4 ms·

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 di

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?
    - michaelt 2y ago
      According to https://help.netflix.com/en/node/24926 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/24926 in the UK Standard with adverts: £4.99 / month Standard: £10.99 / month Premium: £17.99 / month So less than half price with adverts. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean ads bring in £6/user/month - this could be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination with the ads just being obnoxious enough to motivate people who can afford it to upgrade.
Yizahi 2y ago
It's unsustainable for NNs specifically. As Sequoia recently wrote, there is a 600 billion hole in the NN market, and it was only 200 billion a year ago. No way a better text generator and search with bell and whistles will be able to close this gap via subscriptions from end users. And on a separate issue - federating NN providers will be hard from the technical point of view. OpenAI and it's few competitors basically stole all copyrighted data from all web to get to the current level. And biggest data holders are slowly awakening to this reality and closing this possibility to the future NN companies, meanwhile current NN models are poisoning that same dataset with generated nonsense. I don't see a future with hundreds of competitive NN companies, a set of monopolies instead is more probable.
- worldsayshi 2y ago
  > No way a better text generator and search with bell and whistles will be able to close this gap via subscriptions from end users. For me this shines a light on a fundamental problem with digital services. There is likely a much bigger willingness to pay for these services than there is ability to charge. I would be willing to pay more for the services I use but I don't need to because there are good products given for free. While I could switch to services that I pay for to avoid myself being the product, at the core of this issue there's a coordination problem. The product I would pay for will be held back by having much fewer users and probably lower revenue. If we as consumers could coordinate in an optimal way we could probably end up paying very little for superior services that have our interests in mind. (I kind of see federated api routers to be a flawed step in sort of the right direction here.) > federating NN providers will be hard from the technical point of view... I don't see how you adress that point in your text? Federation itself doesn't seem to be a hard problem although I can see that being a competitive LLM service provider can be.

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?
  - michaelt 2y ago
    According to https://help.netflix.com/en/node/24926 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/24926 in the UK Standard with adverts: £4.99 / month Standard: £10.99 / month Premium: £17.99 / month So less than half price with adverts. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean ads bring in £6/user/month - this could be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination with the ads just being obnoxious enough to motivate people who can afford it to upgrade.

Yizahi 2y ago

It's unsustainable for NNs specifically. As Sequoia recently wrote, there is a 600 billion hole in the NN market, and it was only 200 billion a year ago. No way a better text generator and search with bell and whistles will be able to close this gap via subscriptions from end users. And on a separate issue - federating NN providers will be hard from the technical point of view. OpenAI and it's few competitors basically stole all copyrighted data from all web to get to the current level. And biggest data holders are slowly awakening to this reality and closing this possibility to the future NN companies, meanwhile current NN models are poisoning that same dataset with generated nonsense. I don't see a future with hundreds of competitive NN companies, a set of monopolies instead is more probable.

worldsayshi 2y ago
> No way a better text generator and search with bell and whistles will be able to close this gap via subscriptions from end users. For me this shines a light on a fundamental problem with digital services. There is likely a much bigger willingness to pay for these services than there is ability to charge. I would be willing to pay more for the services I use but I don't need to because there are good products given for free. While I could switch to services that I pay for to avoid myself being the product, at the core of this issue there's a coordination problem. The product I would pay for will be held back by having much fewer users and probably lower revenue. If we as consumers could coordinate in an optimal way we could probably end up paying very little for superior services that have our interests in mind. (I kind of see federated api routers to be a flawed step in sort of the right direction here.) > federating NN providers will be hard from the technical point of view... I don't see how you adress that point in your text? Federation itself doesn't seem to be a hard problem although I can see that being a competitive LLM service provider can be.