I suspect that ad powered LLMs will also dramatically sacrifice quality- they are a cost center suddenly, no reason to run a model with 10s or 100s of billions of parameters when some 500m thing will provide a minimally plausible scaffold for ad delivery.

Like everything else, most people won't notice a difference and prioritize free over paid.

The thing is, ads don’t pay that much. Facebook’s ad revenue works out to about $50/user per year . I probably don’t like FB enough to pay $5/mo for it (and even if I did, all the people I interact with that make it useful wouldn’t) but something that’s a personal assistant? Easy.

It’s not hard to imagine ChatGPT just charging.

There's money to take, maybe, so why not take it.

I've already started getting results infiltrated by SEO but for AI. Deep research did return seemingly a top book when I was looking into Ansible. I independently verified it with my own searching in a few different places.

But the other recommendations seemed like crap and when I followed the sources they seemed like AI generated garbage for AI that I couldn't find doing my normal searching.

By the time this „golden“ ad free time is over in 1-2 years you should be able to run your own custom model locally

Would you consider sharing these somewhere?

The training data is full ads. For books, you have publisher-influenced rankings, SEO slop and promotional social media posts. It's GIGO, and has been that way from the start.

I like the thesis, (and probably not a fully informed opinion here), it's easier for openai like router to go the affiliate model than ads model. Router can determine how much a query is worth (eg: help plan a vacation is worth $50 vs say what is the capital of Australia as $0). This further informs how much compute to use, and this can lead to how much they get on affiliate fees if a link is clicked. Ads here are counter to the proposition in the sense that results are to be trusted. Then, despite everything, while contextual ads are good, personalized ads are still going to be more effective (gut feel). To get there, openai needs the kind of infra Facebook and Google has. They can get the same value (perhaps more) from affiliate links - especially in a world where they are kind of gateway to the discovery - and don't have to do as much work on the infra side. This also aligns incentives for all three - companies, consumers, and middlemen, in a way it only happened with Google before this.

If folks corrupt the integrity of LLM responses, as it were, they’ll destroy the value proposition.

More likely the model will be payment for low friction enablement of transactions rather than overt steering. Pick Door #1: the LLM states the product is fit for purpose. Pick Door #2: the LLM will directly complete the transaction or close to it.

Expensive part is providing the services at loss to get the biggest part of the market, which is the current state of affairs. At some point the market leader will emerge and it will price things according to the actual cost of running this thing + markup, and ALL efforts would be going into squeezing as much profit as possible from the leading position. At the same time usability and quality would not be priority anymore. We are enjoying the late-capitalism at it's peak here.

For sure. Needs to drain as much money as possible from Microsoft first. I approve!

That hasn't been true for a while IME. Did you select 'Robot' as the personality?

I think they'd inject ads during training (too). You and everyone cannot do that; Google can.

And yet somehow it's even worse.