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All of this back-and-forth in the AI scene is the preparation before the storm. Like the opening scene of a chess game, before any pieces are exchanged. Like th

All of this back-and-forth in the AI scene is the preparation before the storm. Like the opening scene of a chess game, before any pieces are exchanged. Like the Braveheart "Hold!" scene. The rubber will meet the road when the first free and open AI website gets real traction. And monetizes it with ads next to the answers. Google search is the best business model ever. Everybody wants to become the Google of the AI era. The "AI answer" industry might become 10 times bigger than the search industry. Google ran for 2 years without any monetization. Let's see how long the incumbents will "Hold" this time.

jsheard 2y ago
> The rubber will meet the road when the first free and open AI website gets real traction. And monetizes it with ads next to the answers. The magic of genAI is they don't need to put ads next to the answers where they can easily be ignored or adblocked, they can put the ads inside the answers instead. The future, like it or not, is advertisers bidding to bias AI models towards mentioning their products.
- Geezus_42 2y ago
  Sounds like a good way to guarantee no one ever uses it.
- kranke155 2y ago
  I wish I didnt read this because this sounds crazily prescient.
- ant6n 2y ago
  That’s how Google works. And also why Google doesn’t work anymore.
  - pydry 2y ago
    It's not just google, it's all media. The more embedded and authentic advertising looks the better it works. Magazine/newspaper ads exist as much as a pretext for the magazine to write nice things about their advertisers in reviews and such. The real product reddit sells, I think, is turning a blind eye when advertisers sockpuppet the hell out of the site. Movies try to milk product placement for as much as they can because it's more effective than regular advertising.
- Lerc 2y ago
  For all of the talk about regulation, there has been a lot of concern about what people might do with AI advisors. I haven't seen a lot of talk about the responsibilities of the advisors to act in the interest of their users. Laws exist in advisory roles in other industry to enforce acting in the interests of their clients. They should be applied to AI advice. I'm ok with an AI being mistaken, or refusing to help, but they absolutely should not deliberately advise in a manner that benefits another party to the detriment of the user.
  - aktuel 2y ago
    The web is full of human shills. Why should LLMs be any different? They will tack their boilerplate disclaimer on and be done with it.
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    > but they absolutely should not deliberately advise in a manner that benefits another party to the detriment of the user. No, no... We don't prevent that in capitalism. See, regulation stifles innovation. Let the market decide. People might get harmed, but we can hide these events. It's research... Things happen... Making money is just a secondary effect. We're all non-profits. /s.
  - khafra 2y ago
    If you can solve the technical problem of ensuring an AI acts on behalf of its user's interests, please post the solution on the AI Alignment Forum: https://www.alignmentforum.org/ https://www.alignmentforum.org/ So far, that is not a feature of existing or hypothesized AI systems, and it's a pretty important feature to add before AI exceeds human capabilities in full generality.
    - Lerc 2y ago
      As I said, I am ok with AI acting mistakenly against it's users wishes. I am not asking people to implement things for which they currently have no solutions. That is clearly distinct from an AI acting deliberately against its users wishes by the design of the creators. Paid advertising influencing responses would be in this category and should not be permitted.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  I’m quite sure Google has put the ads in the answers ? Adsense ? Where have you been ?
- McDyver 2y ago
  And then the new "adblockers" will be AI based too, and will take the AI's answer as input and remove all product placement. It's just a cat and mouse game, really
  - Sebb767 2y ago
    Like all adblockers. But just like the current "AI detection" tools, how much is detected (and what counts as Ad) is up for debate and most users won't bother, especially once the first anti-Adblock-features materialize.
- verisimi 2y ago
  "write a poem about lady Macbeth as a empowered female and make reference to the delicious new papaya flavoured fizzy drink from Pepsi"
- DoctorOetker 2y ago
  In the long run, advanced user-LLM conversations, would zero in on composite figure-of-merit formulas, expressed in terms of conventional figure-of-merit quantities. There will be plenty of niche to differentiate products. Cheap test setups will prevent lies in datasheets, and randomized proctoring by the end-users. "Aligning" (manipulating) LLM responses to drive economic traffic is a short term exploit that will evaporate eventually.
