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I don’t think people appreciate what a sea change it is to have a major new technology launch with a subscription model and no ads. Google hasn’t figured out h

• endisneigh 3y ago
  > The age of adtech is closing and the world is better for it. YouTube Premium exists and plenty of people still use adblock, or nothing at all. Most people are not going to pay for a subscription. As for your other point, SaaS is a thing and has been for over a decade... If anything I'd say ChatGPT is the beginning of next-gen adtech.
  • smoldesu 3y ago
    > If anything I'd say ChatGPT is the beginning of next-gen adtech. You're 100% right, and people are gonna hate to hear it. It's like getting people to drink cough medicine. 2 decades ago, we were naive enough to wonder what online video streaming would look like. Now it's an ad-fuelled treadmill that has more promotional content than candid, sincere videos. We were also dumb enough to imagine online search indexing, same problem. Even your app store is not safe from being weaponized. It's a sad pattern that is 100% fueled by the desperate profit-seeking of shareholders, and sustained by the free market in general.
    • nr2x 3y ago
      I’ve got receipts from HBO, Amazon, Disney, Netflix, Curiosity Stream, and YouTube Premium that prove that wrong.
      • smoldesu 3y ago
        Precisely to the point I made elsewhere in this thread: > Just don't pretend that you're funding a better world by buying the premium product - it's a bigger trick than advertisement itself. [0] I'm not going to play the "media companies are the bad guys" card, but they are rent collectors. All of them do this - they take your money, and then keep squeezing. The only way to avoid being manipulated is to not play the game in the first place. You still can (and should) fund the artists and creators you're fond of. The moment you agree to terms or a contract though, you've been made a business bitch. OpenAI is no different than the rest of them. Their Faustian bargain is worded a little differently, and the flowers on the table are a different color, but it's still the same shitshow. As a reminder, YouTube also launched without ads. Just you wait, the squeeze is coming. I guarantee it! [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35706083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35706083
• jerrygenser 3y ago
  Chatgpt running on bing is ad tech, no?
  • nr2x 3y ago
    Bing uses GPT, but Bing != GPT.
• jorblumesea 3y ago
  What are you talking about, there's an entire SAAS industry that exists. I would argue that actually subscription is the default, and "free to use/sell data" model is an outlier.
  • brianwawok 3y ago
    The biggest players are Google / Facebook, which are not charging for their core product. You have Microsoft selling software, but I am not sure it is the default anymore.
    • jorblumesea 3y ago
      Google absolutely does charge. Google suite products are sold to corporations a service. Individuals buy gmail/drive storage. There's Youtube premium, Google Cloud... This is just an objectively wrong take.
      • jumpCastle 3y ago
        These aren't their core product.
        • jorblumesea 3y ago
          Ah yes youtube, not a core product /s
• mliker 3y ago
  > The age of adtech is closing and the world is better for it. If you read most spending reports by companies, they would disagree. SMBs to large businesses all use advertising to increase the reach of their legitimate products. Your local barbershop likely runs Google ads to reach new customers so that he can run his business. Furthermore, adtech lead to an infusion of capital into the internet, which led to many wonderful things for society. It's easy to paint adtech in a bad light when you only consider the worst things about it, which are being addressed.
  • nr2x 3y ago
    “Being addressed”…yes, by a raft of laws around the world that are making it flat out illegal.
  • smashed 3y ago
    > adtech lead to an infusion of capital into the internet, which led to many wonderful things for society. Source? Instant global communication is valuable enough by itself to attract massive investments and interest. I highly doubt technological advancements from adtech was in any way shape or form required for that.
    • mliker 3y ago
      > Instant global communication is valuable enough by itself to attract massive investments and interest. If that's the case, with the advent of email in the early 1990s, why didn't the internet completely take off? It took another 15 to 20 years and only when Google and Facebook came into the picture, did we get open source technologies that spread throughout the world and is used daily.
    • mliker 3y ago
      @smashed, would also like to see your source here too.
  • craigbarry 3y ago
    “My local…” is less than a mile from home. Why does it need to connect with me via Facebook? > Furthermore, adtech lead to an infusion of capital into the internet… Fiat economic capital gave ostensibly free people agency; how generous. The philosophy we mutter as if it gives rise to human need and doing. Lol You should spend less time memorizing spoken gibberish that is used as a restraint on human agency. “If grandpa can’t grift on it, no seed round for you!” How “free.” American culture is nothing but 24/7 propaganda to remind us to cling to the recent past. No rich people are paying my way. Why are we insulating them from growing their own potatoes? What sort of stupid is this?
• SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  I’ll tell you what worked on me. I feel like used it quite a bit for proofreading and suggesting different ways to say things. (Always subjective, never objective) And my total for all the time I used it was $6. I feel like the value is definitely there and paid in. I don’t feel like the value is there when looking at most services. I’m not certain how exactly, but I sense that the era of adtech and the era of Free Money were closely tied together.
• smoldesu 3y ago
  The age of adtech has only just begun. Apple advertises their services in-device, and then doubles-down with App Store search result ads a-la Google Search. They know the ad kickback is endgame, they play ball. What ads do is put wall between a human and some content. ChatGPT does not circumvent that wall - it might be able to tell you something about the content on the other side, but so can a Markov chain or an encyclopedia. The value of wrong information can only be so high, and after a certain point the training material becomes more interesting than the model itself. Your assertion that the age of adtech is closing is like saying that books are over because Wikipedia exists. History suggests that all these things will carve out markets for themselves. I'm not an ad-apologist in any sense, but ChatGPT and OpenAI are not your savior. They're sycophantic magic-makers, watching your response to minor text illusions and imagining how they can further extort you. Now with Microsoft's support, great...
  • consumer451 3y ago
    > The age of adtech has only just begun. I learned a new word recently: Neuromarketing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromarketing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromarketing
    • smoldesu 3y ago
      Neuromarketing only works if my rhetoric does. I'm just appealing to your logic here - I have no de-facto credibility and obviously don't intend to cast ads in a positive light. I'm not trying to convince you of anything, at least in the traditional sense. Look at it this way, though: the last 15 years of computing have been characterized by the commodification of computers and the proliferation of advertisement. We're trapped in a stalemate because nothing beats free -- nothing. Ads subsidize marginal visitor fees, which account for the majority of online interaction. It makes a lot of sense for people providing online content, and hardware sales only further churns this content wheel. So... steal your media. Install adblock. Keep backups and care about what you own digitally. Just don't pretend that you're funding a better world by buying the premium product - it's a bigger trick than advertisement itself.
• techdragon 3y ago
  The shitty advertisements in Apple News would beg to disagree that Apple doesn’t think advertising is worth it, or the App Store advertising that has all but ruined organic search on the App Store, which I would think would be an even more dangerous road to walk down, but no they are absolutely jogging towards advertising with gusto. And I fucking hate it as an apple customer for a couple decades now, I’ve watched the slow slide and I’m not saying it’s as an “if only Steve was still…” I just mean that the company no longer has product people making the ultimate decisions and consequently the product is suffering the slow death by business decision done based on what’s best for this quarter/year profit margins…
• mlsu 3y ago
  There's a kind of reverse money making thing going on with ChatGPT that I haven't seen articulated. Never ever forget that every time you use chatGPT, you are making chatGPT smarter. Right now, chatGPT is not priced for how much value it provides to you; it's priced based on how much value you provide to them. Because every time you use it, you are providing high-quality human feedback to the model. It has already read the entire internet. So where does it get more content? For that, it needs you to use it. So why isn't it free? Better yet, why aren't they paying you? Having you pay has several advantages: I) By paying for it, you prove to openAI that the data you provide is more valuable, simply by the fact that you are willing to pay. Sort of like the counter-intuitive fact that if you pay to avoid ads, you are a much juicier target to advertisers. Not paying is valuable -- you're still a human after all -- but paying is even more valuable, because the people who pay provide qualitatively different data. They provide the type of data that has economic value. You can tell, because they pay! So this helps you improve your model far more than just giving it away for free, because you can treat human feedback from paying customers differently than human feedback from non-payers. II) By paying for it, there is a paper trail that allows openAI to audit their customers. For spam or malicious use purposes. This helps OpenAI fulfill their safety mission. III) By paying for it, you offset their inference costs. I is HUGE. It's more important than II (which is, itself, more significant than III). For any AI company, their competitive advantage lies in the dataset. What is the dataset for a chat model? The humans who use it! Engineering is important, and what OpenAI has shipped is obviously impressive. But it's not like nobody is capable of making an LLM inference frontend. The model? They may have some tricks that they're doing, but at this point, everyone knows how to make a GPT (bard, llama, ...) Feedback is THE advantage that OpenAI has over everyone else. Feedback is THE advantage that MidJourney has over StableDiffusion. Feedback is THE most important differentiator for any company in this space. Those who have high quality human feedback (paying users) will win. What's the best way to get high-quality feedback? Make people pay.
  • etothepii 3y ago
    This is an announcement of literally the opposite. Of course they could be lying, but the claim is that if you talk to it with history switched off you are not making it smarter.
• FloatArtifact 3y ago
  Yet a subscription doesn't buy any sort of semblance of privacy despite the lack of advertisements.