- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
Here we go… It took them some time but ads is going to be inside chat gpt as well. And impossible to block.
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This is interesting, because “add ads” usually means margins are slim, and the product is in a race to the bottom.
If ChatGPT was the transcendent, priceless, premium service they are hyping it as… why would it need ads?
“You want to know how to combat your depression? Sure, but what about a cold Pepsi first?”
“Please drink verification can to read about how to combat your depression.”
Lol :)
Imagine it writing your essay about Nazi Germany for you and in the middle it asks you whether you think Göring would have enjoyed a Big Mac right about now.
Once this rolls out, there will be epic memes and screenshots about it… :)
The fact that they’re pivoting to full enshittification is the strongest signal yet that the AI bubble is collapsing. There won’t be an AI-driven mass-unemployment revolution this time around. OpenAI has given up on trying to build that.
Anyone else concerned that the AI bubble is actually an everything bubble, and more or less represents the devaluation of the US dollar? We have a lot of debt, we can’t necessarily keep raising interest rates to slow down spending (as that would make the debt’s impact far greater), and so they’re printing money onto the deficit. Meanwhile, you have the White House eye balling cryptocurrency, letting banks hold it alongside gold, … what does all of this mean?
https://www.theblock.co/amp/post/333107/jpmorgan-debasement-trade-bitcoin-gold
https://matrixmag.com/chinas-gold-corridor-a-structural-shift-in-the-global-financial-order/
As people living outside the US know, these bubbles (like 2008) don’t lead to a crisis of their sector, but of the US economy at large which in turn, very unfortunately, affects everything else. Wall Street is held up by the Nvidia/OpenAI/Oracle holy trinity, and once that crashes it’s not only taking LLMs and GPUs with it
Capitalism, especially late stage, requires to keep “creating value” and more “territory” (money) to grow into. Printing dollars and using cryptocurrencies as collateral is just doing that.
Only works until you find yourself in the same debt spiral that royally fucked Rome, Spain, and plenty of others.
Printing money causes inflation, debasing the currency. You have to raise interest rates to slow down borrowing. But now, we can’t raise interest rates because the debt is too massive… raising would cause mass defaults. Not raising means the bubbles keep growing and the value of the currency collapsing.
You could run a tight budget, but that’ll never happen. The left will win on taxing the rich for social programs, but taxing the rich won’t be enough == more printing. The right will win on tax cuts for the rich, which == more printing. Anyone outside this paradigm won’t get public support.
You could purposefully debase the currency as well. Transfer wealth into other assets and then legislatively increase the value of those assets before finally tethering USD to those. Like with stablecoin or gold, maybe both.
You could do what Japan did and let inflation run its course. That’s also political suicide.
It doesn’t mean anything. You’re just rules by greedy idiots.
Everything means something because meaning is created, not discovered. They can be greedy, idiots, and still know how to come out on top of a failing empire.
I really think there’s a lot more to this than meets the eye. There being winners implies there being losers also. If the ultra wealthy can come out on top, it leaves the rest of the US with a debased currency on bottom.
Is gold up 2x since 2 years ago, or is the US Dollar loosing its purchase power at a rate not seen since 1970s (Nixon took USD off gold) and 2008-11 (global housing crisis)?
Suddenly, Elons stock-performance based bonus benchmarked at $1T makes some sense…
You can make fictious meaning out of everything. That doesn’t mean there is meaning.
You’re confusing what I mean. Of course you can make fictitious meaning out of anything. But all meaning is created. All of it. No meaning is discovered.
To say there is no meaning, it represents the depth of ingenuity rather than the depth of reality. Everything has meaning. For example, it might mean something about the past that lead to these circumstances, the potential futures, potential present intentions or lack thereof…
Whether or not you think the meaning fictitious is another topic altogether. If you’re saying there is no meaning, and so therefore any meaning must be fictitious, then you’re just prematurely shutting the door on every perspective which disagrees with yours.
I dont know about that. I think the fear right now is that these companies wont get enough revenue to justify their enormous evaluations. By putting ads in the product, they increase revenue but also increase Enshittification.
I wont be using chat gpt if it becomes annoying. But many will, everyone today who is used to constant ads will.
So im thinking this will work against the bubble popping. But I could be wrong.
Its not really the ads that are the signal so much as the fact that they are slapping ads onto it BEFORE it has developed enough to actually be a useful product. They have direct competition that is not ad supported and they just “aren’t there yet” in terms of making a product that everyone feels like they need to engage with regardless of ads. Slapping ads on something before its actually demonstrated the ability to succeed as a product is just rolling the dice to see if it makes money magically appear. Its desperation.
If the service was truly viable they wouldn’t need to be supporting it in that way so early. Ads might delay the bubble popping but it’s not a good sign IMO. Selling ads is going to be a lot more difficult than getting millions or billions of dollars from investors.
Yes exactly. What they really want to offer is an AI employee replacement service. If they could replace one of your employees who makes $40k/year then they could easily charge $30k/year for the service and you (the business owner and AI customer) could add $10k to your profits.
The fact is that they can’t do that. They can’t even make money charging thousands of dollars a year for basic LLM service that people use to write emails and the like.
But many will, everyone today who is used to constant ads will.
wouldn’t it stand to reason, many current users are engaged because chatGPT produces faster shitty search results without ads? compared to the alternative shitty slower search results with ads?