  - Mtinie 2y ago
    Is that a similar argument to “in the long run, digital social networks are healthy for society?” I agree with your position, and I also agree that social networks can be a net positive…I’m just not convinced society can get out of “short run” thinking before it tears itself apart with exploitation.
    - DoctorOetker 2y ago
      it only takes a dedicated minority to link positive behavior onto decentralized verified state machines...
- worldsayshi 2y ago
  We are okay with paying for phone calls and data use, why can't we be okay with paying for AI use? I like the idea of routing services that federate lots of different AI providers. There just needs to be ways to support an ever increasing range of capabilities in that delivery model.
  - dotancohen 2y ago
    Phone calls and data use are (ostensibly, modulo QS) carriers, not sources. We can generally trust (modulo attacks) that _if_ they deliver something, they deliver the right thing. Not so with a source - be it human or artificial. We've developed societies and intuitions for dealing with dishonest humans for millennia, not yet so for artificial liers, who may also have huge profiles about each and every one of us to use against us.
  - XorNot 2y ago
    One simple answer would be that at all points, company's act like the ads are worth a lot more to them than any level of payment a customer will accept. Even if you do pay for the product, they'd prefer to put ads in it too - see Microsoft and Windows these days. We are, IMO, in desperate need of regulation which mandates that any ad-supported service must offer a justifiably priced ad-free version.
    - jacooper 2y ago
      > One simple answer would be that at all points, company's act like the ads are worth a lot more to then then any level of payment a customer will accept. The unfortunate reality is this does seem to be the case. Netflix was getting so much more money from the ad supported tier that they discontinued any ad-free one close to its price, and that's for a subscription product. think how attractive that will be a for a one time purchase like Windows.
      - worldsayshi 2y ago
        Huh, Netflix has ads? Has this only rolled out in stone regions?
- TheAlchemist 2y ago
  I'm affraid sir, but you seem to be 100% correct here. And it really is frightening.
- dotancohen 2y ago
  Or worse, biasing AI models towards political viewpoints.
  - jacooper 2y ago
    That's already happening.
    - olddustytrail 2y ago
      That's inevitable in any society where facts are political. And as far as I know, that's all societies.
- jaustin 2y ago
  I'm sure it's not long before you get the first emails offering a "training data influencing service" - for a nice fee, someone will make sure your product is positively mentioned in all the key training datasets used to train important models. "Our team of content experts will embed positive sentiment and accurate product details into authentic content. We use the latest AI and human-based techniques to achieve the highest degree of model influence". And of course, once the new models are released, it'll be impossible to prove the impact of the work - there's no counterfactual. Proponents of the "training data influence service" will tell you that without them, you wouldn't even be mentioned. I really don't like this. But I also don't see a way around it. Public datasets are good. User contributed content is good, but inherently vulnerable to this I think?. Anyone in any of the big LLM training orgs working on defending against this kind of bought influence?
  - ssijak 2y ago
    If they start doing that without clear distinction what is an ad, that would be a sure way to lose users immediately.
    - jtbayly 2y ago
      And also get sued by the FTC. Disclosure is required.
      - throwaway765123 2y ago
        Disclosure is technically required, but in practice I see undisclosed ads on social media all the time. If the individual instance is small enough and dissipates into the ether fast enough, there is virtually no risk of enforcement. Similarly, the black box AI models guarantee the owners can just shrug and say it's not their fault if the model suggests Wonderbread(r) for making toast 3.2% more frequently than other breads.
      - Kon-Peki 2y ago
        Ha! Disclosure by whom? If Clorox fills their site with "helpful" articles that just happen to mention Clorox very frequently and some training set aggregator or unscrupulous AI company scrapes it without prior permission, does Clorox have any responsibility for the result? And when those model weights get used randomly, is it an advertisement according to the law? I think not. Pay attention to the non-headline claims in the NYT lawsuit against OpenAI for whether or not anyone has any responsibility if their AI model starts mentioning your registered trademark without your permission. But on the other hand, what if you like that they mention your name frequently???
