If AI kills the ad-funded business model of the internet, it will be one of the few good outcomes from AI.
Good riddance.
replies(2):
Good riddance.
We can be forgiven for not seeing how social media was going to become weaponized against us, how streaming's promise of no ads was only temporary. There's no excuse for not seeing it coming this time.
The AI companies in turn will hoover in the deluge because they need something new to train their models with, embedding the ad copy deeply into the model itself.
Your local AI of the future will be just as ad-riddled.
Which foundational models?
Not all model providers are in the ad business and while the chances of building a supercomputer in your basement to train such a model are zero, some of the companies that build such models aren't exactly huge. Mistral for example is (according to Wikipedia) 150 people - this means that a company that can make their own model from scratch doesn't need to be some giant corporation. Which in turn means that it is possible for new companies to pop up, if there is a need for them - in this case, if some models become ad-infested, chances are other models will use their ad-free status as a feature.
And this is assuming only companies make such models. But some days ago i was reading here in HN about a new foundational model being trained by ETH Zurich and somehow i doubt a public university will inject ads in it.
• Small models have performed really well in recent years. • Newer phones will have more RAM. • Private LLMs do not necessarily need to run locally.
LLMs cannot act on encrypted information - the server must have access to all your plaintext prompts. And you simply are forced to trust they don't keep them forever, but they probably do.