Comment by nextlevelwizard
4 days ago
Is she paying for it? That is the only question that matters in the end.
For myself, I use LLMs daily and I would even say a lot on some days and I _did_ pay the 20€/mo subscription for ChatGPT, but with the latest model I cannot justify that anymore.
4o was amazingly good even if it had some parasocial issues with some people, it actually did what I expect an LLM to do. Now the quality of the 5.whatever has gone drastically down. It no longer searches web for things it doesn't know, but instead guesses.
Even worse is the tone it uses; "Let's look at this calmly" and other repeated sentences are just off putting and make the conversation feel like the LLM thinks I am about to kill myself constantly and that is not what I want from my LLM.
>Is she paying for it? That is the only question that matters in the end.
Don't underestimate advertising. Noone pays for Facebook or Google search. Yet the ad business with a couple billion users seems profitable enough to fund frontier LLM research and inference infrastructure as a side-gig in these companies. Google only rushed out AI overview because they saw ChatGPT eating their market share in information retrieval and Zuck is literally panicking about the fact that users share more personal details with OpenAI than on his doomscrolling attention sinks.
> Don't underestimate advertising.
OpenAI is talking out of their ass with their advertising plans. Meta and Google are an advertising duopoly, extremely anti-competitive, and basically defrauding their own customers. OpenAI can't just replicate that.
Worse still is that OpenAI has no competitive edge. All the hype around their advertising plans is based on the idea that they can blend the ads right into the response, a turbocharged version of Native Advertising.
This is explicitly illegal. Very explicitly.
The US' FTC may have been declawed by the current US government, but the rest of the west will nuke them from orbit over it. Doubtless OpenAI will try some stunt alike marking the entire LLM response as "this is an ad", but that won't satisfy the regulators.
This only gets worse with further problems. An LLM hallucinating product features is going to invoke regulator wrath as well, and an LLM deciding to cut off the adcopy early will invoke the wrath of the advertiser.
> Yet the ad business with a couple billion users seems profitable enough to fund frontier LLM research and inference infrastructure as a side-gig in these companies
Also important: Not anymore. The tech giants are now issuing quite a lot of debt to pay for the AI plans.
If that were true Meta and Google wouldn't be so desperate to get in the game. And don't think that other nations would step in against abusive marketing practices. The EU has been battling uphill for decades and the only ones who had some moderate success for user rights are private groups like NYOB. There is no law that will save the old tech companies and they know it.
> This is explicitly illegal.
Is it really any different than product placement in TV shows/movies?
Maybe I am underestimating how suggestible average people are as someone who has never in their lives clicked on an ad I just can't see ads being anything but a deterrent for using the service
>Maybe I am underestimating
You sure are. And it sounds like you are also underestimating the effect yourself as well. In fact this perception is so common that there is even a name for it in psychology: Third-person effect. Many people believe that advertising does not affect them. But ironically, the more you believe so, the more likely you are to fall victim to particular types of advertising. And in general your response to ads will be very similar to everyone else's. These "annoying" ads that you "would never click on" are just badly personalized or badly placed ads. That's the only type that gets stuck in your mind when you think of ads, based on your personal biases. But the major tech companies have spent the last one-and-a-half decades on perfecting the psychology of advertising. You might think you are immune, but you are certainly not. Every buying decision you have made in the last 10 years was almost certainly influenced to some degree. Just not always consciously. And I'm willing to bet that a lot of buying decisions were already heavily influenced by ChatGPT, even before their shopping feature. OpenAI just didn't profit on them as much as they could.
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I agree with you, I can't stand ads
However, I believe an ad it still influences you subconsciously as long as it is in your sight line.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is a lot of investigation into subtly slipping advertising in the LLM responses the way Korean dramas have product placement right in the storyline (Subway, bbq chicken, beverages, makeup, etc).
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Ads aren't just for click through, they are for suggestions, and mind share as well.
You can't click on the budweiser logo when watching super bowl ad. But if you sit in your chatgpt window all day then it's probably worth it for advertisers to expect to build familiarity with brands they advertise.
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Imagine subliminal messages being sent in the llm responses carefully created for max impact on you. I’m sure many companies will pay to recommend their product on ChatGPT.
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> Maybe I am underestimating
Advertising is one of the biggest markets on the planet. Meta is nearly a $2T company and is making record profits.
not necessarily, if openai managed to monetize free users. Could be through advertising, or integrations with marketplaces on commission (e.g. order your next Hello Fresh through ChatGPT? Get recommended a hotel?)
They could succeed where Alexa failed. A free user can even bring in more than a paid user if you look at some platforms like spotify, where apparently there is a large chunk of free users generating more income through ads than if they would pay
We are so far away from ordering stuff from LLM
Not really!
I was researching CAVA ( due to the crazy earnigs announcement yesterday ) and it was displaying some nice links to the website, all suffixed with ?utm=chatgpt
So, it has begun!
Most potential customers wouldn't ever think in terms as "justifying" a €20 purchase when the product is great.
ChatGPT (and competitors) is an incredibly high value tool, and €20 per month is nothing for somebody who wants or needs it. It's just a matter of if they use it enough to start hitting the daily limits.
This is why people are constantly moaning about paying too many subscriptions and why we have companies whose whole business is to remind you to not pay for stupid subscriptions.
As if paying constantly for a thing is normal and not dystopian
People are completely irrational when it comes to their personal finances, and hackers are the group who is most irrational of all.
For a few bucks per month you have access to artificial intelligence on a level which was completely unheard of just a few years ago. A revolution on the level of electricity or radio communication. And you are still complaining about price.
Consider if it's only habit that you have learnt from others. People talk all the time about the price of milk, eggs or gas, even though these things could double in price and still be incredible value. Then they turn around and waste enormous sums of money on completely meaningless stuff.
>no longer searches web for things it doesn't know, but instead guesses.
This could very well have been a cost-reduction effort to try and simulate what it was doing before.
Somebody must think training has already looked at the web enough, or there may be too much slop now that there was no contingency for.
Then you've got tighter guardrails to make it more palatable for a wider audience.
I guess different people would draw the line differently, but when it goes from being worth money to not worth it any more that could be an enshittification effect.
Especially if things like that accelerate.