In all seriousness. Windows is invaded by copilot, OpenAI introducing ads, Google providing Siri for Apple, it’s all just a collusion to keep you buying. Disconnect. From TV, Media, Ads, Social Networks, Predatory subscriptions, all of it. The only way to show these companies that we are not on board with this is to not participate.
On my shelf from the corner of my eye I see “Understanding the Linux Kernel”. It’s outdated, but it comes from a time of peer review and subject matter experts. I don’t need to double guess if the author is hallucinating or if they’re subconsciously trying to sell me something.
Maybe it’s time we return to books for entertainment and knowledge share.
It's a guest op-ed, relax.
Google realized this a long time ago; there is no ad-free paid version of Google Search.
The counter for this is that people hate being double-billed like this.
How do I wash my windows? You can use window cleaner and a paper towel. Our recommendation is Windex, an S C Johnson product.
At first it'll annoy us, but eventually we will all get used to it.
How do I clean my laptop screen?
How does openAI know what to charge for a particular product and category? How do I know if my money was well spent to boost my product in that category?
I don’t think you’re wrong! I’m just curious about how the new pricing models will work.
* WSJ
* Bloomberg
* Financial Times
* Cartier
* Kagi
* Protonmail
* Coca-Cola
* HBO
* Windex
* Netflix
* Azure
* AWS
We are all ourselves advertisers, we just don't realize it. It is inevitable that chatbots will be RLHF-trained in our footsteps.
It will be much more subtle. Asking an LLM to help you sift through reviews before you spend $250 on some appliance or what good options are for hotels on your next trip…
Basically the same queries people throw into google but then have to manually open a bunch of tabs and do their own comparison except now the llm isn’t doing a neutral evaluation, it’s going to always suggest one particular hotel despite it not being best for your query.
It’s not like a movie where I’m engrossed by the narrative or acting and only subliminally see the can of coke on the table (though even then)
Maybe image generation ads will be a bit more subtle.
How does X then change "on the fly" if ad deals are changing? Constantly re-training with whatever advertiser is the current highest paying on?
In google ad times, this was realtime bidding in the background - for AI ads this does not work, if Im right?
> I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers
And anyway, companies that just want to make a really good living doing what they love are lame. /s
Not every corporate entity needs to become a behemoth to be successful.
OpenAI/Google/etc. operate at a much larger scale, large enough for those proprietary user datasets to be worth far more in ad revenue than any reasonable subscription fee could net.
Do you see how such a comparison doesn't work?
> Do you see how such a comparison doesn't work?
No, I don't.
I don't think the Kagi team has any bad intentions, and most likely they have attended the anti-Vucic protests as well. Moving back to Serbia is an economically wise choice for Kagi as a company.
However, once regime goons show up in Kagi's offices, they will be forced to do whatever the serbian government and by extension putin wants them to do.
Often Kagi gets mentioned alongside Protonmail and related privacy-focused services. But Switzerland is a totally different country than serbia to operate it.
It's a risk we should be aware of and consciously decide to accept when we are using Kagi.
well there is also no 200$/month Google Search subscription
We're already being double-billed. Expensive subscription news like WSJ, Bloomberg and it's been a while but even FT require ad blockers even if you're subscribed.. If you're not subscribed you don't even see the ads because you can't see the full article.
It's wild that we've normalized this. There's no longer any argument in favor of an ad model when you're paying 20-30 dollars a month already - in this case, one wonders how journalism survives if they need that AND the ad revenue to pay the bills! It feels more like greed than "support."
but they're already paying you. While I appreciate the greed can be there, surely they'd be shooting themselves in the foot. There's many people who would pay who find advertising toxic and they have such huge volumes at free level that they'd be able to make a lot off a low impression cost.
(not that ads alone would make up an $800 deficit, they'll have to enshittify on multiple fronts)
That's not how it works. It never has.
