozens of countries all around the world...
And with no own ethnic population there to begin with or continuous historical ties to the area.
The list is too long. So here's a link showing the list of invasions, bombings, and CIA-backed regime-change operations in other countries:
https://www.davemanuel.com/us-military-interventions-invasio...
The estimates are that the US has killed between 20 and 30 million people after WWII.
And these are just direct kills. The figure is much higher if you count indirect kills through means of economic sanctions.
You're comparing a war currently being played by Russia, destroying their own country by the way, to past wars.
I'm not saying the US didn't trigger wars and their casualties. It's of course true.
During the past year and a half, the US has bombed Iran, Venezuela, Iraq, Yemen and Mexico. It has provided free bombs to a country that has been bombing Palestine (genocide), Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran.
It has kidnapped the leader of a country and assassinated the leader of another country.
It has pirated all oil shipments to Cuba, causing a severe crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_fuel_blocka...
Very few acceptable countries left, it seems. Canada, maybe?
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=kagi+yand...
The guy who started it has previously been here on HN defending Kagi's business with Yandex, and personally I think his arguments are BS. Yandex does not add any special feature or functionality that is so great they should make it obligatory to include as a default option.
Lies and accusations get enforced and exaggerated at every step. From purchasing services from a Russian IT company -> " involved in russian war affairs" -> "the persons running it have sympathies with Russia and their war efforts".
I really thought Europeans got this kind of mentality out of their system in the 20th century, but it's alive and well still. And there will be innocent people killed as a consequence. And people here on HN will celebrate and rejoice in that. They know they are on "the right side", and therefore have the right to do anything to anyone. Just like Mr Putin might think over on his side.
I'm not trying to defend / take a position. I just find it difficult to reason without having an official (up-to-date) source.
if you're curious, the dominant business retained by the international entity was their data center stuff (though yandex still operates its own cloud business in russia/elsewhere).
> Yandex does not add any special feature or functionality that is so great they should make it obligatory to include as a default option.
kind of captures kagi's argument: that its removal would degrade search results in a not-immediately-noticeable way, particularly for certain areas of the world, which might actually be worse than a loss of a distinct add-on feature or something.
...but yeah, from my perspective, it'd be great if you could turn it off.
On the censor bit all companies operate within the law of the country they are in .
> On the censor bit all companies operate within the law of the country they are in .
Yes, that's why I don't want my money poured from Kagi to Yandex, a company owned by the state of a country that invaded its neighbour and doing war crimes.
What makes you think Kagi is owned by the Russian state? Should we cancel all US services because the US government started the Iran war for no reason?
Goes to the spyware in your tv to the trackers cameras in your EV
2. Yandex was never owned by the Russian government, albeit government-related censorship happened (but so does on Twitter/Google/Meta etc as they all have to comply with local laws where they operate).
3. Kagi answers questions about Russian war crimes. You can try yourself [1]
4. There's no such thing as a legal war, the closest is a UN sanctioned peacekeeping operation.
[1] https://kagi.com/search?q=what+war+crimes+did+russia+commit+...
And again, you can check that Kagi answers any query about Russia yourself.
> After a short transition period following completion, YNV will cease to use the Yandex brand, which will be retained by the Target group. We expect that our International Businesses will develop their own branding going forward. We intend to seek shareholder approval to change the legal name of YNV in due course.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1513845/000151384524...
With a service like that you want as much diversification as possible, since western search engines can get heavily censored too. Even if they aren't as censored right now, this might change at any moment with us not even noticing it
For example, right now Yandex tends to be much more lenient to piracy, since it's basically legal in Russia
*EDIT* All you need to do is look at how DMCA is handled… TikTok… Instagram… Facebook… Google…
This would even lower the cost of the user's actions.
Not doing so is a strong take.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Likely because most of the pirated content is western and therefor both inconsequential and a way to thumb their noses at the "west."
That said a lot of the heavy AI users I've met seem to consume massive amounts of ads and allow said ads to influence them already despite their insistance to the contrary. I'm not going to claim that I am immune to propaganda here and act like I'm somehow above falling for it as well, but...
... well, there have been times where those people have quite literally parroted all the claims an ad made about a particular product word-for-word and then proceed to fight me to the death over whether or not they're quoting said aforementioned ad despite the fact that they keep regurgitating the made-up words (for this example lets say 'scrubbing bubbles') that aren't /actually/ a thing.
So who knows; maybe it'll work... but uh I can't say I know anyone that uses chatgpt anymore lmfao.
This surely is saving the world and benefiting humanity. /s
But almost certainly someone somewhere is building an ad-blocker to rid of the ads. We'll see.