7 ms·

While OpenAI is making an aggressive play on being the platform that eats all other platforms and is positioned to be a neutral party directly on the transactio

by ralfn 4y ago

While OpenAI is making an aggressive play on being the platform that eats all other platforms and is positioned to be a neutral party directly on the transaction with self service plugins (apps), Microsoft is squandering the opportunity the way they squander every opportunity. Not realizing the game changed and playing yesterday's game in today's world. The reason why people prefer these chats over clicking search results and finding the relevant information is that the search results themselves as well as the first page of links forces your brain to filter 99% commercial information that you don't care about. You don't want to subscribe to newsletters. You don't want notifications. You wish the site would just die rather that pollute the search results and push more to-the-point non profit sources further down. And bringing ads in the game makes it impossible to make the platform play due to conflict of interests. You are either serving the user or the advertiser. Ads is the wrong business model for this, and OpenAI is positioned to be the winner here (against both Google and Bing) in a market larger than search and advertising. I will definately keep paying for the answers to be in my interest and look forward to spending money directly through ChatGPT, much like I spent money on iOS, Android and Steams's platform today.

sebzim4500 4y ago
>Microsoft is squandering the opportunity the way they squander every opportunity. While I find ads as annoying as you do, I don't think they are squandering anything. The vast majority of internet users are fine looking at ads, or else they would use an adblocker. The earlier they start playing with ads the earlier they can get an idea for how much revenue is on the table. Without this data how can they know what inference cost can be justified long term?
- ralfn 4y ago
  I think I'm failing to communicate my point here. It's the wrong bussiness model. The power of these chats is integration. To have the chat suggest a travel plan -and- book all the underlying steps. To integrate 3rd party services on the fly based on your specific requirements while rolling it up in a single transaction. That only works if the chat is representing my interests. Not just from a user perspective, but also from a regulatory and anti-trust perspective. ChatGPT is positioned to be a platform of apps that are integrated. Bing is positioned to be a search engine, making money on ads. The whole point is to never leave the chat. To have it all come to you on your terms. I want to do every transaction that I do online today from my chat. I don't care if you have a website or an app. If I can't order/subscribe from the chat your product might as well not exist. Examples: - I want a peperroni pizza from the highest rated place that doesn't also sell kebab that can deliver within 30 minutes. - Send a neutral professional Christmas gift to every customer in our EMEA region that generates at least 50k revenue for us At no point would I accept the product choices to be decided by who pays Microsoft more. Nor do I care who makes it happen. I don't want a link. I don't want to engage. But I'm perfectly fine with a neutral chat taking 5-30% cut on the transaction.
  - travisjungroth 4y ago
    But are you willing to pay a 5-30% premium? I think I am, but not everyone is.
    - ralfn 4y ago
      You are always paying that! Ads aren't free either. Neither is the marketing, the website, the app, etc. Getting your customers is expensive, serving them is as well. But you wouldn't need any of those to compete in this market, any more than an Uber driver would need that. All you need is to tell a chat about your API and focus on your actual product. It is a much more submissive relationship with the customer, but not a less profitable one.
      - travisjungroth 4y ago
        It’s not the same. The mechanism has a serious effect on behavior. You’re saying you would give the chat a cut but it’s not yours to give. You pay $100 for something and you tell the vendor “I found this through chat. You get $70 and they get $30.” I don’t really see that working. If the vendor opts-in to this relationship and chat only shows people who pay then it’s called advertising or reselling. If they show everyone, then there’s little incentive to pay. I’m not saying it’s unsolvable, but this getting a cut idea is not a solution. I do see abandoning normal advertising and optimizing for chat being possible. It’s like SEO. Not sure it’s a sufficient model for the chat services.
