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"advertising would make ChatGPT a better product." And with that, I will never read anything this guy writes again :)
by RoddaWallPro 10mo ago
"advertising would make ChatGPT a better product."
And with that, I will never read anything this guy writes again :)
- Groxx 10mo agoyeah... and it's (partly) based on the claim that it has network effects like how Facebook has? I don't see that at all, there's basically no social or cross-account stuff in any of them and if anything LLMs are the best non-lock-in system we've ever had: none of them are totally stable or reliable, and they all work by simply telling it to do the thing you want. your prompts today will need tweaking tomorrow, regardless of if it's in ChatGPT or Gemini, especially for individuals who are using the websites (which also keep changing). sure, there are APIs and that takes effort to switch... but many of them are nearly identical, and the ecosystem effect of ~all tools supporting multiple models seems far stronger than the network effect of your parents using ChatGPT specifically.
- stanfordkid 10mo agoI’d argue that AI apis are nearly trivial to switch… the prompts can largely stay the same, and function calling pretty similar
- alecco 10mo agoIndeed. Why do people follow these clowns? They seem to read high level takes and spew out their nonsense theories. They fail to mention Google's edge: Inter-Chip Interconnect and the allegedly 1/3 of price. Then they talk about software moat and it sounds like they never even compiled a hello world in either architecture. smh And this comes out days after many in-depth posts like: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/tpuv7-google-takes-a-swing-at-the https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/tpuv7-google-takes-a-s... A crude Google search AI summary of those would be better than this dumb blogpost.
- ebiester 10mo agoWhy? It turns out that I try to read people who have a different perspective than I do. Why am I trying to read everything that just confirms my current biases? (Unless those writings are looking to dehumanize or strip people of rights or inflame hate - I'm not talking about propaganda or hate speech here.)
- Teever 10mo agoPersonally when I go to the grocery store I pick fruits and vegetables that are ripe or are soon to be ripe, and I stay away from meat that is close to expiration or has an off putting appearance or odour to it. With that said there's no accounting for taste.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- raw_anon_1111 10mo agoYou realize this “dumb blogspot” is written by the most successful writer in the industry as far as revenue from a paid newsletter? He has had every major tech CEO on his podcast and he is credited for being the inspiration for Substack. The Substack founders unofficially marketed it early on as “Stratechery for independent authors”. Your analysis concerning the technology instead of focusing on the business is about like Rob Malda not understanding the success of the “no wireless, less space than the Nomad lame”. Even if you just read this article, he never argued that Google didn’t have the best technology, he was saying just the opposite. Nvidia is in good shape precisely because everyone who is not Google is now going to have to spend more on Nvidia to keep up. He has said that AI may turn out to be a “sustaining innovation” first coined by Clay Christenson and that the big winners may be Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon because they can leverage their pre-existing businesses and infrastructure. Even Apple might be better off since they are reportedly going to just throw a billion at Google for its model.
- lmm 10mo ago> You realize this “dumb blogspot” is written by the most successful writer in the industry as far as revenue from a paid newsletter? The belief that adding ads makes things better would be an extremely convenient belief for a writer to have, and I can easily see how that could result in them getting more revenue than other writers. That doesn't make it any less dumb.
- raw_anon_1111 10mo agoAt at least $5 million in paid subscriptions annually and living between Wisconsin and Taiwan, as an independent writer do you really think he needs to juice his subscriptions by advocating other people do ads on an LLM? Any use of LLMs by other people reduces his value.
- tsunamifury 10mo agoNone of this proves anything other than he writes what audiences want to hear. Which as we know has nothing to do with reality.
- specialist 10mo ago> spew out their nonsense theories Discussing "innovator's dilemma" unironically is a fullstop for me.
- oblio 10mo agoWhy? The book describes a common real life business situation and explains it really well.
- specialist 10mo agoThe thesis has no predictive power, no explanatory power. Merely descriptive. That "change is inevitable and we all better adapt or die" is somewhere between axiomatic and cliché. What is "innovation"? How do you define it? (Am honestly asking.) How do we get more of it? (I know this is an area of active research.) I forced myself to reread and revisit Christensen a year or two back. I may not have looked hard enough, but I didn't find any evidence that he'd updated or expanded his thesis, corpus. IIRC, no mention of Everett's diffusion of innovation, of thesis from Design Rules: the Power of Modularity (an adjacent topic), no engagement with ongoing innovation research. FWIW, my still poorly formed hunch is that "innovation" is where policy meets the cost learning curve meets financial accounting. With maybe a dash of rentier capitalism. But I'm noob. Not an academic, not an economist. Deep down on my to do list is to learn how DARPA (and others) places their bets, their emerging formalisms (like technology readiness levels), how emerging tech makes the jump from govt funded to private finance (VC). Enough of my babble. In closing, I'd like to read some case studies for the two most "disruptive technologies" of our times: solar and batteries.
