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They don't have to. Ad & search dependent companies need to answer for themselves how to handle the coming disruptions. As an analogy, Kodak was a disruption op

They don't have to. Ad & search dependent companies need to answer for themselves how to handle the coming disruptions. As an analogy, Kodak was a disruption opportunity, not a problem, for apple and flickr. Yes, maybe some content dries up -- no more stock photo sites -- but entirely unclear how important and they can wait to see how zombie companies adjust. Ex: ChatGPT encourages us to put more api docs online, not less.

acdha 4y ago
Google has already taken a lot of heat from increasingly keeping people on the search results page rather than sending them to the content providers. Chat interfaces are going to take that problem to the next level since they not only present someone else’s content but do it without linking to them. At some point that destroys the web as sites move behind paywalls. Google or Facebook giving you less revenue is still a lot better than receiving nothing. In some cases, that’s fine (AWS doesn’t mind you learning how to call their metered APIs on someone else’s site) but there are a ton of people who aren’t going to create things if they can’t make rent. Beyond the obvious industries like journalism, consider how many people are going to create open source software or write about it when they won’t get credit or even know if another human ever read it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- nostrademons 4y ago
  That's not really a problem for the adoption or economic viability of ChatGPT, though. At some point, it hoovers up all the knowledge of the Internet, encodes it into its model, and then - the model just stagnates as content providers stop providing content. That's not a big deal for it - it'll continue to be the primary place people go for answers even when the source material has thrown in the towel and decided they don't want to play, just like how people continue to go to Google even though webspam & SEO have long since made the web a place where you don't bother to contribute. Eventually the ecosystem might collapse when people realize they get more accurate, up-to-date information from sources other than ChatGPT. But considering that ChatGPT's answers are already more "truthy" than "truth", accuracy does not seem to be a top priority for most information-seekers.
  - fauigerzigerk 4y ago
    Once all competing language models and providers have hoovered up all the existing knowledge and can do similar things with it then margins for that part of the story will shrink rapidly. It will all be about access to new information, access to customers (such as advertisers) and access to users attracted to other aspects of the platform as well. I think producers of new content and their distribution platforms will have a lot of leverage. Youtube, Facebook, TikTok, Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, traditional publishers and perhaps even smaller ones such as Substack and Medium, are all gatekeepers of new original content. I think Google is best positioned to make the economics work. Unfortunately, they don't appear to have the best management team right now. They keep losing focus. Perhaps the danger of their core business getting disrupted will focus their minds.
    - nostrademons 4y ago
      The content is a bootstrapping tool. Once the language model gets critical mass it gets further training data from its interactions with users, which are private to the language model's developer. It's like how Google Search bootstrapped off the content of the web, but the real reason you can't replicate Search today is all the information about who is searching for what, which links they actually click on, and how long they spend on the page.

acdha 4y ago

Google has already taken a lot of heat from increasingly keeping people on the search results page rather than sending them to the content providers. Chat interfaces are going to take that problem to the next level since they not only present someone else’s content but do it without linking to them. At some point that destroys the web as sites move behind paywalls. Google or Facebook giving you less revenue is still a lot better than receiving nothing. In some cases, that’s fine (AWS doesn’t mind you learning how to call their metered APIs on someone else’s site) but there are a ton of people who aren’t going to create things if they can’t make rent. Beyond the obvious industries like journalism, consider how many people are going to create open source software or write about it when they won’t get credit or even know if another human ever read it.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nostrademons 4y ago
That's not really a problem for the adoption or economic viability of ChatGPT, though. At some point, it hoovers up all the knowledge of the Internet, encodes it into its model, and then - the model just stagnates as content providers stop providing content. That's not a big deal for it - it'll continue to be the primary place people go for answers even when the source material has thrown in the towel and decided they don't want to play, just like how people continue to go to Google even though webspam & SEO have long since made the web a place where you don't bother to contribute. Eventually the ecosystem might collapse when people realize they get more accurate, up-to-date information from sources other than ChatGPT. But considering that ChatGPT's answers are already more "truthy" than "truth", accuracy does not seem to be a top priority for most information-seekers.
- fauigerzigerk 4y ago
  Once all competing language models and providers have hoovered up all the existing knowledge and can do similar things with it then margins for that part of the story will shrink rapidly. It will all be about access to new information, access to customers (such as advertisers) and access to users attracted to other aspects of the platform as well. I think producers of new content and their distribution platforms will have a lot of leverage. Youtube, Facebook, TikTok, Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, traditional publishers and perhaps even smaller ones such as Substack and Medium, are all gatekeepers of new original content. I think Google is best positioned to make the economics work. Unfortunately, they don't appear to have the best management team right now. They keep losing focus. Perhaps the danger of their core business getting disrupted will focus their minds.
  - nostrademons 4y ago
    The content is a bootstrapping tool. Once the language model gets critical mass it gets further training data from its interactions with users, which are private to the language model's developer. It's like how Google Search bootstrapped off the content of the web, but the real reason you can't replicate Search today is all the information about who is searching for what, which links they actually click on, and how long they spend on the page.