        ralfn 4y ago
        Let me phrase it differently. When people give Apple Music a cut of their song sales, or when people give Apple a cut of their iOS in game spending, it is not called advertisement. When you pay to tell someone who doesn't want to hear it about your product, thats advertisement. The smart play here is the platform play. Clicking on a link and leaving the chat is the opposite of the intent and purpose of the chat. It makes sense for search because going to another website is the point. For search it is the correct business model, but for chat it is not. The chat is the platform. Leaving it breaks all the advantages.
nwienert 4y ago
I’ve yet to see an example of *GPT be better at search than Google. I’ve seen a few examples that breathlessly proclaimed that they literally saved lives or saved hours of time, but when I typed the 3 most obvious keywords from their input into Google, the first result always has the answer right there.
- mejutoco 4y ago
  The other day I asked chatgpt about a Polish supermarket with a logo in a certain color and an animal in it. I could not remember the name. We continued our conversation until it was clear I was misremembering some things (I thought the name started with x letter, and that was false). Eventually chatgpt suggested the correct one. The search was something like: "Polish supermarket with red and white logo and a bird in the logo, that begins with the letter K". The first google result to wikipedia has it, to be fair, but without this back and forth idk if I would have found it.
  - tapland 4y ago
    It’s extremely wild to see this obfuscated with the wrong colors, animal and name, when it’s just a common grocery store chain in Poland.
    - rchaud 4y ago
      Ah, but ChatGPT is trained mostly on English materials.
    - mejutoco 4y ago
      That is literally what I remembered about the supermarket, so that is what I searched. It is a supermarket in Poland, not a Polish one I believe. P.S. It was not Biedronka! it was Auchan, and I thought Auchan started with K, because of the bird.
- ralfn 4y ago
  I never have a search problem. I need either information, a service or a product. Or information about a service or a product. I never need a search, a website or an app. That's never the problem I'm trying to solve. Search, websites and apps are the tools I have to use (currently) to solve my problems. In the process I have to: - deal with the fact that the interest of the makers of the app or website do not align with mine - deal with privacy invasions/ads/notifications - deal with things being phrased disingenuously - deal with apps needing to update, website being broken/bandwidth wasted And most importantly, unless two vendors implemented an integration together, I have to integrate their services myself! I never want to leave the chat. I want to do all my transactions from the chat. All of them. On my terms. With my prompts. Whoever facilitates that can take a 5-30% cut on all my online transactions. Examples: - book me a highly rated hotel in Berlin around 100 euro p/n most suitable for a staycation for next week Monday to Friday. Make a reservation near that hotel for the highest rated traditional German cuisine restaurant with a price per plate of 20-30 euro - send every contact ive emailed with from my work email in the last year a Christmas card with a funny but professional pun about the invention of the steam engine. Send it to their work address.
d136o 4y ago
I’m far from an expert (just an engineer who likes to download and try out demos) but one dark view of the alignment chatter is that it’s really about whether can you can get this new big artificial brain to push any user in the direction of BigCorp goal, while letting the users think that it’s answering their questions etc. I’d love to think that we can have AI agents working locally (with privacy) in alignment with our personal goals, but that seems like one of those things that won’t happen. (Will apple come through in terms of enabling local+decentralized inference/training?)
- ralfn 4y ago
  It's in the interest of the semi conductor industry for LLM to become a commodity, so it will.
seydor 4y ago
That's how google started as well. Ads is a tried and true model and is not going anyway anytime. People won't pay for bing chat search
- ralfn 4y ago
  The point is not to leave the chat. If you could buy the car from the chat, thats the correct bussiness model. Ads were the correct business model for search, where the goal is to find and click on a relevant link.. but that's the exact opposite of a chat. Clicking a link means the chat failed its purpose.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
