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Google is winning on every AI front

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993 points vinhnx | 2 comments | 12 Apr 25 03:58 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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gcanyon ◴[12 Apr 25 12:35 UTC] No.43663844[source]▶
Several people have suggested that LLMs might end up ad-supported. I'll point out that "ad supported" might be incredibly subtle/insidious when applied to LLMs:

An LLM-based "adsense" could:

   1. Maintain a list of sponsors looking to buy ads
   2. Maintain a profile of users/ad targets 
   3. Monitor all inputs/outputs
   4. Insert "recommendations" (ads) smoothly/imperceptibly in the course of normal conversation
No one would ever need to/be able to know if the output:

"In order to increase hip flexibility, you might consider taking up yoga."

Was generated because it might lead to the question:

"What kind of yoga equipment could I use for that?"

Which could then lead to the output:

"You might want to get a yoga mat and foam blocks. I can describe some of the best moves for hips, or make some recommendations for foam blocks you need to do those moves?"

The above is ham-handed compared to what an LLM could do.

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wccrawford ◴[12 Apr 25 12:43 UTC] No.43663878[source]▶
Yeah, ad-supported LLMs would be incredibly bad.

But "free" is a magic word in our brains, and I'm 100% sure that many, many people will choose it over paying for it to be uncorrupted by ads.

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1. torginus ◴[12 Apr 25 16:19 UTC] No.43665717[source]▶
Free might as well be a curse-word to me, and I'm not alone. I'm old enough to have experience in pre-internet era magazines, and the downgrade in quality from paid publications to free ones has been quite substatial.

Free-to-play is a thing in video games, and for most, it means they'll try to bully you into spending more money than you'd be otherwise comfortable with.

I think everyone at this point had enough bad experiences with 'free' stuff to be wary of it.

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2. dragonwriter ◴[12 Apr 25 16:26 UTC] No.43665785[source]▶
> Free might as well be a curse-word to me, and I'm not alone. I'm old enough to have experience in pre-internet era magazines, and the downgrade in quality from paid publications to free ones has been quite substantial.

The cool thing is it is trivial for LLM vendors to leverage this bias as well the pro-free bias other people have to also sell a premium, for-pay offering that, like pre-internet magazines is, despite not being free to the user, still derives the overwhelming majority of its revenue from advertising. Although one of the main reasons advertising-sponsored print media in the pre-internet era often wasn't free is that paid circulation numbers were a powerful selling point for advertisers who didn't have access to the kind of analytics available on the internet; what users were paying for often wasn't the product so much as a mechanism of proving their value to advertisers.