Even in the days of print publications, the publisher would seek revenues from advertisers, subscribers, and they would sell their subscriber data. (On top of that, many would have contests and special offers which probed for deeper data about the readership.) In some sense, the subscriber data was more shallow. In other senses, it was more valuable.
I get what you're saying about shooting themselves in the foot, and I'm sure there will be options for corporate clients that will treat the data collected confidentially while not displaying advertising. I also doubt that option will be available (in any official sense) to individuals much as it isn't available (in any official sense) to users of Windows. For the most part, people won't care. Those who would care are those who are sensitive enough about their privacy that they wouldn't use these services in the first place, or are wealthy enough to be sensitive about their privacy that they would could pay for services that would make real guarantees.
For the users who refuse to see ads, they'd either use a different platform or run an ad blocker (especially using the website vs the app).
The timing isn’t inevitable. Is OpenAI going to speedrun to the endgame? Not sure they need to.
Ad-free YouTube costs $14 a month (and the creators get a higher payout from premium user views than they do from the free, ad-viewing users).
YT has more angles. That's really the point. And monetization is adjusted accordingly.
Beyond all of this ads are more increasingly invasive due to the cat and mouse game of iteration. Personally, I bounce from sites where I can't get around a blocker. I also pay for content on sites where its worth it. But if I can't ever read anything on your site I'm just skipping it. If I really need / want to see something I'll go one level deeper, but that's a rarity these days. Everything is mostly in reprint somewhere else anyway.
At the end of the day it's still simple sales: you have a product at a price point people can't refuse. That is the 5% of the clear web today and it shows in all the bullshit people are going through to protect their ad revenue.
There's still an AI bubble.
I like this quote from TFA :)
Because even if there would be AGI, they could (and would?) serve ads anyway?
Perhaps the people who like that quote can elaborate why that quote makes sense and why they like it?
Once you go ads, that’s pretty much it, you start focusing on how to deliver ads rather than what you claim your core competency is.
Isn't that the pitch of AGI? Solve any problems?
Selling this AGI to a state actor? OK - this seems realistic, but for how many billions then? 100b per year?
Thats what I meant.
So why bake in ads? My hunch is that raising funds privately can only take you so far. To keep scaling, they need more capital and have to go public. Despite all the hype they still have to show _some_ revenue to help justify the valuation they need to keep buying hardware. They are a business after all. Ads to support the lowest tiers feel like a no brainer. People already accept them for search.
John Oliver had a piece on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc
This is a natural extension of it.
But what is revolutionary is the scale that this is now possible.
We have so many people out there who now blindly trust the output of an LLM (how many colleagues have you had proudly telling you: I asked Claude and this is what it says <paste>).
This is as advertiser's wet dream.
Now it's ads at the bottom, but slowly they'll become more part of the text. And worst part: you don't know, bar the fact that the link has a refer(r)er attached to it.
The internet before and after LLMs is like steel before and after the atomic bombs.
Anything after is contaminated.
Wouldn't that be quite challenging in terms of engineering? Given these people have been chasing AGI it would be a considerable distraction to pivot into hacking into the guts of the output to dynamically push particular product. Furthermore it would degrade their product. Furthermore you could likely keep prodding the LLM to then diss the product being advertised, especially given many products advertised are not necessarily the best on the market (which is why the money is spent on marketing instead of R&D or process).
Even if you manage to successfully bodge the output, it creates the desire for traffic to migrate to less corrupted LLMs.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35706981
I think the next natural evolution after showing ads in chat sessions is providing services where LLMs tailor site content to include ads in real time. Right now you get served a prepared advertisement after the bid is won and the ad for you is selected. With LLMs, both the bidding process and the ad served would be seamlessly integrated with the site content/context.