blibble 4y ago
I think this sums up modern microsoft perfectly actually no matter the potential future value of the product, they can't resist putting shitty ads into it to make a quick buck today imagine what windows is going to look like in a few years time
goldfeld 4y ago
A floundering corporation has the extractivist mentality. Windows is on its way out so the suits pump it full of cheap bait to catch all the dollars they can, then they move on to other products naturally. It has been a rotten thing for a while, since the executives and investors don't really care about that brand, only about their own portfolios.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  Flaundering? I think Microsoft is a perfectly cromulent company. (Bah! Keeping it.)
  - goldfeld 4y ago
    Haha, I fire first but always double-check later the things that on second thought look strange. TIL English is still hard for me after over 25 years, and I used to think I was a more careful speller than native speakers who often type by the memory of words' sounds, and I do not. It can always publicly bite you in the tushy.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      I think it's a great word! Wonderful to be there for its genesis.
      - goldfeld 4y ago
        Sorry about the late reply I was up to my neck in money flaundering activities.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    I wish my business was floundering like Microsoft. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/net-income https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/net...
    - 4y ago
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> Microsoft is squandering the opportunity the way they squander every opportunity. https://www.google.com/search?q=microsfot+market+cap https://www.google.com/search?q=microsfot+market+cap $2.09t "squander opportunity" I agree with you though. I do not have a single Microsoft product in my house. No Windows, no Xbox, etc.
- scrollaway 4y ago
  You don’t get GP’s point and you’re talking about something completely different. The game has changed. It doesn’t mean their existing customer base has suddenly vanished and threw their Xboxes away.
hankchinaski 4y ago
Either the monetization is done with ads or with paid subscriptions. They chose to be in the former category. And I personally don’t mind clicking ads for the sake of not paying a premium. The two models can coexist
- ralfn 4y ago
  The third model is the platform model and thats the only one that makes sense here. An ad would send you to another site. The point of the chat is so you don't have to go to all the shitty sites and deal with all the marketing speak. So the options are either: - subscription, as they do now (ala Netflix, Officd365) - free, with ads having the profit maximalisation be the exact opposite of the main selling point (ala Google, Bing, Facebook) - platform, free for the user, but taking a cut from vendors that would integrate (ala iOS, Android, Steam, Amazon, Salesforce) In other words, rather than being an ad, it could offer to buy the car directly from the chat. The later is the most profitable solution and also ensure the interests of the user and the platform align. Platforms don't care which product you buy through them, they take the same cut, and would rather make you as happy as possible so you don't go to the competitor.
majormajor 4y ago
It's not clear to me that ChatGPT will realistically be able to avoid some variant of either SEO or pay-to-play just like search. If you've got a dozen plugins for getting food delivered, how does one get picked? If it's the user picking, they're at risk of the user cutting out the middleman, especially if the novelty of "tell the robot to pick an item" wears off and people want to actually look at menus. If it's something behind the scenes (either the model or some other software OpenAI writes) then that's a big big big temptation for pay-to-play a la app stores including direct advertising "promotional placement" like you see in mobile app stores. And even if it's not pay-to-play, once people start figuring out what makes plugins more or less likely to be triggered, it's SEO season. Nobody else has managed the art of "make it purely in the user's interest" with their marketplaces; it ends with one or both of either temptation to play both sides OR gamification/optimization/deception from the vendors behind the scenes.
acchow 4y ago
What happens when the SEO-equivalent cottage industry for LLMs appears? Will trainings models be so easy?

