27 ms·

This is the moment where we fumble the opportunity to avoid a repeat of Web 1.0's ad-driven race to the bottom Look forward to re-living that shift from life-c

by A_Duck 1y ago

This is the moment where we fumble the opportunity to avoid a repeat of Web 1.0's ad-driven race to the bottom Look forward to re-living that shift from life-changing community resource to scammy and user-hostile

zharknado 1y ago
I feel this. I had a very productive convo with an LLM today and realized that a huge part of the value of it was that it addressed my questions in a focused way, without trying to sell me anything or generate SEO rankings or register ad impressions. It just helped me. And that was incredibly refreshing in a digital world that generally feels adversarial. Then the thought came, when will they start showing ads here. I like to think that if we learn to pay for it directly, or the open source models get good enough, we could still enjoy that simplicity and focus for quite a while. Here’s hoping!
- danenania 1y ago
  The "good" thing is this is all way too expensive to be ad-supported. Maybe there will be some ad-supported products using very small/cheap models, but the leading edge stuff is always going to be at the leading-edge of compute usage too, and someone has to pay the bill. Even with investors subsidizing a lot of the costs, it's still very expensive to use the best models heavily for real work.
  - aylmao 1y ago
    Subscription services can sell ads too. See Hulu, or Netflix. Spotify might not play "radio ads" if you pay, but it will still advertise artists on your home screen. These models being expensive leads me to think they will look at all methods of monetization possible when seeking profitability. Rather than ads being off the table, it could feasibly make ads be on the table sooner.
    - danenania 1y ago
      Maybe it could happen, but the revenue that can be made per user from ads is basically insignificant compared to the compute costs. They’d be pissing off their users for a very marginal benefit.
  - toxik 1y ago
    It is guaranteed that the models will become salespeople in disguise with time. This is just how the world works. Hopefully competition can stave it off but I doubt it. It's also why totalitarian regimes love it, they can simply train it to regurgitate a modified version of reality.
  - advisedwang 1y ago
    There's no such thing as too expensive to be ad-supported. There might be too expensive to be ONLY ad-supported, but as a revenue stream ads can be layered on top of other sources. For example, see that the ads shown on a $100/mo cable package!
- sumedh 1y ago
  > I like to think that if we learn to pay for it directly The $20 monthly payment is not enough though and companies like Google can keep giving away their AI for free till OpenAI is bankrupt.
NoahZuniga 1y ago
Ads intermixed into llm responses is so clearly evil that openai will never do it so long as the nonprofit has a controlling stake (which it currently still has), because the nonprofit would never allow it.
- aprilthird2021 1y ago
  Ads / SEO but with AI responses was so obviously the endgame given how much human attention it controls and the fact that people aren't really willing to pay what it costs (when decent free, open-weights alternatives exist)
- Twirrim 1y ago
  The insidious part is it doesn't have to be so blatant as adverts, you can achieve a lot by just slight biases in text output. Decades ago I worked for a classical music company, fresh out of school. "So.. how do you anticipate where the music trend is going", I once naively asked one of the senior people on the product side. "Oh, we don't. We tell people really quietly, and they listen". They and the marketing team spent a lot of time doing very subtle work, easily as much as anything big like actual advertisements. Things like small little conversations with music journalists, just a dropped sentence or two that might be repeated in an article, or marginally influence an article; that another journalist might see and have an opinion on, or spark some other curiosity. It only takes a small push and it tends to spread across the industry. It's not a fast process, but when the product team is capable of road-mapping for a year or so in advance, a marketing team can do a lot to prepare things so the audience is ready. LLMs represent a scary capability to influence the entire world, in ways we're not equipped to handle.
  - gooob 1y ago
    >LLMs represent a scary capability to influence the entire world, in ways we're not equipped to handle replace LLMs with TV, or smartphones, or maybe even mcdonald's, and you've got the same idea. through TV, corporations got to control a lot of the social world and people's behavior.
  - NoahZuniga 1y ago
otabdeveloper4 1y ago
In the future AI will be commoditized. You'll be able to buy an inference server for your home in the form factor like a wi-fi router now. They will be cheap and there will be a huge selection of different models, both open-source and proprietary. You'll be able to download a model with a click of a button. (Or just torrent them.)
- anticensor 1y ago
  That can be done with today's desktops already, if you beef up the specs slightly.
  - mlnj 1y ago
    The smaller models are becoming even more capable now. Add that with a suite of tools and integrations and you can do most of what you do online within the infra at home.
  - otabdeveloper4 1y ago
    Cheap Chinese single-board computers made specifically for inference is the missing puzzle piece. (No, GPU's and especially Nvidia is not that.) Also the current crop of AI agents are just utter crap. But that's a skill issue of the people coding them, expect actual advances here soon.
    - anticensor 1y ago
      Aren't DGX Spark or Framework Desktop cheap enough?
      - otabdeveloper4 1y ago
        Not really. Eventually we'll get something with the price and availability of a home appliance. (Wi-fi router tier.)
yread 1y ago
At least we can self-host this time around
energy123 1y ago
Now the hard part. Design a policy stop this from happening while balancing the need to maintain competition, innovation, etc. That step, along with getting politicians to pass it, is the only thing that will stop that outcome.
wrsh07 1y ago
For all of the skepticism I've seen of Sam Altman, listening to interviews with him (eg by Ben Thompson) he says he really does not want to create an ad tier for OpenAI. Even if you take him at his word, incentives are hard to ignore (and advertising is a very powerful business model when your goal is to create something that reaches everyone)
pradn 1y ago
I'm hoping there will always be a good LLM option, for the following reasons: 1) The Pareto frontier of open LLMs will keep expanding. The breakneck pace of open research/development, combined with techniques like distillation will keep the best open LLMs pretty good, if not the best. 2) The cost of inference will keep going down as software and hardware are optimized. At the extreme, we're lookin toward bit-quantized LLMs that run in RAM itself. These two factors should mean a good open LLM alternative should always exist, one without ulterior motives. Now, will people be able to have the hardware to run it? Or will users just put up with ads to use the best LLM? The latter is likely, but you do have a choice.

