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Ads are a ratchet that only tighten in one direction. Once the paychecks of 1000s of motivated, intelligent OpenAI employees depend on ad revenue increasing, th
by mbb70 8mo ago
Ads are a ratchet that only tighten in one direction. Once the paychecks of 1000s of motivated, intelligent OpenAI employees depend on ad revenue increasing, the only option is to make them more invasive, more prevalent, more annoying, more data hungry etc.
- simianwords 8mo ago[flagged]
- cced 8mo agoCompetitors use ads?
- simianwords 8mo agono they don't
- Someone1234 8mo agoNot yet, but they all will. OpenAI has shown that customers will accept it.
- simianwords 8mo agoname a single product that has 1. many competitors 2. ways to pay for the subscription but no tier exists to remove ads i can't even think of one.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- vntok 8mo agoEver heard of a thing called television?
- simianwords 8mo agoNetflix
- vntok 8mo agoNetflix does not replace television channels, except when it actually partners with TV broadcasters. Netflix only replaces how you consume series and films. Many TV programs --news, short series, specials, local/regional programs, etc-- aren't available at all on Netflix, or when they are they only become available months/years later due to licensing.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- eknkc 8mo agoThey will or they will perform worse. OpenAI will be able to offer a better `free tier` as it won't be free after all.
- runjake 8mo agoNot yet. But they likely will, if OpenAI's ad revenue becomes worthwhile.
- tyre 8mo agoOr they view it as a differentiator and focus on a different segment. As I understand it, this is what Anthropic is doing: 1. Focus on businesses and developers 2. Make money on productivity and API platform Enterprises are particularly sensitive about their data being farmed (e.g. note that paid Google accounts don’t have their emails used for ads.) Keeping that trust is not a differentiator and existentially important to Anthropic.
- simianwords 8mo agothis is false and not how things work at the enterprise level. trust is important and it is not lost by showing ads in free tier. trust is lost in other ways.
- runjake 8mo agoI just don't believe that is likely. I think that, despite Anthropic's present statements, they will move to ads if ads prove successful for ChatGPT or Gemini. It would be viewed as "leaving money on the table" by their board and shareholders if they didn't.
- tommica 8mo agoI'm "excited" for the era of different locally run LLMs get to have ads baked into them... People start selling ad-space to inject into their training/tuning data. Could be quite lucrative.
- tempest_ 8mo agoOnce one competitor sees the ratchet turn they will follow suit.
- simianwords 8mo agothis won't work because there are way too many open weight alternatives that are run independently - just go to openrouter.
- marginalia_nu 8mo agoYeah, once competitors investors see OpenAI making a profit, and competitors not, they ask why.
- baggachipz 8mo ago> OpenAI making a profit I don't think anyone has to worry about that.
- marginalia_nu 8mo agoDon't underestimate just how much money you can make off funneling visitors to ads at scale. It's basically Google's entire business model. If OpenAI plays their cards right, they can definitely end up in a similar position. Yeah a lot of programmers would probably pony up for Claude, but every lazy high schooler in the world would gladly hear about Raid: Shadow Legends to have ChatGPT do their homework for them. Don't get me wrong it's definitely sucks, but man is it ever a profitable way to suck.
- baggachipz 8mo agoThis assumes that ads at google's or facebook's level would get them anywhere close to profitability. OpenAI's costs of doing business are only accelerating, all while burn rate continues to get worse. I have no doubt that selling ads will bring in a lot of revenue, but it'll be dwarfed by the numbers OpenAI needs to stop hemorrhaging cash every quarter. The great irony is that the more success OpenAI has in gaining users, the more money they lose at an ever-increasing rate. Lose on every sale, and make up for it in volume!
- draxil 8mo agoWe've seen this process before. If you don't pay, you are the product.
- Someone1234 8mo agoBut people ARE paying and still getting ads in this move. Their Go plan, which is paid, is getting ads.
- simianwords 8mo agoThere exists no (or very few) subscription service that has no tier without advertisements. You are panicking for no reason. Netflix? Hulu? Youtube? Spotify? Adobe? Duolingo? X?
