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> they didn't really do anything with it at all because they didn't have to. They didn't do anything with it because chatbots are unequivocally a worse busines

• sn0wf1re 4y ago
  It reminds me of the Tiktok vs Youtube comparison. Ad revenue was way higher on long format content, but the success of Tiktok means that Youtube now has to pay more to creators, even if their margins are lower. AI as search is lower margin but Google will need to implement it just to stay relevant.
  • revskill 4y ago
    It's really hard to move fast on a Python codebase i think. The solution should be rewriting it .
  • lottin 4y ago
    Tiktok succeeded because it offered something that the public wanted. I don't know that a chat bot is something that the public wants. I know I have no use for it.
    • grugagag 4y ago
      Now youtube trying to catch up with Tiktok is ruining their users experience with their 'Shorts' feature. My opinion at least. I wish I could hide shorts and never see them again...
      • visarga 4y ago
        Does anyone know if parental controls can hide shorts? Especially from the mobile toolbar.
        • infinityio 4y ago
          I think (Re)Vanced can do it if you are on Android
      • sn0wf1re 4y ago
        I take the opinion of the sibling comment. These short form videos are heroin. And as a service provider YouTube needs to offer the number one in-demand product if they want to maintain clientele, even at the cost of their "core" product (medium to long form video).
        • cpeterso 4y ago
          “There are only two industries that refer to their customers as ‘users’, one is of course IT, the other is the illegal drugs trade.” — Edward Tufte
          • notpachet 4y ago
            "The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client." -- William S Burroughs
    • Swenrekcah 4y ago
      TikTok is like heroin. Sure there’s a market for it but it’s not a particularly great thing to provide. A chatbot like chatGPT actually has a great potential to be useful for accomplishing real tasks.
    • edgyquant 4y ago
      Judging by the reaction it would seem you’re in the minority here
    • NikolaNovak 4y ago
      It is astonishing to me for someone to find no uses for it. We've been reading three custom made children adventure stories to our kids every night. My wife made custom black history month trivia, quizzes and posters I learned more about basic financial terms, music theory, caught up on concussion treatment and myriad other things We created quick rhymes for school And I feel there are astonishing things I haven't even touched on! Like ten million things. I'm exceedingly polite to the chat AI because I cannot believe I'm lucky and privileged enough to use something this awesome in my lifetime. I feel like a kid in candy store :). I cannot imagine that somebody can find NO USE for it!
      • la64710 4y ago
        I too felt like a kid in the candy store but I soon discovered that if you go in depth on anything with chatGPT it just starts to repeat the same answers after a while.
      • gardenhedge 4y ago
        I spent hours on ChatGPT asking questions about black holes. Like really dumb ones. I learned a lot!
      • lottin 4y ago
        I have a feeling that when I read a book I get smarter, whereas when I interact with a chat bot I get dumber. And it's not just a feeling, I'm positive that this is what's actually happening.
        • 0______0 4y ago
          That fits the candy store reference pretty well - the candy is not doing the kid any favors.
      • OOPMan 4y ago
        You don't need a chatbot to do any of that. You're basically just saying your too damn lazy to do any of this stuff unless the amount of effort you need to put in is as minimal as possible. While I get being tired and stressed (I'm a parent too) I feel like what you're doing is not much better than just zoning out.
  • MichaelDickens 4y ago
    I'm not sure I understand. If long form content makes more money, how can TikTok afford to pay creators to attract them away from YouTube?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • katbyte 4y ago
      They can’t/pay far less and most of its content is an alternate revenue stream/promotion vehicle for creators rather then many who’s YouTube is their primary?
  • shyn3 4y ago
    YouTube is heavily investing in shorts as well but a bit late.
    • Leo_Germond 4y ago
      I'm pretty sure that this is exactly what the poster above is refering to: they would profit more out of longer contents due to the way their ads placements work, but they have to adapt and propose shorts anyway.
  • starfallg 4y ago
    Are you saying that YouTube margins are lower than tiktok? Because that seems very unlikely based on estimated figures. Tiktok is still spending hundreds of millions on user acquisition. Bytedance is no closer to IPO now than 2 years ago, and so we don't have any idea the exact performance of its business lines.
• ekanes 4y ago
  Dang. You're right. Classic Innovator's Dilemma!
• huijzer 4y ago
  Since we’re on a technical site here, can I ask why ChatGPT cost exponentially more to run? The inference time for a neural net is constant so I’d say that it scales linearly with the number of users.
  • resource0x 4y ago
    See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34390123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34390123
  • HDThoreaun 4y ago
    I wasn't talking big O lol, maybe orders of magnitude would've been better?
