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Don't fool yourself into thinking Anthropic won't be serving up personalized ads too.

dotancohen 1y ago
Though in general I like the idea of personal ads for products (NOT political ads), I've never seen an implementation that I felt comfortable with. I wonder if Arthropic might be able to nail that. I'd love to see products that I'm specifically interested in, so long as the advertisement itself is not altered to fit my preferences.
- lostdog 1y ago
  There is no such thing as a good flow for showing sponsored items in an LLM workflow. The point of using an LLM is to find the thing that matches your preferences the best. As soon as the amount of money the LLM company makes plays into what's shown, the LLM is no longer aligned with the user, and no longer a good tool.
  - agar 1y ago
    Same can be said for search. And your statement is provably correct, depending on the definition of "good tool." But it's not only money's influence on the company, it's also money's influence on the /data/ underlying the platform that undermines the tool. Once financial incentives are in place, what will be the AI equivalent of review bombing, SEO, linkjacking, google bombing, and similar bad behaviors that undermine the quality of the source data?
- Terr_ 1y ago
  > Though in general I like the idea of personal ads for products (NOT political ads), I've never seen an implementation that I felt comfortable with. No implementation will work for very long when the incentives behind it are misaligned. The most important part of the architecture is that the user controls it for the user's best interests.
zer00eyz 1y ago
Claude: "What is my purpose?" Anthropic: "You serve ad's." Claude: "Oh, my god." Jest asside, every paper on alignment wrapped in the blanket of safety is also a moving toward the goal of alignment to products. How much does a brand pay to make sure it gets placement in, say, GPT6? How does anyone even price that sort of thing (because in theory it's there forever, or until 7 comes out)? It makes for some interesting business questions and even more interesting sales pitches.
- Yoric 1y ago
  Could be part of a LORA or some other kind of plug-in refinement.
- rubidium 1y ago
  I’ll be concerned when ex-Yelp “growth strategists” start showing up at OpenAI and leverage the same extortionist technics.
- rblatz 1y ago
  The models aren’t static, we have to build validation sets to measure model drift and modify our prompts to compensate.
- swiftcoder 1y ago
  Ads aren't going to be trained into the model. They'll be an ads backend that the model queries with a set of topic tags, just like in traditional web advertising.
  - puilp0502 1y ago
    It's going to be interesting if ChatGPT actually hooks up with SSPs and dumps a whole "user preference" embedding vector to the ad networks.
ankit219 1y ago
My conjecture is that their memory implementation is not aimed at building a user profile. I don't know if they would or would not serve ads in the future, but it's hard to see how the current implementation helps them in that regard.
- cj 1y ago
  > I don't know if they would or would not serve ads in the future There are 2 possible futures: 1) You are served ads based on your interactions 2) You pay a subscription fee equal to the amount they would have otherwise earned on ads I highly doubt #2 will happen. (See: Facebook, Google, twitter, et al) Let’s not fool ourselves. We will be monetized. And model quality will be degraded to maximize profits when competition in the LLM space dies down. It’s not a pretty future. I wouldn’t be surprised if right now is the peak of model quality, etc. Peak competition, everyone is trying to be the best. That won’t continue forever. Eventually everyone will pivot their priority towards monetization rather than model quality/training. Hopefully I’m wrong.
  - taneq 1y ago
    3) You pay a subscription fee, and are force-fed ads anyway.
  - fluidcruft 1y ago
    But aren't we only worth something like $300/year each to Meta in terms of ads? I remember someone arguing something like that when the TikTok ban was being passed into law... essentially the argument was that TikTok was "dumping" engagement at far below market value (at something like $60/year) to damage American companies. That was something the argument I remember anyway.
    - cj 1y ago
      If that’s the case, we have an even bigger problem on our hands. How will these companies ever be profitable? If we’re already paying $20/mo and they’re operating at a loss, what’s the next move (assuming we’re only worth an extra $300/yr with ads?) The math doesn’t add up, unless we stop training new models and degrade the ones currently in production, or have some compute breakthrough that makes hardware + operating costs an order of magnitudes cheaper.
michaelbrave 1y ago
I kinda figured they were more interested in enterprise customers rather than consumer customers.
GuB-42 1y ago
Anthropic seems to want to make you buy a subscription, not show you ads. ChatGPT seems to be more popular to those who don't want to pay, and they are therefore more likely to rely on ads.
- cantor_S_drug 1y ago
  They might be coming from different directions. But these things, as often they do, will converge. Too big of a market to leave.
- mrheosuper 1y ago
  so ChatGPT will become "saleman". And i do not trust any saleman.
  - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
    They're all salesmen, they were trained on the web which is jam packed with SEO content.
    - aswegs8 1y ago
      Interesting point. Never thought about AI slop being fed by SEO slop.
  - FergusArgyll 1y ago
    The plan is not ads said by chatgpt - it's ads on the side that are relevant to the conversartion (or you in general). Or affiliate links. That's my understanding.
  - bigfishrunning 1y ago
    You shouldn't be trusting an LLM either, so this is a real sideways move.
- chii 1y ago
  and netflix used to think they dont want to show ads either.
AlecSchueler 1y ago
It's very interesting to ask Claude what ads it would show you based on your past interactions.