by A_Duck 1y ago

zharknado 1y ago

I feel this. I had a very productive convo with an LLM today and realized that a huge part of the value of it was that it addressed my questions in a focused way, without trying to sell me anything or generate SEO rankings or register ad impressions. It just helped me. And that was incredibly refreshing in a digital world that generally feels adversarial. Then the thought came, when will they start showing ads here. I like to think that if we learn to pay for it directly, or the open source models get good enough, we could still enjoy that simplicity and focus for quite a while. Here’s hoping!

danenania 1y ago
The "good" thing is this is all way too expensive to be ad-supported. Maybe there will be some ad-supported products using very small/cheap models, but the leading edge stuff is always going to be at the leading-edge of compute usage too, and someone has to pay the bill. Even with investors subsidizing a lot of the costs, it's still very expensive to use the best models heavily for real work.
- aylmao 1y ago
  Subscription services can sell ads too. See Hulu, or Netflix. Spotify might not play "radio ads" if you pay, but it will still advertise artists on your home screen. These models being expensive leads me to think they will look at all methods of monetization possible when seeking profitability. Rather than ads being off the table, it could feasibly make ads be on the table sooner.
  - danenania 1y ago
    Maybe it could happen, but the revenue that can be made per user from ads is basically insignificant compared to the compute costs. They’d be pissing off their users for a very marginal benefit.
- toxik 1y ago
  It is guaranteed that the models will become salespeople in disguise with time. This is just how the world works. Hopefully competition can stave it off but I doubt it. It's also why totalitarian regimes love it, they can simply train it to regurgitate a modified version of reality.
- advisedwang 1y ago
  There's no such thing as too expensive to be ad-supported. There might be too expensive to be ONLY ad-supported, but as a revenue stream ads can be layered on top of other sources. For example, see that the ads shown on a $100/mo cable package!
sumedh 1y ago
> I like to think that if we learn to pay for it directly The $20 monthly payment is not enough though and companies like Google can keep giving away their AI for free till OpenAI is bankrupt.

