It's very simple. There is ZERO chance the worlds biggest advertising companies will refrain, long-term, from using your most intimate secrets, gathered through your many conversations with their AI personal assistants, to sell you things.
This level of unfettered access to your personality, lifestyle, and secrets allows for an unprecedented kind of manipulation and control. You could see it as a new kind of wealth transfer: not only will They sell you things, They will subtly manipulate behaviors of the masses via trusted agents.
I think to the vast majority of people having one of these companies run an agent platform is going to be business as usual.
Here’s a prediction: the true AI moat will be owning the “AI friends” of the masses: a trusted coworker, therapist, personal music artist, or even just something to talk to. The moat comes from the fact that these “friends” will deeply understand the user and the users will want to “take them along” with their entire life (they’re useful!). So people will get “locked in” to their AI “team” which is only available via one of the major AI labs. And in turn, the AI labs parasitically will understand everything about the way you live and think at a level that traditional ad trackers could only dream of.
Sama has alluded to this in interviews for a long time. He stated a year ago [2]:
> The way that I think of it is that most people will want to have one AI service, and that needs to be useful to them across their whole life. And so you’ll use ChatGPT, but you’ll want it to be integrated with other services and so you need to have other apps inside of ChatGPT. We need to have an API business, because you will want to be able to sign in with OpenAI into some service that someone else has built, and you’ll want the kind of continuity of experience and you’ll want it to still know you and have your stuff and know what to share and what not to share. So we want to build this AI helper for people and that’s going to have to — there’s a few pieces that have to fit into that.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits....
[2] https://stratechery.com/2025/an-interview-with-openai-ceo-sa...
Why do they send me ads that seem like I am assigned to random demographics if they know everything about me?
In mine, I don't.
That seems like an oversight/ opportunity.
Let’s not forget Facebook caused a genocide
Products like Facebook and Google search were magical in their early days, but over the past couple decades they have been relentlessly and deliberately degraded into useless slop.
The people who made all of those unfortunate decisions are the exact same people building and funding AI! What do you think they are going to do with more powerful Skinner boxes? Help the masses live their best, most empowered lives?!