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What's the business model on this? GPT3.5 and Claude 1.2 aren't as expensive as other models, but they're not cheap. Is this going to get pulled later, monetise
by danpalmer 3y ago
What's the business model on this? GPT3.5 and Claude 1.2 aren't as expensive as other models, but they're not cheap. Is this going to get pulled later, monetised, etc?
It's concerning in general to see so many companies throwing so much money at this without business models. The big names mostly have either premium tiers or paid API usage, that's fine, but DDG/Brave/BingChat/Arc/etc are all just giving away money, and when the music stops it's possible consumers will be left high and dry.
- maltalex 3y agoIt'll probably not be free forever. Access to the models could become part of their "Pro" offering - https://duckduckgo.com/pro https://duckduckgo.com/pro
- veggieroll 3y agoI really wish they named the paid service DuckDuckPro
- thih9 3y agoAs a user I dislike this kind of temporary free products. It feels dishonest and unreliable to me.
- maltalex 3y agoIt's just a theory. I don't know where they're going with this.
- panqueca 3y agoI didn't know they have a "Pro" offer. I wish Kagi has something similar. It's quite expensive paying 10 bucks for search results only.
- salad-tycoon 3y agoYeah but we’re getting t shirts.
- margalabargala 3y agoHonestly I doubt it. Considering the speed at which models are improving, and more importantly, the speed at which models have begun improving per unit compute, I would bet that AI models at least as good as ChatGPT 3.5 will be free to use like this forever. Right now there is so much interest/demand, and so much money sloshing around to provide it, that it's easy to find. By the time the AI market cools off a little bit, I would expect that the cost to run a model meeting the current quality of ChatGPT 3.5 will be next-to-free. Will near-state-of-the-art models be free forever? Absolutely not. But state-of-the-art circa late 2022 models are probably the quality basement, and free models will be at least that good.
- yegg 3y agoThe plan is to maintain free anonymous access to base models, with eventually search better integrated as well. We'd also like to experiment with providing anonymous access to more cutting-edge models as part of Privacy Pro.
- blululu 3y agoThis feels like a corpspeak non answer to the serious question above. This move will increase operating costs by a considerable amount. Is the company sufficiently profitable that it can eat the loss or is this a gamble that culminates in a PE takeover? I get that duck duck go is in a tough position since LLM search is increasing popular among users, but without a business model that balances out this feels dubious. E.G this is the marketing campaign before everyone is going to be herded into the paid tier Privacy Pro?
- yegg 3y agoYes, we are sufficiently profitable and have in fact been profitable for a decade. Our mission is to provide easy access to privacy, and offering things free where we can is key to doing that well. Additionally, we expect the forthcoming search integrations to end up at least break-even in any case.
- Zhyl 3y agoAt the moment there don't appear to be ads on the chat page. Is this something that will be coming so that chat can be monetised?
- freediver 3y agoThe first steps towards DuckDuckGo assuming a paid business model. Love it!