• unoti 4y ago
  > They didn't do anything with it because chatbots are unequivocally a worse business model than the current search paradigm. I'm not so sure. Imagine having a human assistant that's smart enough to pass the bar, get an MBA, pass medical exams, and knows how to work on your car, and is good at brainstorming, and and and... And having that person do searches for you. Are you sure that working with this assistant wouldn't be a better user interface to the internet than the search we have today? And what if that assistant was willing to work for pennies per hour...
  • HDThoreaun 4y ago
    Oh the chatbots absolutely have the potential to create tons of value. The question is if its creator can harvest it/how much will be left with the consumer vs the producer. I suspect that it will still be very difficult to get people to sign up for subscriptions and advertising will be less effective than current search advertising so the chatbot creator will have difficult harvesting the value they create.
    • lerchmo 4y ago
      It’s the innovators dillema. Google is selling the answers to questions for millions of dollars per day. If their bot answers with ads, people will use another bot.
    • Maarten88 4y ago
      why settle for advertisements or user subscription when they could have the Chat AI make transactions for the user and take a cut from the seller. They could publish an API spec for many transaction categories and providers would be in line to sell products and services.
    • cwkoss 4y ago
      The key is that AI needs to have a fiduciary duty to its users: it should always suggest the most economically advantageous deal for the user, not what is best for the AI if those are not aligned. Make a marketplace for targeted discounts to incentivize changed behavior. Many companies that sell consumables are happy to give a first sample free in hopes of repeat purchasing. If I ask AI for a good lavender scented hand soap refill, it should have a fiduciary duty to give me the best economic choice for me. HOWEVER, AI could solicit discounts from this marketplace platform at the point the AI is making the decision: a new layer above and around Amazon and Walmart and every other established player. Hand soap manufacturers can compete with deals like "people who order hand soap at least twice a year can get 60% off their first purchase" and pay a commission to the AI platform for facilitating the discount. Users can trust the AI with their data because of the fiduciary responsibility and so become willing participants in keeping it accurate because it increases the ability of the AI to serve them.
• jbenjoseph 4y ago
  I disagree. There is a ton of money to be made. Advertisements can be even more lucrative, we just have to rethink the whole idea of advertisement. Imagine the chat bot as a digital salesperson, but for literally everything. It can even be optimized in a manner that if a user asks for too much work that doesn't involve selling you products (eg. writing essays) it can go "I'm Sorry Dave, but you need a ChatGPT Premium Subscription(tm) for that." As far as computational costs. These chat bots are not remotely maximally optimized. Sure it costs more to run but it is still on the order of pennies per user per day.
  • HDThoreaun 4y ago
    If google released a sales bot and Microsoft released a chatbot with banner ads everyone would just use bing. Maybe that’s naive but I just can’t see people accepting that kind of product. This is a competitive market with zero switching costs. You can’t just hamstring your product and expect users to stick around when another company they know and trust has a much better product.
  • linkjuice4all 4y ago
    But I don’t seek out sales people unless I desperately need what they have already. I typically don’t frequent businesses that continue to try to upsell me once I’m already inside. That being said there are definitely other people out that that do want this and aren’t resistant to paid messaging but if you want answers an AdBot will probably not be your first stop.
    • maeil 4y ago
      > But I don’t seek out sales people unless I desperately need what they have already. In case you don't because you prefer to do the research yourself, I'm sure that holds for the large majority of HN users, including me. But why do we prefer to do the research ourselves? Because we don't trust the salesman's incentives, objectivity and breadth of knowledge. If we had a utopian salesman who only cared about getting the right product for us and has intimate knowledge of every relevant product, it'd be a fools errand to do the research ourselves other than as a genuine hobby. I think the parent comment is hoping for the creation of AI Chatbots who at least get close enough to such a salesman. And while for-profit companies will surely attempt to instill perverse incentives, unlike with humans we only really need one AI salesman without them and we can all use that one. This might sound idealistic ("if everyone just used Linux..") but the barrier of usage is low enough that I see Google and MS having a much harder time competing with agents without perverse incentives than they've had competing with e.g. Linux or Firefox - especially if Google (the search engine) loses its moat.
• obert 4y ago
  The writing was on the wall: when looking for info we don’t interact with people continuously distracted by ads. We ask, focus on the answer, act. Google business model is shortsighted when looking at tech in terms of decades of humans modeling tech after themselves
• Auracle 4y ago
  And digital cameras were a worse business model than film. If someone is going to do it - even though it might be a worse business model - it might as well be you. But yeah, some of the chat responses will have to be ads. How they handle it will be key.