Comment by dijksterhuis
4 days ago
> What percentage of Meta's users are paying? Google's?
The advertiser based business model for those companies makes your question/thought process here problematic for me. Historically speaking Google and "Meta" (Facebook) were primarily advertising provider companies. They provided billboards (space and time on the web page in front of an end-user) to people who were willing to buy tht space and time on the billboard. The "free access" end-users would always end up seeing said billboards, which is how they ended up "paying" for the service.
So most of Meta/Google end-users were "paying" users. They were being subsidised by the advertising customers paying for the end-users (who were forced to view adverts). The end-users paid with interruption to the service by an advert. [0]
In that context it feels a little like you're comparing apples to dave's left foot, as OpenAI hasn't had that with advertising ............ historically [1].
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[0]: yes ad-blockers, yes more diverse revenue income streams over the years like with phones, yes this is simplified yadayada
[1]: excluding government etc. ~bailouts~ investments as not the same as advertising subsidies, but you could argue it's doing the same thing
Yes -- but both Google and Meta didn't start off as an advertising company - they started off providing a service a lot of people liked, and then eventually added ads to it. My assumption (somewhat implicit, admittedly) is that there's no reason OpenAI couldn't do the same. I can understand why that might be controversial, though.
But honestly, if OpenAI can't figure out ads given all their data and ability, they deserve to fail. :P
I agree that OpenAI could and most likely will execute quite well on ads.
What I'm uncertain about is how much the ability of Google to set defaults matters.
Setting Gemini as the "AI" on phones, automatically integrated with all "daily" services could matter a lot. They have a platform ready to go and are pushing hard to make themselves really attractive. All while being very profitable.
Apple on the other hand will be in a strong position to negotiate a good deal with competitors to OAI and my suspicion is that "good enough AI" is all most people need.
And of course there is the financial reality that OpenAI does not only need profits, but profits on an enormous scale. Just being successful would mean they missed the mark.
My personal guess is that Microsoft will fully buy them at some point in the future but I'm not, confidence enough to bet any money on it.
But OpenAI has more serious competition than those others did when they were coming up. That puts pressure on them to figure out ads and they dragged their feet getting started