Part of the "problem" with ads is people know they're ads. What if this comment was edited by HN's servers and rephrased to mention a specific product? You might see a sentence about how OpenAI is the future, someone else might see how claude or anthropic are. Another person might see a paragraph from me about how I used Tide to clean laundry this morning with the help of AI, telling me the right portions for the right cloth. You might suspect it's AI but you won't always be able to tell. Even if they made it more obvious like how reddit is doing it, the content of the AD itself, pictures, text,etc.. could be crafted dynamically so that it embeds in your subconscious without much resistance.
The tech developed to make ads more effective is also used to influence people for other purposes. The current state of society came about after the widespread accessibility of smartphones, social media and the rise of surveillance capitalism. Russia's influence ops using ads is well documented for example. I mentioned all this to say how catastrophic the combination of LLMs and advertising could be, even by today's standards.
"Ads Generated Income"
"Artificial General Intelligence"
"A Google Imitator"
"Absolutely Great IPO"
It is any definition that fits the goal of the original secret definition of "100 Billion dollars in profits" from Microsoft and OpenAI [0].
Global online advertising is around 650-700 billion per year - how much of this stake need OAI to capture over how many years to fulfill all its datacenter orderings? (a huge chunk of this is already caught bei Meta/Google/etc. per year)
If I’m looking at ads for your shizz a) why can’t we just pay as a business expense, inline ads and B2B are an odd combo, and b) if this isn’t fully local tech I think there is a real challenge trusting MS or OpenAI to respect their contracts.
We’re not too far past these same dudes running around, violating NDAs, and launching product clones to eat partner businesses. Now ads? … trust? … scorpions and frogs, scorpions and frogs.
We can wrangle the legalese (as AI companies certainly will) but is there any ethical, moral, or practical difference?
Increasingly it seems you must go to the almighty Google or Meta in order to launch any business.
We're looking to expand into a new business line and have out grown our pharmacy capacity.
The new business line will cost about $2M in software dev, and $3M for the new facility. The advertising budget? $40,000,000 (annual).
We can build 10 robotic pharmacies (~10 staff per 4000 fills daily, each) for the price of just the advertising.
Increasingly we wonder why America doesn't build more and here is why. You are going to give all your revenue to two platforms. Unless you operate in a business line with 50% margin you are screwed.
I don't know what the solution is, but its clear that the platforms are figuring out how much margin everyone has and slowly eroding it. Somewhere between 8-15% of the cost of all products we purchase is advertising spend.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_race
If you are considering at human society as a whole, it is a disastrously poor use of resources. But if you are an arms merchant (or dominant advertising platform), it is fabulously profitable.
To the extent to which our current situation costs more, I'd think it might merely be because of increased worldwide competition: it used to be that the people trying to advertise to any specific random community were also likely local, and probably had a legit attempt at a business model... only, now, the rise of online companies funded by speculative venture capital means that an attempt to advertise a restaurant to people who live in a 10 mile radius must compete against a company that raised $400m to sell an online engagement platform that cares not one iota who uses it as long as the conversion cost is cheap, bidding up ads everywhere.
(One place that does seem to me to be uniquely the fault of these modern tech companies, though, is that if a newspaper published a scam ad, whether or not they had legal culpability, I think they and their surrounding community did at least strongly feel that they had some level of moral culpability. In the current tech environment, people seem to want to believe Meta/Google should be allowed to indiscriminately publish ads from bad actors, so you now must also compete to bid for limited attention with obvious-to-most-but-not-all scams and grifts that make money out of nothing but bullshit and are thereby willing to again bid up prices anywhere and everywhere.)
The solution was/is and most likely will be antitrust but which administration will shatter the US tech market we are yet to see.
Just spitballing, but how about a total ban on behavioral targeting?
If I was to follow a stranger as closely as an entitty like Facebook or Google does and compiled a dossier on that stranger in many countries that would be considered stalking and would be illegal.
Incorporating and doing the same thing to society en masse doesn't somehow make it legal despite it somehow makes people disinclined to prosecute.
They call it a moat.