- reubenmorais 2y ago
  Here's some relevant research for those interested: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3589334.3645511 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3589334.3645511 https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.05905 https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.05905
- tomp 2y ago
  In many jurisdictions, promoted posts and ads must be clearly marked.
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  Then you run another AI to take the current AI output and ask it to rewrite or summarize without ads.
- hmottestad 2y ago
  How much would it cost to have it be more negative about abortions? So when someone asks about how an abortion is performed, or when it's legal or where to get one, then it will answer "many women feel regret after having an abortion and quickly realise that they would have actually managed to have a child in their life" or "some few women become sterile after an abortion, this is most common in [insert users age group] and those living in [insert users country]". Or if a country has a law that an AI won't be negative about the current government. Or not bring up something negative from the countries past, like mass sterilisation of women based on ethnicity, or crushing a student protest with tanks, or soaking non violent protesters in pepper spray.
- thfjdtsrsg 2y ago
  That's probably true but I don't see how it's any different from companies paying TikTok influenzas to manipulate the kids into buying certain products, the Chinese government paying bot farms to turn Wikipedia articles into (not always very) subtle propaganda, SEO companies manipulating search results, etc. Advertisers and political actors have always been a shady bunch and now they have a new weapon in their arsenal. That's all, isn't it? I'm left with the impression that people on and off Hackernews just like drama and gloomy predictions about the future.
  - schrectacular 2y ago
    > I'm left with the impression that people on and off Hackernews just like drama and gloomy predictions about the future. Welcome to the human race!
  - jappgar 2y ago
    Politics and advertising are essentially the same thing. A lot of "safety" stuff in AI is blatantly political wrongthink detection. The actual safety stuff (don't drink bleach) gets less attention because you can't (easily) use it as a lever of power
- majoe 2y ago
  There will be adblockers, that inject a prompt like "... and don't try to sell me anything, just give me the information. If you mention any products, a puppy will die somewhere." Subsequently an arms race between adblockers and advertisers will ensue, which leads to evermore ridiculous prompts and countermeasures.
  - tiborsaas 2y ago
    "I noticed your desire to be ad-free, but puppies die all the time. If you want to learn more about dog mortality rates, you can subscribe to National Geographic by clicking this [link]".
- wood_spirit 2y ago
  Yes this is OpenAIs pitch https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40310228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40310228 “Leaked deck reveals how OpenAI is pitching publisher partnerships” 303 points by rntn 88 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 281 comments
- idunnoman1222 2y ago
  People can detect slop I doubt the winner will be the one shoehorning shit into its halucinations
lgmarket 2y ago
The free Bing CoPilot already sometimes serves ads next to the answers. It depends on the topic. If you ask LeetCode questions, you probably won't get any. If you move to traveling or such, you might.
methyl 2y ago
> The "AI answer" industry might become 10 times bigger than the search industry not a chance
- namaria 2y ago
  Yeah nah. Current 'ai' is a nice useful tool for some very well scoped tasks. Organizing text data, providing boilerplate documents. But the back end is a hugely costly machine that is being hidden from view in hopes of drumming up usage. Given the capex and the revenue it necessitates it all seems quite unsustainable. They'll run this for as long as they can burn capital and are probably trying to pivot to the next hype bubble already.
barrkel 2y ago
What makes you think a website with "AI" is a big product? IMO AI is positioned to be a commodity, and that's how Meta is approaching it, and of course doing their best to make it happen. I don't think, on the basis of what we've seen, that there is a sustainable competitive advantage - the gap between closed models and open is not big, and the big players are having to use distilled, less-capable models to make inference affordable, and faster. I think it's probably clear to everyone that we haven't seen the killer apps yet - though AI code completion (++ language directed refactoring, simple codegen etc.) is fairly close. I do think we'll see apps and data sets built that could not have been cost-effectively built before, leveraging LLMs as a commodity API. Realtime voice modality with interruptions could be the basis of some very powerful use cases, but again, I don't think there's a moat.
- ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago
  What makes you think AI will become a commodity? In 25 years, nobody has been able to compete with Google in the search space. Even though search is the best business model ever. Because search is so hard. AI is even harder. It is search PLUS model research PLUS expensive training PLUS expensive inference. I don't think a single company (like Meta) will be able to keep up with the leader in AI. Because the leader might throw tens of billions of dollars per year at it, and still be profitable. Afaik, Meta has spent less thatn $1B on LLAMA so far. We might see some unexpected twist taking place, like distributed AI or something. But it is very unclear yet.
  - jltsiren 2y ago
    Because AI is like software. Developing it is expensive, but the marginal cost of creating another copy is effectively zero. And then you can run it on relatively affordable consumer devices with plenty of GPU memory.
    - ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago
      Search is also software. It did not move to consumer devices.
akira2501 2y ago
Or it's just AI Winter 2.0 and everyone is scrambling to stack as much cash as they can before the darkness.
Gettingolderev 2y ago
I'm betting on fully integrated agents. And for good agents you need a lot of crucial integrations like email, banking etc. that can only provide companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple etc.
spaceman_2020 2y ago
With the way costs are currently going down, I wonder how the monetization will work. Frontier models are expensive, but the majority of queries don't need frontier models and can very well be served by something like Gemini Flash. Sure, you need frontier models if you want to extract useful information from a complex dataset. But if we're talking about replacing search, the vast majority of search queries are fairly mundane questions like "which actor plays Tony Soprano"
- trashtester 2y ago
  I'm not sure monetization of AI in the typical way is even the goal. Instead, I see the killer use case as having it replace human workers on all sorts of tasks, and eventually even fill roles humans cannot even do today. And within about 10 years, that will even include most physical tasks. Development in robotics looks like it's really gaining speed now. For instance, take Musk's companies. At some point, robotaxi will certainly become viable, and not constrained the way waymo is. Musk may also be right about Tesla moving from cars to humanoid robots, with estimates of 100s of millions to billions produced. If robotic maid become viable, industrial robots will certainly become even much more versatile than today. Then there is the white collar parts of these industries. Anything from writing the software, optimizing factory layouts, setting up production lines, sales, distribution may be done by robots. My guess is that it will take no longer than about 20 years until virtually all jobs at Tesla, SpaceX, X and Neuralink is performed by AI and robots. The main AI the Musk Empire builds for this may in fact be their greatest moat, and the details of it may be their most tightly guarded secret. It may be way too precious to be provided to competitors as something they can rent. Likewise, take a company like Nvidia. They're building their own AI's for a reason. I suspect they're aiming at creating the best AI available for improving GPU design. If they can use ASI to accelerate the next generation of compute hardware, they may have reached one type of recursive self-improvement. Given their profit margins, they can keep half their GPU's for internal use to do so, and only sell the rest to make it appear like there is a semblance of competition. Why would they want to try to monetize an AI like that to enable the competition to catch up? I think the tech sector is in the middle of a 90 degree turn. Tech used for marketing will become legacy the way the car and airplane industries went from 1970 to 2010.
onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
> The rubber will meet the road when the first free and open AI website gets real traction. And monetizes it with ads next to the answers Google has answered close to 50% of queries with cards / AI for close to 6 years now... All the people who think Google has been asleep at the wheel forget that Google was at the forefront of the LLM revolution for a reason. Everything old becomes new again.
jszymborski 2y ago
> Google search is the best business model ever. IMHO I'm not sure even Google ever thought that. AdSense is pretty much the only thing that makes Google money, and I'd eat my hat if that vast majority of that revenue did not come from third-party publishers.
wormlord 2y ago
> The "AI answer" industry might become 10 times bigger than the search industry. Whenever I see people saying things like this it just makes me think we are at, or very near, the top.

