> Ads will also be slapped on answers.

Ads won't be slapped onto answers, my guess is that they will be subtly and silently inserted into them so that you don't even notice. It won't always be what you see either as companies, political groups, and others who seek to influence you will pay to have specific words/phrases omitted from answers as well.

AI at this point is little more than a toy that outright lies occasionally yet we're already seeing AI hurting people's ability to think, be creative, use critical thinking skills, and research independently.

And friendster at one point had over 100m users. A gross margin (and more importantly, positive cash flow) business is more important than users. This data is not a good indicator of either.

IMO adding ads is not going to be that easy. It is relatively easy to implement ads when the user is scrolling through tons of content and the ads are "organically" injected into the stream. But if the user is seeking a specific answer in a chat-like GUI, what will you do exactly? Whatever ad you will show will have to be visually distinguished and the user will just scroll past to get to the "true" answer they want. Sure, you will still get the product in front of some eyes, but I would expect this to be less effective than other social-media based ads.

Exactly. Enterprise use has a carveout for analytics - so it wouldn’t be in the paper’s population anyways

In case anyone doubts the growth and progress for scammers enabled by it: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/ai-chatb...

I think AI will also enable the discovery of psychopaths and narcissists, so the dystopia mentioned is uncertain. When AI will confidently boil down someone to some labels like this, we may get competent leadership for the first time ever.

Consumers do have very very high friction with chatbots. As clearly demonstrated by the gpt5 update and the loss of gpt4.

I don't see how friction is the primary driver here. ChatGPT is available through the most enterprise sales channel available -- Azure. The Microsoft enterprise sales engine is probably the best in the world.

Similarly, if costs double (or worse, increase to a point to be close to typical SaaS margins) and LLMs lose their shine I dont think there will be friction on the way out. People (especially executives) will offer up ChatGPT as a sacrifice.

> If people find it useful but enterprise adoption is lagging, doesn't that indicate there's still a big upside?

It could indicate that many people find it more of an entertainment product than a tool, and those are often harder to monetize. You've got ads, and that's about it, and puts a probable cap on your monthly revenue per user that's less than most of the subscription prices these companies are trying to get (especially in non-USA countries).

(I find it way more of a tool and basically don't use it outside of work... but I see a LOT of AI pics and videos in discord and forums and such.)

It’s been shoved down enterprise throats for months/years. Shareholders, CEOs, workers (at the start) and users (at the start) have never had such a unified understanding in what they want than this AI frenzy. All stars were aligned for it to gain more traction. And yet…

It’s the prodigal child of tech.

When Apple sells a device, they get more revenue with minimal coats turbocharging revenue and profits.

When OpenAI sells a ChatGPT subscription, they incur large costs just to serve the product, shrinking margins.

Big difference in unit economics, hence the quantization push.

The chats alone are backbreakingly costly relative to the market mix of ChatGPT.

Rest of the market be damned -- combined with the poor customer mix (low to middle income countries) this explains why there has been such a push by the big labs to attempt to quantize models and save costs. You effectively have highly paid engineers/scientists running computationally expensive models on some of the most expensive hardware on the market to serve instructions on how to do things to people in low income countries.

This doesn't sound good, even for ad-supported business models.

The difference is ISPs usually have monopoly/duopoly pricing power and LLMs already have freely available open source models. If one AI company decides they want to start gouging, they have to compete with other providers AND open source. And if all of the ai companies start colluding on price gouging, there’s always the option of new competitors cloud hosting open source models.

That said I do think eventually prices will increase somewhat, unless SOTA models start becoming profitable at current prices (my knowledge is at least 6 months old on this so maybe they have already become profitable?)