by ralfn 4y ago

sebzim4500 4y ago

>Microsoft is squandering the opportunity the way they squander every opportunity. While I find ads as annoying as you do, I don't think they are squandering anything. The vast majority of internet users are fine looking at ads, or else they would use an adblocker. The earlier they start playing with ads the earlier they can get an idea for how much revenue is on the table. Without this data how can they know what inference cost can be justified long term?

ralfn 4y ago
I think I'm failing to communicate my point here. It's the wrong bussiness model. The power of these chats is integration. To have the chat suggest a travel plan -and- book all the underlying steps. To integrate 3rd party services on the fly based on your specific requirements while rolling it up in a single transaction. That only works if the chat is representing my interests. Not just from a user perspective, but also from a regulatory and anti-trust perspective. ChatGPT is positioned to be a platform of apps that are integrated. Bing is positioned to be a search engine, making money on ads. The whole point is to never leave the chat. To have it all come to you on your terms. I want to do every transaction that I do online today from my chat. I don't care if you have a website or an app. If I can't order/subscribe from the chat your product might as well not exist. Examples: - I want a peperroni pizza from the highest rated place that doesn't also sell kebab that can deliver within 30 minutes. - Send a neutral professional Christmas gift to every customer in our EMEA region that generates at least 50k revenue for us At no point would I accept the product choices to be decided by who pays Microsoft more. Nor do I care who makes it happen. I don't want a link. I don't want to engage. But I'm perfectly fine with a neutral chat taking 5-30% cut on the transaction.
- travisjungroth 4y ago
  But are you willing to pay a 5-30% premium? I think I am, but not everyone is.
  - ralfn 4y ago
    You are always paying that! Ads aren't free either. Neither is the marketing, the website, the app, etc. Getting your customers is expensive, serving them is as well. But you wouldn't need any of those to compete in this market, any more than an Uber driver would need that. All you need is to tell a chat about your API and focus on your actual product. It is a much more submissive relationship with the customer, but not a less profitable one.
    - travisjungroth 4y ago
      It’s not the same. The mechanism has a serious effect on behavior. You’re saying you would give the chat a cut but it’s not yours to give. You pay $100 for something and you tell the vendor “I found this through chat. You get $70 and they get $30.” I don’t really see that working. If the vendor opts-in to this relationship and chat only shows people who pay then it’s called advertising or reselling. If they show everyone, then there’s little incentive to pay. I’m not saying it’s unsolvable, but this getting a cut idea is not a solution. I do see abandoning normal advertising and optimizing for chat being possible. It’s like SEO. Not sure it’s a sufficient model for the chat services.
      - ralfn 4y ago
        Let me phrase it differently. When people give Apple Music a cut of their song sales, or when people give Apple a cut of their iOS in game spending, it is not called advertisement. When you pay to tell someone who doesn't want to hear it about your product, thats advertisement. The smart play here is the platform play. Clicking on a link and leaving the chat is the opposite of the intent and purpose of the chat. It makes sense for search because going to another website is the point. For search it is the correct business model, but for chat it is not. The chat is the platform. Leaving it breaks all the advantages.

nwienert 4y ago

I’ve yet to see an example of *GPT be better at search than Google. I’ve seen a few examples that breathlessly proclaimed that they literally saved lives or saved hours of time, but when I typed the 3 most obvious keywords from their input into Google, the first result always has the answer right there.

mejutoco 4y ago
The other day I asked chatgpt about a Polish supermarket with a logo in a certain color and an animal in it. I could not remember the name. We continued our conversation until it was clear I was misremembering some things (I thought the name started with x letter, and that was false). Eventually chatgpt suggested the correct one. The search was something like: "Polish supermarket with red and white logo and a bird in the logo, that begins with the letter K". The first google result to wikipedia has it, to be fair, but without this back and forth idk if I would have found it.
- tapland 4y ago
  It’s extremely wild to see this obfuscated with the wrong colors, animal and name, when it’s just a common grocery store chain in Poland.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    Ah, but ChatGPT is trained mostly on English materials.
  - mejutoco 4y ago
    That is literally what I remembered about the supermarket, so that is what I searched. It is a supermarket in Poland, not a Polish one I believe. P.S. It was not Biedronka! it was Auchan, and I thought Auchan started with K, because of the bird.
ralfn 4y ago
I never have a search problem. I need either information, a service or a product. Or information about a service or a product. I never need a search, a website or an app. That's never the problem I'm trying to solve. Search, websites and apps are the tools I have to use (currently) to solve my problems. In the process I have to: - deal with the fact that the interest of the makers of the app or website do not align with mine - deal with privacy invasions/ads/notifications - deal with things being phrased disingenuously - deal with apps needing to update, website being broken/bandwidth wasted And most importantly, unless two vendors implemented an integration together, I have to integrate their services myself! I never want to leave the chat. I want to do all my transactions from the chat. All of them. On my terms. With my prompts. Whoever facilitates that can take a 5-30% cut on all my online transactions. Examples: - book me a highly rated hotel in Berlin around 100 euro p/n most suitable for a staycation for next week Monday to Friday. Make a reservation near that hotel for the highest rated traditional German cuisine restaurant with a price per plate of 20-30 euro - send every contact ive emailed with from my work email in the last year a Christmas card with a funny but professional pun about the invention of the steam engine. Send it to their work address.

d136o 4y ago

I’m far from an expert (just an engineer who likes to download and try out demos) but one dark view of the alignment chatter is that it’s really about whether can you can get this new big artificial brain to push any user in the direction of BigCorp goal, while letting the users think that it’s answering their questions etc. I’d love to think that we can have AI agents working locally (with privacy) in alignment with our personal goals, but that seems like one of those things that won’t happen. (Will apple come through in terms of enabling local+decentralized inference/training?)