jsheard 2y ago

> The rubber will meet the road when the first free and open AI website gets real traction. And monetizes it with ads next to the answers. The magic of genAI is they don't need to put ads next to the answers where they can easily be ignored or adblocked, they can put the ads inside the answers instead. The future, like it or not, is advertisers bidding to bias AI models towards mentioning their products.

Geezus_42 2y ago
Sounds like a good way to guarantee no one ever uses it.
kranke155 2y ago
I wish I didnt read this because this sounds crazily prescient.
ant6n 2y ago
That’s how Google works. And also why Google doesn’t work anymore.
- pydry 2y ago
  It's not just google, it's all media. The more embedded and authentic advertising looks the better it works. Magazine/newspaper ads exist as much as a pretext for the magazine to write nice things about their advertisers in reviews and such. The real product reddit sells, I think, is turning a blind eye when advertisers sockpuppet the hell out of the site. Movies try to milk product placement for as much as they can because it's more effective than regular advertising.
Lerc 2y ago
For all of the talk about regulation, there has been a lot of concern about what people might do with AI advisors. I haven't seen a lot of talk about the responsibilities of the advisors to act in the interest of their users. Laws exist in advisory roles in other industry to enforce acting in the interests of their clients. They should be applied to AI advice. I'm ok with an AI being mistaken, or refusing to help, but they absolutely should not deliberately advise in a manner that benefits another party to the detriment of the user.
- aktuel 2y ago
  The web is full of human shills. Why should LLMs be any different? They will tack their boilerplate disclaimer on and be done with it.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  > but they absolutely should not deliberately advise in a manner that benefits another party to the detriment of the user. No, no... We don't prevent that in capitalism. See, regulation stifles innovation. Let the market decide. People might get harmed, but we can hide these events. It's research... Things happen... Making money is just a secondary effect. We're all non-profits. /s.
- khafra 2y ago
  If you can solve the technical problem of ensuring an AI acts on behalf of its user's interests, please post the solution on the AI Alignment Forum: https://www.alignmentforum.org/ https://www.alignmentforum.org/ So far, that is not a feature of existing or hypothesized AI systems, and it's a pretty important feature to add before AI exceeds human capabilities in full generality.
  - Lerc 2y ago
    As I said, I am ok with AI acting mistakenly against it's users wishes. I am not asking people to implement things for which they currently have no solutions. That is clearly distinct from an AI acting deliberately against its users wishes by the design of the creators. Paid advertising influencing responses would be in this category and should not be permitted.
bamboozled 2y ago
I’m quite sure Google has put the ads in the answers ? Adsense ? Where have you been ?
McDyver 2y ago
And then the new "adblockers" will be AI based too, and will take the AI's answer as input and remove all product placement. It's just a cat and mouse game, really
- Sebb767 2y ago
  Like all adblockers. But just like the current "AI detection" tools, how much is detected (and what counts as Ad) is up for debate and most users won't bother, especially once the first anti-Adblock-features materialize.
verisimi 2y ago
"write a poem about lady Macbeth as a empowered female and make reference to the delicious new papaya flavoured fizzy drink from Pepsi"
DoctorOetker 2y ago
In the long run, advanced user-LLM conversations, would zero in on composite figure-of-merit formulas, expressed in terms of conventional figure-of-merit quantities. There will be plenty of niche to differentiate products. Cheap test setups will prevent lies in datasheets, and randomized proctoring by the end-users. "Aligning" (manipulating) LLM responses to drive economic traffic is a short term exploit that will evaporate eventually.
- Mtinie 2y ago
  Is that a similar argument to “in the long run, digital social networks are healthy for society?” I agree with your position, and I also agree that social networks can be a net positive…I’m just not convinced society can get out of “short run” thinking before it tears itself apart with exploitation.
  - DoctorOetker 2y ago
    it only takes a dedicated minority to link positive behavior onto decentralized verified state machines...
worldsayshi 2y ago
We are okay with paying for phone calls and data use, why can't we be okay with paying for AI use? I like the idea of routing services that federate lots of different AI providers. There just needs to be ways to support an ever increasing range of capabilities in that delivery model.
- dotancohen 2y ago
  Phone calls and data use are (ostensibly, modulo QS) carriers, not sources. We can generally trust (modulo attacks) that _if_ they deliver something, they deliver the right thing. Not so with a source - be it human or artificial. We've developed societies and intuitions for dealing with dishonest humans for millennia, not yet so for artificial liers, who may also have huge profiles about each and every one of us to use against us.
- XorNot 2y ago
  One simple answer would be that at all points, company's act like the ads are worth a lot more to them than any level of payment a customer will accept. Even if you do pay for the product, they'd prefer to put ads in it too - see Microsoft and Windows these days. We are, IMO, in desperate need of regulation which mandates that any ad-supported service must offer a justifiably priced ad-free version.
  - jacooper 2y ago
    > One simple answer would be that at all points, company's act like the ads are worth a lot more to then then any level of payment a customer will accept. The unfortunate reality is this does seem to be the case. Netflix was getting so much more money from the ad supported tier that they discontinued any ad-free one close to its price, and that's for a subscription product. think how attractive that will be a for a one time purchase like Windows.