- sho_hn 10mo ago"Better product" here means "monetizes harder". You just have a different concept of product quality than hardline-capitalist finance bros.
- dandanua 10mo agobetter product = inflicting more suffering while generating more revenue
- biophysboy 10mo agoI like and read Ben's stuff regularly; he often frames "better" from the business side. He will use terms like "revealed preference" to claim users actually prefer bad product designs (e.g. most users use free ad-based platforms), but a lot of human behavior is impulsive, habitual, constrained, and irrational.
- Cheer2171 10mo ago[flagged]
- biophysboy 10mo agoI think its more subtle; they fight for regulations they deem reasonable and against those they deem unreasonable. Anything that curtails growth of the business is unreasonable.
- computerthings 10mo ago[dead]
- wubrr 10mo agoWhich is entirely unreasonable, and there's no need to make excuses or explain away this borderline psychopathy.
- sph 10mo agoThere is a term in biology for things which decide to grow uncontrollably, to the detriment of the surrounding ecosystem.
- mykowebhn 10mo agoThe non-biological term would be "billionaire".
- AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
- spyckie2 10mo agoA better product to make money of course.
- claw-el 10mo agoBen Thompson is a content creator. Even if Ben’s content does not directly benefit from ads, it is the fact that other content creator’s content having ads is what makes Ben’s content premium in comparison. I would say that, on this topic (ads on internet content), Ben Thompson may not be as objective a perspective as he has on other topics.
- raw_anon_1111 10mo agoPeople aren’t collectively paying him between $3 million a year and five million (estimated 40k+ subscribers paying a minimum of $120 a year) just because he doesn’t have ads.
- empath75 10mo agoI am not 100% sure this is wrong? I frequently ask chatgpt about researching products or looking at reviews, etc and it is pretty obvious that I want to buy something, and the bridge right now from 'researching products' to 'buying stuff' is basically non-existent on ChatGPT. ChatGPT having some affiliate relationships with merchants might actually be quite useful for a lot of people and would probably generate a ton of revenue.
- yunohn 10mo agoSure, but affiliate != ads. Rather, both affiliate links and paid ad slots are by definition not neutral and thus bias your results, no matter what anyone claims.
- matwood 10mo agoChatGPT has recently been linking me directly to Amazon or other stores to buy what I'm researching.
- jeromegv 10mo agoIt's likely they already make money on affiliates, but this is different, ads are product placement.
- forrestpitz 10mo agoThat assumes a certain kind of ad though. Even a "pu ch the monkey" style banner ad would be a start. I can't imagine they wouldn't be very careful not to give consumers the impression that their "thumb was on the scale" of what ads you see
- an0malous 10mo agoIf you liked that, you'll enjoy his take on how, actually, bubbles are good: https://stratechery.com/2025/the-benefits-of-bubbles/ https://stratechery.com/2025/the-benefits-of-bubbles/
- matwood 10mo agoAnd he's right (and the sources he points out), that some bubbles are good. They end up being a way to pull in a large amount of capital to build out something completely new, but still unsure where the future will lead. A speculative example could be AI ends up failing and crashing out, but not until we build out huge DCs and power generation that is used on the next valuable idea that wouldn't be possible w/o the DCs and power generation already existing.
- 20after4 10mo agoHuge DCs and Power Generation might be useful, long-lasting infrastructure, however, the racks full of GPUs and TPUs will depreciate rather quickly.
- sdenton4 10mo agoI think this is a bit overblown. In the event of a crash, the current generation of cards will still be just fine for a wide variety of ai/ml tasks. The main problem is that we'll have more than we know what to do with if someone has to sell of their million card mega cluster...
- raw_anon_1111 10mo agoThe problem is the failure rate of GPUs is extremely high
- foogazi 10mo agoThe bubble argument was hard to wrap my head around It sounded vaguely like the broken window fallacy- a broken window creating “work” Is the value of bubbles in the trying out new products/ideas and pulling funds from unsuspecting bag holders? Otherwise it sounds like a huge destruction of stakeholder value - but that seems to be how venture funding works
- bambax 10mo agoThe problem with ads in AI products is, can they be blocked effectively? If there are ads on a side bar, related or not to what the user is searching for, any adblock will be able to deal with them (uBlock is still the best, by far). But if "ads" are woven into the responses in a manner that could be more or less subtle, sometimes not even quoting a brand directly, but just setting the context, etc., this could become very difficult.