- pigpag 8mo agoThis is simply not (always) true. Spotify injects ads for Podcasts even for paying users. YouTube has tons of videos with adds built-in by content creators.
- Someone1234 8mo agoYep, and a lot of the streaming services listed also inject ads for their own shows into the "ad-free" tier's content (before it begins). Plus ads on the home-page.
- simianwords 8mo agothis is an incorrect analogy - the platform is not showing ads but rather the creators themselves.
- Marsymars 8mo agoI dunno, I think it's clearly different if Spotify is using their platform to inject the ads vs the creators creating the content with ads included. Like if Netflix let showrunners inject ads into their shows and provided a technical platform for that, and the Stranger Things creators added ads to every episode... nobody would be like "it's not Netflix showing ads, it's the Stranger Things creators".
- badsectoracula 8mo agoThe competitor also having ads. I know Anthropic made these ads about not having ads but Apple also made ads about thinking different, yet once they became successful they ended up thinking the same as every other business. And once upon a time, Google did not do evil.
- simianwords 8mo agojust go to openrouter and there are openweight models hosted by independent providers. why would all of them choose ads?
- Someone1234 8mo agoThen OpenRouter has ads, and the models hosted by third-parties have an ad/ad-free tier (heck, even ads injected into the query response stream).
- simianwords 8mo agothis is motivated reasoning. the models are openweight and anyone can host them. why would every hosting company use ads? lets be a bit sensible.
- jon-wood 8mo agoAre you (and the other’s going all Pikachu face here) really that naive? Have you looked around lately? News is a race to the bottom for clicks and ad revenue, photo sharing sites are turning people into extremists because it results in more ad revenue than just showing your friend’s holiday photos, and search engines prefer giving malware laden installers over the legit version of open source software. So yeah, the assumption unless shown otherwise is that things will get worse, and the user is just there to be sold whatever shit is paying most.
- atherton94027 8mo agoI mean your argument is basically saying "in the future Linux will have ads, there's a race to the bottom with operating systems, just look at windows". Tough to justify this train of thought with open weight models
- jsheard 8mo agoYou only have to look at Google Search to see how this plays out. Their ads were also clearly separated and distinguished from the organic content, until they weren't.
- malux85 8mo agoAnd now it's become an anti-signal. If I search for a hotel the top N results are for other hotels, and then results for travel agents, and buried somewhere in this sea of uselessness is the result I searched for. The managers at Google have become self interested promotion hunters, and the programmers weak sycophants. It wasn't like this in the early days when I was there, the best ideas won, but then the B player managers were hired and the rot started.
- lanstin 8mo agoIt isn't the managers it is the business. All those geniuses hired and over years and years no one came up with another business model but ads. I pay for ad-free YouTube and would happily pay for ad free search. As would many. Many people would like a google scale micropayments system that isn't ads. The failure to do this led directly to social media becoming customer devouring experiences rather than making good products people want.
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- Brystephor 8mo agoAs someone who has worked in an ad domain, 100% agree. Ads are like a dangling carrot. There's always a way to get ad gains by blending them with organic content. What starts off as cleanly separated incrementally evolves into being indistinguishable from the original product offering.
- m463 8mo ago> more invasive I think invasive might be close to the right word, but in a different context. Not invasive to the content, but invasive to your psyche. AI + personalization goes past dystopian into terrifiying.
- amelius 8mo agoThe ratchet can loosen! It should be easy to detect what is an ad and thus block it (or overlay some artwork over it or just blank it out). Use ChatGPT for getting answers, and use Claude for detecting the ads in ChatGPT, or vice versa!
- recursive 8mo agoThis could conceivably work maybe up until the point where monied interests are directing public sentiment via alignment tuning or whatever it's called.
- anigbrowl 8mo ago/thread
- QuantumGood 8mo agoOligarcy itself is a similar ratchet overall (The Iron Law of Oligarchy), and many of its moving parts similarly optimize. The problem is like Soylent Green; it's made of people.
- nunez 8mo agoSaddest part is that people mostly won't care. See also: - Google - Social media - ad blockers still being relatively niche