Though in general I like the idea of personal ads for products (NOT political ads), I've never seen an implementation that I felt comfortable with. I wonder if Arthropic might be able to nail that. I'd love to see products that I'm specifically interested in, so long as the advertisement itself is not altered to fit my preferences.

lostdog 1y ago
There is no such thing as a good flow for showing sponsored items in an LLM workflow. The point of using an LLM is to find the thing that matches your preferences the best. As soon as the amount of money the LLM company makes plays into what's shown, the LLM is no longer aligned with the user, and no longer a good tool.
- agar 1y ago
  Same can be said for search. And your statement is provably correct, depending on the definition of "good tool." But it's not only money's influence on the company, it's also money's influence on the /data/ underlying the platform that undermines the tool. Once financial incentives are in place, what will be the AI equivalent of review bombing, SEO, linkjacking, google bombing, and similar bad behaviors that undermine the quality of the source data?
Terr_ 1y ago
> Though in general I like the idea of personal ads for products (NOT political ads), I've never seen an implementation that I felt comfortable with. No implementation will work for very long when the incentives behind it are misaligned. The most important part of the architecture is that the user controls it for the user's best interests.

zer00eyz 1y ago

Claude: "What is my purpose?" Anthropic: "You serve ad's." Claude: "Oh, my god." Jest asside, every paper on alignment wrapped in the blanket of safety is also a moving toward the goal of alignment to products. How much does a brand pay to make sure it gets placement in, say, GPT6? How does anyone even price that sort of thing (because in theory it's there forever, or until 7 comes out)? It makes for some interesting business questions and even more interesting sales pitches.

Yoric 1y ago
Could be part of a LORA or some other kind of plug-in refinement.
rubidium 1y ago
I’ll be concerned when ex-Yelp “growth strategists” start showing up at OpenAI and leverage the same extortionist technics.
rblatz 1y ago
The models aren’t static, we have to build validation sets to measure model drift and modify our prompts to compensate.
swiftcoder 1y ago
Ads aren't going to be trained into the model. They'll be an ads backend that the model queries with a set of topic tags, just like in traditional web advertising.
- puilp0502 1y ago
  It's going to be interesting if ChatGPT actually hooks up with SSPs and dumps a whole "user preference" embedding vector to the ad networks.

ankit219 1y ago

My conjecture is that their memory implementation is not aimed at building a user profile. I don't know if they would or would not serve ads in the future, but it's hard to see how the current implementation helps them in that regard.

cj 1y ago
> I don't know if they would or would not serve ads in the future There are 2 possible futures: 1) You are served ads based on your interactions 2) You pay a subscription fee equal to the amount they would have otherwise earned on ads I highly doubt #2 will happen. (See: Facebook, Google, twitter, et al) Let’s not fool ourselves. We will be monetized. And model quality will be degraded to maximize profits when competition in the LLM space dies down. It’s not a pretty future. I wouldn’t be surprised if right now is the peak of model quality, etc. Peak competition, everyone is trying to be the best. That won’t continue forever. Eventually everyone will pivot their priority towards monetization rather than model quality/training. Hopefully I’m wrong.
- taneq 1y ago
  3) You pay a subscription fee, and are force-fed ads anyway.
- fluidcruft 1y ago
  But aren't we only worth something like $300/year each to Meta in terms of ads? I remember someone arguing something like that when the TikTok ban was being passed into law... essentially the argument was that TikTok was "dumping" engagement at far below market value (at something like $60/year) to damage American companies. That was something the argument I remember anyway.
  - cj 1y ago
    If that’s the case, we have an even bigger problem on our hands. How will these companies ever be profitable? If we’re already paying $20/mo and they’re operating at a loss, what’s the next move (assuming we’re only worth an extra $300/yr with ads?) The math doesn’t add up, unless we stop training new models and degrade the ones currently in production, or have some compute breakthrough that makes hardware + operating costs an order of magnitudes cheaper.

michaelbrave 1y ago

I kinda figured they were more interested in enterprise customers rather than consumer customers.

GuB-42 1y ago

Anthropic seems to want to make you buy a subscription, not show you ads. ChatGPT seems to be more popular to those who don't want to pay, and they are therefore more likely to rely on ads.

cantor_S_drug 1y ago
They might be coming from different directions. But these things, as often they do, will converge. Too big of a market to leave.
mrheosuper 1y ago
so ChatGPT will become "saleman". And i do not trust any saleman.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  They're all salesmen, they were trained on the web which is jam packed with SEO content.
  - aswegs8 1y ago
    Interesting point. Never thought about AI slop being fed by SEO slop.
- FergusArgyll 1y ago
  The plan is not ads said by chatgpt - it's ads on the side that are relevant to the conversartion (or you in general). Or affiliate links. That's my understanding.
- bigfishrunning 1y ago
  You shouldn't be trusting an LLM either, so this is a real sideways move.
chii 1y ago
and netflix used to think they dont want to show ads either.

AlecSchueler 1y ago

It's very interesting to ask Claude what ads it would show you based on your past interactions.