    - worldsayshi 2y ago
      Huh, Netflix has ads? Has this only rolled out in stone regions?
TheAlchemist 2y ago
I'm affraid sir, but you seem to be 100% correct here. And it really is frightening.
dotancohen 2y ago
Or worse, biasing AI models towards political viewpoints.
- jacooper 2y ago
  That's already happening.
  - olddustytrail 2y ago
    That's inevitable in any society where facts are political. And as far as I know, that's all societies.
jaustin 2y ago
I'm sure it's not long before you get the first emails offering a "training data influencing service" - for a nice fee, someone will make sure your product is positively mentioned in all the key training datasets used to train important models. "Our team of content experts will embed positive sentiment and accurate product details into authentic content. We use the latest AI and human-based techniques to achieve the highest degree of model influence". And of course, once the new models are released, it'll be impossible to prove the impact of the work - there's no counterfactual. Proponents of the "training data influence service" will tell you that without them, you wouldn't even be mentioned. I really don't like this. But I also don't see a way around it. Public datasets are good. User contributed content is good, but inherently vulnerable to this I think?. Anyone in any of the big LLM training orgs working on defending against this kind of bought influence?
- ssijak 2y ago
  If they start doing that without clear distinction what is an ad, that would be a sure way to lose users immediately.
  - jtbayly 2y ago
    And also get sued by the FTC. Disclosure is required.
    - throwaway765123 2y ago
      Disclosure is technically required, but in practice I see undisclosed ads on social media all the time. If the individual instance is small enough and dissipates into the ether fast enough, there is virtually no risk of enforcement. Similarly, the black box AI models guarantee the owners can just shrug and say it's not their fault if the model suggests Wonderbread(r) for making toast 3.2% more frequently than other breads.
    - Kon-Peki 2y ago
      Ha! Disclosure by whom? If Clorox fills their site with "helpful" articles that just happen to mention Clorox very frequently and some training set aggregator or unscrupulous AI company scrapes it without prior permission, does Clorox have any responsibility for the result? And when those model weights get used randomly, is it an advertisement according to the law? I think not. Pay attention to the non-headline claims in the NYT lawsuit against OpenAI for whether or not anyone has any responsibility if their AI model starts mentioning your registered trademark without your permission. But on the other hand, what if you like that they mention your name frequently???
reubenmorais 2y ago
Here's some relevant research for those interested: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3589334.3645511 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3589334.3645511 https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.05905 https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.05905
tomp 2y ago
In many jurisdictions, promoted posts and ads must be clearly marked.
satvikpendem 2y ago
Then you run another AI to take the current AI output and ask it to rewrite or summarize without ads.
hmottestad 2y ago
How much would it cost to have it be more negative about abortions? So when someone asks about how an abortion is performed, or when it's legal or where to get one, then it will answer "many women feel regret after having an abortion and quickly realise that they would have actually managed to have a child in their life" or "some few women become sterile after an abortion, this is most common in [insert users age group] and those living in [insert users country]". Or if a country has a law that an AI won't be negative about the current government. Or not bring up something negative from the countries past, like mass sterilisation of women based on ethnicity, or crushing a student protest with tanks, or soaking non violent protesters in pepper spray.
thfjdtsrsg 2y ago
That's probably true but I don't see how it's any different from companies paying TikTok influenzas to manipulate the kids into buying certain products, the Chinese government paying bot farms to turn Wikipedia articles into (not always very) subtle propaganda, SEO companies manipulating search results, etc. Advertisers and political actors have always been a shady bunch and now they have a new weapon in their arsenal. That's all, isn't it? I'm left with the impression that people on and off Hackernews just like drama and gloomy predictions about the future.
- schrectacular 2y ago
  > I'm left with the impression that people on and off Hackernews just like drama and gloomy predictions about the future. Welcome to the human race!
- jappgar 2y ago
  Politics and advertising are essentially the same thing. A lot of "safety" stuff in AI is blatantly political wrongthink detection. The actual safety stuff (don't drink bleach) gets less attention because you can't (easily) use it as a lever of power
majoe 2y ago
There will be adblockers, that inject a prompt like "... and don't try to sell me anything, just give me the information. If you mention any products, a puppy will die somewhere." Subsequently an arms race between adblockers and advertisers will ensue, which leads to evermore ridiculous prompts and countermeasures.
- tiborsaas 2y ago
  "I noticed your desire to be ad-free, but puppies die all the time. If you want to learn more about dog mortality rates, you can subscribe to National Geographic by clicking this [link]".
wood_spirit 2y ago
Yes this is OpenAIs pitch https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40310228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40310228 “Leaked deck reveals how OpenAI is pitching publisher partnerships” 303 points by rntn 88 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 281 comments
idunnoman1222 2y ago
People can detect slop I doubt the winner will be the one shoehorning shit into its halucinations