Besides, if it wasn't for ads, I never would've found out about Zyns, and now I can't stop buying them.
Even now there are viable options for a person to pick up a dedicated ( and reasonably powerful ) local inference machine, where time from setup to working is than few hours ( more if you don't want to use Windows.. which is fair ).
Separately, about the chat sessions. For once, those ads could be more relevant than repeat toaster ads immediately after me buying a toaster. But if one is worried about profiling ( and advertising ), one should not using a commercial solution anyway. Personally, I am taking a.. calculated risk.
There is a concern that openai will follow the same path as google, but they can't ( at least for now ) really afford to make chatgpt not useful as this is their only viable product.
I will end with a more optimistic note. This is HN. There are people here, who are likely working on something that does not depend on openai or any of the big providers anyway. It is going to be ok. And if it won't be. Make it so. After all, this is supposed to be your realm. Own it.
Putting aside the ridiculous hyperbole, the reason is that consumerism is our culture. Our cult-ure. Everything is oriented toward and reduced to consumption. Our worth as human beings is replaced by consumerist criteria and measures. It's why physicists leave research and work in finance where their training is repurposed in service of all sorts of financial jiggery-pokery.
"The A in AGI stands for Ads! It's all ads!! Ads that you can't even block because they are BAKED into the streamed probabilistic word selector purposefully skewed to output the highest bidder's marketing copy."
But note the implication. Sure, ads weaved into the content, but they still must be targeted. And here's the irony of the online existence. People often refrain from expressing various desires in public for fear of judgement. It's why the vitriol online is so much spicier. The world of social media where you can express repressed opinions, the world of games and other ahem media where you can sublimate all sorts of desires and fantasies - all of this is data for the AI machine. These companies, in some respects, "know" you better than the people in your life do - especially those parts of you that you could be embarrassed to reveal in public - and they use this information to manipulate you, largely for profit, but why not for broader social and psychological control. AI's convenience is already irresistible. It's the go-to in Google search.
To actually quote Sam Altman: "I think of ads as a last resort for a business model."
It's just maddening to me because this technology could be so much more useful for purposes way beyond advertising.
Ads are a blight on our society and purging them from many areas will greatly improve quality of life.
At first, In retail you had billboards and shelf space. The lowest quality ingredients your product has (example syrup bottled with soda water), the higher your margin was, the more you could afford to buy out shelf space in retail chains and keep any higher quality competition out. Then you would use some extra profits to buy out national ads and you’d become a top holding for the biggest investors. That was the low-tech flywheel.
In the Search Engine world - the billboards weee the Margin-eating auction-based ads prices and the shelf space became SEO on increasingly diluted and dis-informative content to fill the shelf-space side. In Video advertising, rage-bait and conspiracy theories try to eat up the time available for top users.
AI advertising if done right can be useful, but the industry that asks for it intentionally asks for obtrusive and attention hogging, not for useful. The goal is always to push people to generate demand, not sit there when they need something. Thus the repetition, psychological experiments, emotional warfare (surfacing or creating perceived deficiencies, then selling the cure). Now if you understand that the parties funding AI expansion are not Procter and Gamble- level commercial entities but state and sovereign investors, you can forecast what the main use cases may be and how those will be approached. Especially if natural resources are becoming more profitable than consumer demand.
"The sieve of Eratosthenes is an ancient algorithm for finding all prime numbers up to any given limit. But if you're looking to have fluffier baked goods, consider this flour sieve by DONUIBO to achieve the perfect texture in your muffins, cookies, and more. Want me to add one to your shopping list or order one for a loved one?"
"SEO" that companies will do to make their ads appear in places that they don't belong.
Hilarious example btw
I know this can be done with their primary AI search tool, but why not separate the world of advertising from the "organic" mouth-to-mouth technological world?
No one wants to experience intrusive ads because their personal data is being sold to big tech companies.
smithmayowa•1h ago