I use Perplexity for most of my searches. Not because of ads (I have robust adblocking to the point that I’m genuinely gobsmacked whenever I’m in a situation where I can’t browse any other way, like on someone else’s machine), but because of third-party SEO and first-party paid-for search results. Perplexity is far from flawless, but unlike google, Bing, etc. and the engines which rely on them (DuckDuckGo is Bing, for example), it’s actually designed to return you the answer to your question.
We can discuss the exact meaning of “ads” and whether the paid-for search results count. I’d say they’re similar but with subtle differences. And it’s not what’s being suggested for ChatGPT here, although for over a year now I’ve been suggesting that the AI-equivalent of SEO & paid-for search results is where we’re headed.
No matter how profitable a company is (which doesn’t apply here) it can’t resist increasing profits even more. They are all like an AI being told to make paperclips and not stopping until they have converted the entire mass of the universe into paperclips.
Well, in this case, how unprofitable a company is. OpenAI hemorrhages money like no other.
Luckily humanity will only be able to destroy its own planet at least. I would be a lot more worried if our behavior here would affect other worlds. But we are a long way from that, thank god.
First it was ignorantly stupid, now it’ll be purposefully misleading towards ads. Who could have seen that coming?
Where’s the end of work life as we know it that we were promised?
I feel like nobody read the article. It mentioned an “ad carousel” which would be a fairly standard way to offset costs on free plans. I don’t see that specifically as being enshitification. Now, if they start altering AI responses, that is definitely enshitification. I have no doubt they will eventually get there, but I don’t think that’s what this article is about.
All ads are enshitification.
Excellent question! When I am sad about my dad dying, nothing helps me like the cool refreshing taste of an ice cold Coca-Cola™. Click here to buy one on Doordash™ right now!
I suppose identifying AI is going to be a lot easier when users copy and paste answers that contain some sort of ad roll.
It’s gonna be really hard to argue your Grapes of Wrath essay wasn’t AI generated when you submit without proofreading and don’t catch the sponsored ad for Walmart+ grocery delivery.
I don’t know that I agree. AI will continue to grow stronger and heartier, just like Campbell’s new Extra Chunky™ All Americanado™ Chicken Noodle Soup.
After reading this I’m convinced we’ll not only know it’s AI but be able to identify which platform. We’ll get to a point where people will go must’ve used Gemini it’s the only one still serving Factor ads 😂
Companies have already been SEOing LLMs for a few months now. There are companies who have a panel of participants who are willing to share their data, and this is then used to estimate what people might be searching on LLMs and now to optimise content so that it shows up on responses across LLMs.
Ads was the logical direction for LLMs and has always been the only pathway to any substantial revenue.
You’re having a conversation in ChatGPT and all of a sudden you’re being bombarded with questions like how swell it’d be to buy something from Amazon or play this shitty-ass app game with MTX.
What a timeline…
Too bad larger LLMs require ungodly amounts of VRAM, or self-hosting would be a good alternative. LLMs have their uses, but they’re not useful enough to put up with ads.
You can get by surprisingly well on 20b parameter models using a Mac with decent ram or even 8b parameter models that fit on most high end (eg 16gb) model cards. Depends on your use cases but I almost exclusively use smaller local models.
I have a RTX 4060 low-profile in my 2U server and am limited to 8GB of VRAM for anything I self-host at the moment. I may consider a larger chassis with a better GPU in the future.
I think we’ve hit the end times for AI. The biggest player in the space OpenAI couldn’t be profitable by selling its services to business, nor directly to consumers. Subscription moneys nor licensing its models is working too. So the last avenue they have is this, shilling to marketers hoping for scrap.
On top of Nvidia having to stop selling RAM I think the breaks are about to hit AI and hard once the current supply runs out. I wonder how long that could take?
If the product is free…
BigTech 101
They actually put ads in paid products also now. :)
Never enough ads, never enough revenue.
How soon till they put ads in the ads
The businesses who run ads must themselves pass through a slop-page littered with ads to be able to index their ads.
The big problem is that we have long stepped over that line.
Now even when you pay you are still shown ads (maybe, but not surely, not-targeted) and your data is still scrapped and analyzed to hell and back.
Oh no. I’ll have to look at ads while I make use of their fantastic and totally useful product, oh yeah, never mind.
And the enshitification cycle continues…
Do you think it’s possible to run the cycle too quickly? Like, shouldn’t you make sure your product has been
widelymaximally adopted first before you make it shittier?May be that’s just hopium
Speedrunning exists already, so you could just apply that philosophy to tech startups.
At first, you’re good to your users. Once you have 10, you can start milking them with spyware and ads. This way, you’ll sacrifice the users in favor of the ad companies. Before the first quarter is over, you’re already milking the ad companies too. Once they get fed up with the ramped up prices, you can file for bankruptcy in record time!
AI is just soooo fucking expensive. Silicon Valley has made burning cash up front a standard practice, but the amount they’re burning is just astronomical. There is going to be a demand for profits, or the path to profits, much sooner than usual.
Even the enshittification cycle got enshittified.
Glorious.
Late stage enshitification.
yes, this is how bubbles pop
Well, you go as wide as you can, then try to cash in.
Looks like, given that porn and ads are both imminent, they think this is maximum adoption.