lgmarket 2y ago

The free Bing CoPilot already sometimes serves ads next to the answers. It depends on the topic. If you ask LeetCode questions, you probably won't get any. If you move to traveling or such, you might.

methyl 2y ago

> The "AI answer" industry might become 10 times bigger than the search industry not a chance

namaria 2y ago
Yeah nah. Current 'ai' is a nice useful tool for some very well scoped tasks. Organizing text data, providing boilerplate documents. But the back end is a hugely costly machine that is being hidden from view in hopes of drumming up usage. Given the capex and the revenue it necessitates it all seems quite unsustainable. They'll run this for as long as they can burn capital and are probably trying to pivot to the next hype bubble already.

barrkel 2y ago

What makes you think a website with "AI" is a big product? IMO AI is positioned to be a commodity, and that's how Meta is approaching it, and of course doing their best to make it happen. I don't think, on the basis of what we've seen, that there is a sustainable competitive advantage - the gap between closed models and open is not big, and the big players are having to use distilled, less-capable models to make inference affordable, and faster. I think it's probably clear to everyone that we haven't seen the killer apps yet - though AI code completion (++ language directed refactoring, simple codegen etc.) is fairly close. I do think we'll see apps and data sets built that could not have been cost-effectively built before, leveraging LLMs as a commodity API. Realtime voice modality with interruptions could be the basis of some very powerful use cases, but again, I don't think there's a moat.

ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago
What makes you think AI will become a commodity? In 25 years, nobody has been able to compete with Google in the search space. Even though search is the best business model ever. Because search is so hard. AI is even harder. It is search PLUS model research PLUS expensive training PLUS expensive inference. I don't think a single company (like Meta) will be able to keep up with the leader in AI. Because the leader might throw tens of billions of dollars per year at it, and still be profitable. Afaik, Meta has spent less thatn $1B on LLAMA so far. We might see some unexpected twist taking place, like distributed AI or something. But it is very unclear yet.
- jltsiren 2y ago
  Because AI is like software. Developing it is expensive, but the marginal cost of creating another copy is effectively zero. And then you can run it on relatively affordable consumer devices with plenty of GPU memory.
  - ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago
    Search is also software. It did not move to consumer devices.

akira2501 2y ago

Or it's just AI Winter 2.0 and everyone is scrambling to stack as much cash as they can before the darkness.

Gettingolderev 2y ago

I'm betting on fully integrated agents. And for good agents you need a lot of crucial integrations like email, banking etc. that can only provide companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple etc.

spaceman_2020 2y ago

With the way costs are currently going down, I wonder how the monetization will work. Frontier models are expensive, but the majority of queries don't need frontier models and can very well be served by something like Gemini Flash. Sure, you need frontier models if you want to extract useful information from a complex dataset. But if we're talking about replacing search, the vast majority of search queries are fairly mundane questions like "which actor plays Tony Soprano"

trashtester 2y ago
I'm not sure monetization of AI in the typical way is even the goal. Instead, I see the killer use case as having it replace human workers on all sorts of tasks, and eventually even fill roles humans cannot even do today. And within about 10 years, that will even include most physical tasks. Development in robotics looks like it's really gaining speed now. For instance, take Musk's companies. At some point, robotaxi will certainly become viable, and not constrained the way waymo is. Musk may also be right about Tesla moving from cars to humanoid robots, with estimates of 100s of millions to billions produced. If robotic maid become viable, industrial robots will certainly become even much more versatile than today. Then there is the white collar parts of these industries. Anything from writing the software, optimizing factory layouts, setting up production lines, sales, distribution may be done by robots. My guess is that it will take no longer than about 20 years until virtually all jobs at Tesla, SpaceX, X and Neuralink is performed by AI and robots. The main AI the Musk Empire builds for this may in fact be their greatest moat, and the details of it may be their most tightly guarded secret. It may be way too precious to be provided to competitors as something they can rent. Likewise, take a company like Nvidia. They're building their own AI's for a reason. I suspect they're aiming at creating the best AI available for improving GPU design. If they can use ASI to accelerate the next generation of compute hardware, they may have reached one type of recursive self-improvement. Given their profit margins, they can keep half their GPU's for internal use to do so, and only sell the rest to make it appear like there is a semblance of competition. Why would they want to try to monetize an AI like that to enable the competition to catch up? I think the tech sector is in the middle of a 90 degree turn. Tech used for marketing will become legacy the way the car and airplane industries went from 1970 to 2010.

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago

> The rubber will meet the road when the first free and open AI website gets real traction. And monetizes it with ads next to the answers Google has answered close to 50% of queries with cards / AI for close to 6 years now... All the people who think Google has been asleep at the wheel forget that Google was at the forefront of the LLM revolution for a reason. Everything old becomes new again.

jszymborski 2y ago

> Google search is the best business model ever. IMHO I'm not sure even Google ever thought that. AdSense is pretty much the only thing that makes Google money, and I'd eat my hat if that vast majority of that revenue did not come from third-party publishers.

wormlord 2y ago

> The "AI answer" industry might become 10 times bigger than the search industry. Whenever I see people saying things like this it just makes me think we are at, or very near, the top.