NoahZuniga 1y ago

Ads intermixed into llm responses is so clearly evil that openai will never do it so long as the nonprofit has a controlling stake (which it currently still has), because the nonprofit would never allow it.

aprilthird2021 1y ago
Ads / SEO but with AI responses was so obviously the endgame given how much human attention it controls and the fact that people aren't really willing to pay what it costs (when decent free, open-weights alternatives exist)
Twirrim 1y ago
The insidious part is it doesn't have to be so blatant as adverts, you can achieve a lot by just slight biases in text output. Decades ago I worked for a classical music company, fresh out of school. "So.. how do you anticipate where the music trend is going", I once naively asked one of the senior people on the product side. "Oh, we don't. We tell people really quietly, and they listen". They and the marketing team spent a lot of time doing very subtle work, easily as much as anything big like actual advertisements. Things like small little conversations with music journalists, just a dropped sentence or two that might be repeated in an article, or marginally influence an article; that another journalist might see and have an opinion on, or spark some other curiosity. It only takes a small push and it tends to spread across the industry. It's not a fast process, but when the product team is capable of road-mapping for a year or so in advance, a marketing team can do a lot to prepare things so the audience is ready. LLMs represent a scary capability to influence the entire world, in ways we're not equipped to handle.
- gooob 1y ago
  >LLMs represent a scary capability to influence the entire world, in ways we're not equipped to handle replace LLMs with TV, or smartphones, or maybe even mcdonald's, and you've got the same idea. through TV, corporations got to control a lot of the social world and people's behavior.
- NoahZuniga 1y ago

otabdeveloper4 1y ago

In the future AI will be commoditized. You'll be able to buy an inference server for your home in the form factor like a wi-fi router now. They will be cheap and there will be a huge selection of different models, both open-source and proprietary. You'll be able to download a model with a click of a button. (Or just torrent them.)

anticensor 1y ago
That can be done with today's desktops already, if you beef up the specs slightly.
- mlnj 1y ago
  The smaller models are becoming even more capable now. Add that with a suite of tools and integrations and you can do most of what you do online within the infra at home.
- otabdeveloper4 1y ago
  Cheap Chinese single-board computers made specifically for inference is the missing puzzle piece. (No, GPU's and especially Nvidia is not that.) Also the current crop of AI agents are just utter crap. But that's a skill issue of the people coding them, expect actual advances here soon.
  - anticensor 1y ago
    Aren't DGX Spark or Framework Desktop cheap enough?
    - otabdeveloper4 1y ago
      Not really. Eventually we'll get something with the price and availability of a home appliance. (Wi-fi router tier.)

yread 1y ago

At least we can self-host this time around

energy123 1y ago

Now the hard part. Design a policy stop this from happening while balancing the need to maintain competition, innovation, etc. That step, along with getting politicians to pass it, is the only thing that will stop that outcome.

wrsh07 1y ago

For all of the skepticism I've seen of Sam Altman, listening to interviews with him (eg by Ben Thompson) he says he really does not want to create an ad tier for OpenAI. Even if you take him at his word, incentives are hard to ignore (and advertising is a very powerful business model when your goal is to create something that reaches everyone)

pradn 1y ago

I'm hoping there will always be a good LLM option, for the following reasons: 1) The Pareto frontier of open LLMs will keep expanding. The breakneck pace of open research/development, combined with techniques like distillation will keep the best open LLMs pretty good, if not the best. 2) The cost of inference will keep going down as software and hardware are optimized. At the extreme, we're lookin toward bit-quantized LLMs that run in RAM itself. These two factors should mean a good open LLM alternative should always exist, one without ulterior motives. Now, will people be able to have the hardware to run it? Or will users just put up with ads to use the best LLM? The latter is likely, but you do have a choice.