- nowittyusername 10mo agoI realized that ads within context were going to be an issue a while ago so to combat this i started building my own solution for this which spiraled in to a local based agentic system with a different bigger goal then the simple original... Anyways, the issue you are describing is not that difficult to overcome. You simply set a local llm model layer before the cloud based providers. Everything goes in and out through this "firewall". The local layer hears the humans requests, sends it to the cloud based api model, receives the ad tainted reply, processes the reply scrubbing the ad content and replies to the user with the clean information. I've tested exactly this interaction and it works just fine. i think these types of systems will be the future of "ad block" . As people start using agentic systems more and more in their daily lives it will become crucial that they pipe all of the inputs and outputs through a local layer that has that humans best interests in mind. That's why my personal project expanded in to a local agentic orchestrator layer instead of a simple "firewall". i think agentic systems using other agentic systems are the future.
- foogazi 10mo ago> i started building my own solution How much ?
- nowittyusername 10mo agohow much it cost me? well i been thinking about it for a long time now, probably 9 months. bought myself claude code and started working on some prototypes and other projects like building my own speech to text and other goodies like automated benchmarking solutions to familiarize myself with fundamentals. but finally started the building process about 2 months ago and all it cost me was a boatload of time and about 50 bucks a month in agentic coding subscriptions. but it hasnt been a simple filter for a long time now. now its a very complex agentic harness system. lots of very advanced features that allow for tool calling, agent to agent interaction, and many other goodies
- cowpig 10mo agoBen Thompson is a sharp guy who can't see the forest for the trees. Nor most of the trees. He can only see the three biggest trees that are fighting over the same bit of sunlight.
- javcasas 10mo ago"advertising in ChatGPT would make DeepSeek/Qwen/<other AI> a better product" There, fixed.
- kaishin 10mo agoThat take was such bad taste. I get where he's coming from, and I don't like it one bit.
- jasondigitized 10mo agoThis guy writes about business strategy not philosophy and religion. Don't conflate the two.
- zeroq 10mo agoI see where you coming from, but that only tells half of the story. I've been sporting the same model of Ecco shoes since high school. 10+ models over the years. And every new model is significantly worse than the previous one. The one I have right now is most definitely the last one I bought. If you would put them right next to the ones I had in high school you'd say they are a cheap, temu knock offs. And this applies to pretty much everything we touch right now. From home appliance to cars. Some 15 years ago H&M was a forefront of whats called "fast fashion". The idea was that you could buy new clothes for a fraction of the price at the cost of quality. Makes sense on paper - if you're a fashion junkie and you want a new outlook every season you don't care about quality. The problem is I still have some of their clothes I bought 10 years ago and their quality trumps premium brands now. People like to talk about lightbulb conspiracy, but we fell victims to VC capital reality where short term gains trumps everything else.
- thinkharderdev 10mo ago> The problem is I still have some of their clothes I bought 10 years ago and their quality trumps premium brands now. I'm skeptical of this claim. Maybe it's true for some particular brand but that's just an artifact of one particular "premium brand" essentially cashing in its brand equity by reducing quality while (temporarily) being able to command a premium price. But it is easier now than at any other time in my life to purchase high-quality clothing that is built to last for decades. You just have to pay for that quality, which is something a lot of people don't want to do.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- pfortuny 10mo agoHis vision of business strategy. There are others, though.
- vikinghckr 10mo agoAdvertisement is unquestionably a net positive for society and humanity. It's one of the few true positive sum business models where everyone is better off.
- emil-lp 10mo agoThat's obviously not true. It significantly favor those with more money.
- vikinghckr 10mo agoIt's the exact opposite. Advertising-based model is why the poorest people in the poorest countries in the world have had access to the exact same Google search, YouTube and Facebook as the richest people in the US. Ad-supported business models are the great equalizers of wealth.
- _lyxd 10mo agoSubsidizing the poor via ads is what we cheer for? bike theif brained understanding
- vikinghckr 10mo agoYes giving people with fewer resources an option to pay with their attention is a morally good thing for society, actually.
- tadfisher 10mo agoEven better, morally, to give the product to them without harvesting their attention or personal data
- vikinghckr 10mo agoNo, that's charity, which while morally great is not sustainable at scale and in the long run.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- guerrilla 10mo agoYeah, now we know.