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They'd be profitable if they showed ads to their free tier users. They wouldn't even need to be particularly competent at targeting or aggressive with the amoun
by jsnell 1y ago
They'd be profitable if they showed ads to their free tier users. They wouldn't even need to be particularly competent at targeting or aggressive with the amount of ads they show, they'd be profitable with 1/10th the ARPU of Meta or Google.
And they would not be incompetent at targeting. If they were to use the chat history for targeting, they might have the most valuable ad targeting data sets ever built.
- bugbuddy 1y agoI heard majority of the users are techies asking coding questions. What do you sell to someone asking how to fix a nested for loop in C++? I am genuinely curious. Programmers are known to be the stingiest consumers out there.
- LtWorf 1y agoAccording to fb's aggressively targeted marketing, you sell them donald trump propaganda.
- disgruntledphd2 1y agoIt's very important to note that advertisers set the parameters in which FB/Google's algorithms and systems operate. If you're 25-55 in a red state, it seems likely that you'll see a bunch of that information (even if FB are well aware you won't click).
- LtWorf 1y agoI'm not even in USA and I've never been in USA in my entire life.
- disgruntledphd2 1y agoWow, that's either a bug or an incredibly incompetent advertiser.
- LtWorf 1y agoAre we surprised someone working for trump is not competent?
- disgruntledphd2 1y agoFrom an advertising perspective, yes. Their ads team was super competent in 2016, at least.
- cuchoi 1y agoI'm not sure that stereotype holds up. Developers spend a lot: courses, cloud services, APIs, plugins, even fancy keyboards. A quick search shows that click on ads targeting developers are expensive. Also there is a ton of users asking to rewrite emails, create business plans, translate, etc.
- disgruntledphd2 1y agoYou'd probably do brand marketing for Stripe, Datadog, Kafka, Elastic Search etc. You could even loudly proclaim that the are ads are not targeted by users which HN would love (but really it would just be old school brand marketing).
- Lewton 1y ago> I heard majority of the users are techies asking coding questions. Citation needed? I can't sit on a bus without spotting some young person using ChatGPT
- jsnell 1y agoOpenAI has half a billion active users. You don't need every individual request to be profitable, just the aggregate. If you're doing a Google search for, like, the std::vector API reference you won't see ads. And that's probably true for something like 90% of the searches. Those searches have no commercial value, and serving results is just a cost of doing business. By serving those unmonetizable queries the search engine is making a bet that when you need to buy a new washing machine, need a personal injury lawyer, or are researching that holiday trip to Istanbul, you'll also do those highly commercial and monetizable searches with the same search engine. Chatbots should have exactly the same dynamics as search engines.
- yamazakiwi 1y agoA lot of people use it for cooking and other categories as well. Techies are also great for network growth and verification for other users, and act as community managers indirectly.
- naravara 1y agoThe existence of the LLMs will themselves change the profile and proclivities of people we consider “programmers” in the same way the app-driven tech boom did. Programmers who came up in the early days are different from ones who came up in the days of the web are different from ones who came up in the app era.
- tsukikage 1y ago…for starters, you can sell them the ability to integrate your AI platform into whatever it is they are building, so you can then sell your stuff to their customers.
- JackFr 1y agoYou sell them Copilot. You Sell them CursorAI. You sell them Windsurf. You sell them Devin. You sell the Claude Code. Software guys are doing much, much more than treating LLM's like an improved Stack Overflow. And a lot of them are willing to pay.
- lxgr 1y agoBolting banner ads onto a technology that can organically weave any concept into a trusted conversation would be incredibly crude.
- nacnud 1y agoTrue - but if you erode that trust then your users may go elsewhere. If you keep the ads visually separated, there's a respected boundary & users may accept it.
- calvinmorrison 1y agogoogle did it. LLms are the new google search. It'll happen sooner or later.
- ptero 1y agoYes, but for a while google was head and shoulders above the competition. It also poured a ton of money into building non-search functionality (email, maps, etc.). And had a highly visible and, for a while, internally respected "don't be evil" corporate motto. All of which made it much less likely that users would bolt in response to each real monetization step. This is very different to the current situation, where we have a shifting landscape with several AI companies, each with its strengths. Things can change, but it takes time for 1-2 leaders to consolidate and for the competition to die off. My 2c.
- SJC_Hacker 1y agoThere will be a respected boundary for a time, then as advertisers find its more effective the boundaries will start to disappear
- Analemma_ 1y agoLike that’s ever stopped the adtech industry before. It would be a hilarious outcome though, “we built machine gods, and the main thing we use them for is to make people click ads.” What a perfect Silicon Valley apotheosis.
- 1y ago
- naravara 1y agoIf interactions with your AI start sounding like your conversation partner shilling hot cocoa powder at nobody in particular those conversations are going to stop being trusted real quick. (Pop culture reference: https://youtu.be/MzKSQrhX7BM?si=piAkfkwuorldn3sb https://youtu.be/MzKSQrhX7BM?si=piAkfkwuorldn3sb) Which may be for the best, because people shouldn’t be implicitly trusting the bullshit engine.
- miki123211 1y agoand they wouldn't even have to make the model say the ads. I think that's a terrible idea which would drive model performance down. Traditional banner ads, inserted inline into the conversation based on some classifier seem a far better idea.
- immibis 1y agoTargeted banner ads based on chat history is last-two-decades thinking. The money with LLMs will be targeted answers. Have Coca-Cola pay you a few billion dollars to reinforce the model to say "Coke" instead of "soda". Train it the best source of information about political subjects is to watch Fox News. This even works with open-source models, too!
- ericfr11 1y agoIt sounds quite scary that an LLM could be trained on a single source of news (specially FN).