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Comment by esafak

3 months ago

The sentence that stood out to me was "We’re revising how we collect and incorporate feedback to heavily weight long-term user satisfaction".

This is a good change. The software industry needs to pay more attention to long-term value, which is harder to estimate.

9 comments

esafak

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bigyabai  3 months ago

That's marketing speak. Any time you adopt a change, whether it's fixing an obvious mistake or a subtle failure case, you credit your users to make them feel special. There are other areas (sama's promised open LLM weights) where this long-term value is outright ignored by OpenAI's leadership for the promise of service revenue in the meantime.

There was likely no change of attitude internally. It takes a lot more than a git revert to prove that you're dedicated to your users, at least in my experience.

adastra22  3 months ago

The software industry does pay attention to long-term value extraction. That’s exactly the problem that has given us things like Facebook

  • esafak  3 months ago

    I wager that Facebook did precisely the opposite, eking out short-term engagement at the expense of hollowing out their long-term value.

    They do model the LTV now but the product was cooked long ago: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1730784113851988

    Or maybe you meant vendor lock in?

    • taurath  3 months ago

      They did that because they needed ad revenue to justify their growth and valuation, or at least, to make as much money as humanly possible for Mark.

      What will happen to Anthropic, OpenAI, etc, when the pump stops?

  • derektank  3 months ago

    The funding model of Facebook was badly aligned with the long-term interests of the users because they were not the customers. Call me naive, but I am much more optimistic that being paid directly by the end user, in both the form of monthly subscriptions and pay as you go API charges, will result in the end product being much better aligned with the interests of said users and result in much more value creation for them.

    • krackers  3 months ago

      What makes you think that? The frog will be boiled just enough to maintain engagement without being too obvious. In fact their interests would be to ensure the user forms a long-term bond to create stickiness and introduce friction in switching to other platforms.

im3w1l  3 months ago

I'm actually not so sure. To me it sounds like they are using reinforcement learning on user retention, which could have some undesired effects.