ralfn 4y ago
It's in the interest of the semi conductor industry for LLM to become a commodity, so it will.

seydor 4y ago

That's how google started as well. Ads is a tried and true model and is not going anyway anytime. People won't pay for bing chat search

ralfn 4y ago
The point is not to leave the chat. If you could buy the car from the chat, thats the correct bussiness model. Ads were the correct business model for search, where the goal is to find and click on a relevant link.. but that's the exact opposite of a chat. Clicking a link means the chat failed its purpose.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

blibble 4y ago

I think this sums up modern microsoft perfectly actually no matter the potential future value of the product, they can't resist putting shitty ads into it to make a quick buck today imagine what windows is going to look like in a few years time

goldfeld 4y ago

A floundering corporation has the extractivist mentality. Windows is on its way out so the suits pump it full of cheap bait to catch all the dollars they can, then they move on to other products naturally. It has been a rotten thing for a while, since the executives and investors don't really care about that brand, only about their own portfolios.

robertlagrant 4y ago
Flaundering? I think Microsoft is a perfectly cromulent company. (Bah! Keeping it.)
- goldfeld 4y ago
  Haha, I fire first but always double-check later the things that on second thought look strange. TIL English is still hard for me after over 25 years, and I used to think I was a more careful speller than native speakers who often type by the memory of words' sounds, and I do not. It can always publicly bite you in the tushy.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    I think it's a great word! Wonderful to be there for its genesis.
    - goldfeld 4y ago
      Sorry about the late reply I was up to my neck in money flaundering activities.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  I wish my business was floundering like Microsoft. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/net-income https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/net...
  - 4y ago

MuffinFlavored 4y ago

> Microsoft is squandering the opportunity the way they squander every opportunity. https://www.google.com/search?q=microsfot+market+cap https://www.google.com/search?q=microsfot+market+cap $2.09t "squander opportunity" I agree with you though. I do not have a single Microsoft product in my house. No Windows, no Xbox, etc.

scrollaway 4y ago
You don’t get GP’s point and you’re talking about something completely different. The game has changed. It doesn’t mean their existing customer base has suddenly vanished and threw their Xboxes away.

hankchinaski 4y ago

Either the monetization is done with ads or with paid subscriptions. They chose to be in the former category. And I personally don’t mind clicking ads for the sake of not paying a premium. The two models can coexist

ralfn 4y ago
The third model is the platform model and thats the only one that makes sense here. An ad would send you to another site. The point of the chat is so you don't have to go to all the shitty sites and deal with all the marketing speak. So the options are either: - subscription, as they do now (ala Netflix, Officd365) - free, with ads having the profit maximalisation be the exact opposite of the main selling point (ala Google, Bing, Facebook) - platform, free for the user, but taking a cut from vendors that would integrate (ala iOS, Android, Steam, Amazon, Salesforce) In other words, rather than being an ad, it could offer to buy the car directly from the chat. The later is the most profitable solution and also ensure the interests of the user and the platform align. Platforms don't care which product you buy through them, they take the same cut, and would rather make you as happy as possible so you don't go to the competitor.

majormajor 4y ago

It's not clear to me that ChatGPT will realistically be able to avoid some variant of either SEO or pay-to-play just like search. If you've got a dozen plugins for getting food delivered, how does one get picked? If it's the user picking, they're at risk of the user cutting out the middleman, especially if the novelty of "tell the robot to pick an item" wears off and people want to actually look at menus. If it's something behind the scenes (either the model or some other software OpenAI writes) then that's a big big big temptation for pay-to-play a la app stores including direct advertising "promotional placement" like you see in mobile app stores. And even if it's not pay-to-play, once people start figuring out what makes plugins more or less likely to be triggered, it's SEO season. Nobody else has managed the art of "make it purely in the user's interest" with their marketplaces; it ends with one or both of either temptation to play both sides OR gamification/optimization/deception from the vendors behind the scenes.

acchow 4y ago

What happens when the SEO-equivalent cottage industry for LLMs appears? Will trainings models be so easy?