Comment by neutronicus
4 hours ago
> Imagine the DVR being invented today. A commercial device that helps you skip ads. It would never be allowed to happen.
That's arguably what AI is - it compressed the internet so that you can extract StackOverflow answers without clicking through all the fucking ads that await you on the journey from search bar to the answer you were looking for.
You can of course expect it, over the next decade or so, to interpose ads between you and your goal in the same way that Google and StackOverflow did from 2010-now.
But for the moment I think it's the exact opposite of your thesis. The AI companies are in cut-throat capture-market-share mode so they're purposely skipping opportunities to cram ads down your throat.
Of course LLMs today are the most consumer-friendly they're ever going to be. It's irresponsible not to look ahead to the inevitable 180.
Sure - and in fact I'm looking into setting up a local GPU compute server for precisely this reason - but I think capitalism and technology are interacting roughly the same way now that they did when the DVR was invented (and when Google search was good).