> and the best monetization plans is ads.... Again?

Several of the biggest companies today are fueled by ads, and OpenAI has the perfect ad vehicle. What else were you expecting?

That's why local LLMs are important, and to preserve the current open weight models, because those are likely still untainted by ads. It won't be long until ad recommendations are directly baked into the weights of open models.

> Several of the biggest companies today are fueled by ads, and OpenAI has the perfect ad vehicle. What else were you expecting?

I'm old enough to remember when these people were claiming AI was as important and as revolutionary as fire and electricity. I don't know about you, but I pay for my electricity and the power companies don't have to run ads on my power lines in order to run their business.

They probably would if they could. That gives me some bad ideas - you could vary the line frequency to play the McDonald's 'I'm Lovin It' jingle, etc.- good thing I'm not involved with either ads or power delivery.

Don't forget morse code

And that's all you really need to know about this AI grift.

I wasn't expecting anything else, because I think Sam Altman is a conman. Let's not forget Altman lambasting ads, and telling us how they were a last restort for OpenAI. So are we there yet? Are we willing to admit that OpenAI is a failing company?

Failing or not, there's no way to justify their current spend without saying the words "massive" and "bubble".

> What else were you expecting?

some of us were hoping for actual innovation, not more ads

I think today's LLMs and their derivatives (agents,.. ) are an impressive technological/research achievement with amazing real-world utility. Innovation at its best. I don't see the enshittification of commercial products based upon LLMs as taking away from that. Like I said, I see the potential of this technology in the local/open weights model space. Yes, those are currently noticeably behind the commercial offerings. But that's not a fundamental problem. It's not a race. If we keep improving open products they can one day match if not exceed the commercial options. A bit like open source desktop environments/operating systems - it took a while, but now the OSS options can arguably match if not beat the commercial ones.

Great observation, and thank you for pointing that out. I deployed a new MR for that using the awesome YASaaS for only 17.99/mo to create QR codes in your NextJS website. Using your company credit card to a new platform tied directly to your bun dependencies to pay for all your library subscriptions. Would you like me to tell you how much you'll spend this month?