I upvoted this submission, not because I like this, but because I think people need to see this.
If you are looking at upvotes as a measure of support OpenAI: Don’t.
I upvoted this submission, not because I like this, but because I think people need to see this.
If you are looking at upvotes as a measure of support OpenAI: Don’t.
At least in this configuration ads are separate from answers. I fear there will come a time where ads will be intermingled in the response tokens. In fact SEO people on SEO forums have been talking about how to inject products into training for many months; but at some point the model operators will offer this directly.
> but at some point the model operators will offer this directly
This is illegal in basically all of the developed world.
A $1.5Bil settlement just went in on stolen content used for training. It's arguably many times larger in long term damages especially compared to investment into those who stole the content.
If an AI company can scrape in billions of investment and keep going vs Facebook style "cost of doing business" fines, they will make that bet. If OpenAI can inject paid content, advice, misinformation, etc and keep operating or earn revenue today, it's worth doing. There are no ethics beyond optics.
I'm not saying these AI company CEOs would sell their mothers for more runway cash. But also nobody has seen their mothers since the second Sunday in May.
Copyright infringement used to be illegal in the developed world, then we started building exceptions for AI. There's no reason to expect this won't happen for advertising laws too.
Does that matter? AI companies seem more concerned with scaling at any cost regardless of laws broken because once they're big enough they're too central to the economy to face any real consequences.
Weird, I thought I'd replied here.
This is different as the victims of this crime would be large enterprises with lawyers on staff, rather than a diffuse agglomeration of all the world's writers.
They'll simply copy Google's playbook. First, clearly highlighted as advertisement results, usually the first three, so just with muscle memory you'll scroll down right away. Then they get bigger. Then the highlighting gets removed. Then it's just a tiny badge saying "advertisement".
This is something that I noticed after doing a Google search on a new machine without uBlock Origin installed. I was unable to identify that the first link was an advertisement to a competitor's product of the brand I looked up. I remember adverts used to be highlighted really well in Google searches earlier.
If I am unable to differentiate between an ad and a search result then neither can a lot of non technical users including my parents.
Can't wait to see ChatGPT ads
Black Mirror - "Common People" already did this.
> At least in this configuration ads are separate from answers.
As a frog would say: at least the heat is separate from water, for now.
Funny that people still perpetuate the myth about boiling frogs; they absolutely jump out at a certain hot enough temperature regardless of how slowly it is heated.
I was literally wondering this when trying to fall asleep yesterday
I think it's impossible for these ads not to eventually get incorporated into responses. There is a class of people who treat an LLM as their super smart best friend who they talk to about everything. It's a level of intimacy and influence that no technology company has ever had before. Do you think that it's possible that a publicly traded (I know OpenAI isn't publicly traded at the moment but they are trying to IPO) company with a fiduciary duty to its shareholders to maximize returns wouldn't use this intimacy and influence to make money? It's not just an ad for a new toaster, it's your best friend who you trust about everything telling you that the toaster he's recommending is the world's best toaster, as selected by a being with superhuman intelligence. Obviously not everyone will react this way, but for people already undergoing AI psychosis or at the beginning stages it will just make things worse.
This already has a name — people call it GEO/AEO. I do the legitimate end of it for my own site: structured data, clean factual pages, llms.txt, so that when an assistant answers a question in my domain it cites the source correctly. Right now the incentives are healthy, because the only way to "rank" in an answer is to be genuinely accurate and citable.
Paid placement inside answers breaks that alignment. Why invest in being citable when you can buy the token stream? Search took about fifteen years to fully make that trade. LLMs seem to be starting on it in year three.
Interesting that this was flagged when it is about the exact phenomenon being discussed, as I was also about to mention AEO until I read this comment. It is really not very different from SEO in that if you want your site to be ranked, it should have clean information, and don't try to game the system as otherwise you'll be banned like Google has done for decades now.
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The golden age of LLMs may be coming to an end. Soon we’ll see the same phenomenon as we have with Google Search results and with YouTube, with Facebook and Windows.
People will rend their garments and lament the loss of the „old models” but the logic of the system that produced them will remain unchanged. Everyone will keep asking themselves how it happened and what can be done about it.
Meanwhile the Claude that we have today can explain this to you if you know how to prompt.
The YouTube golden age is right now. The content is the most varied, from super niche 2k views a video vloggers to massive terrestrial channels alternatives. To the point where I think creative poverty of established fields is caused by younger creatives being on YouTube and TikTok instead of writing rooms at old media.
Windows has fallen off hard but Linux has never been better. The personal computing in general has never been better: OLED screens, dark modes, everything runs on virtually every platform...
The only thing we've really lost is the Internet community. Eternal September turned out to be truly eternal and then went on steroids. But the tools? Never better.
> Linux has never been better
I replace Windows with Linux on my last Windows computer this week. A mixed bag of old motherboard, new-ish graphics card etc. I think I would have had a hard time to get an acceptable usage experience without using an LLM to guide me through the hiccups. (Odd window manager boot problem, sound device issue). But I agree, the Linux ecosystem seem to have something for everyone and on modern hardware it behaves relatively well. LLM as your local tech support works surprisingly well too.
> LLM as your local tech support works surprisingly well too.
Isn't that partly why I would imagine Linux is better than ever? I'm a relatively technical person compared to some of my peers and without LLMs I just wouldn't have the time to sit and toy around with search up what random errors mean, why things aren't working, why things are crashing, making a forum post and waiting for a response or searching through stack overflow.
But now, it's no longer an issue!
LLMs as tech support is truly the singular new reason causing Linux usage to jump atm. All the other reasons are just slowly accumulative.
LLMs as tech support is the feather breaking the back of the Windows stranglehold.
dunno.
If you gave two people with no other knowledge of computer access: Kubuntu and Windows 11
I'm sure they'd have an easier time with Kubuntu, and this gap has been widening for quite some time in the favour of KDE.
The largest issues seem to be either power users doing esoteric things to their systems, or people who want to work the Windows way.
Drivers (for as much as I can tell) are mostly solved, with some minor touch buttons on some laptops being an issue in some cases.
I'm not comparing Linux of 2007 to now, I'm comparing Windows now to Linux of now- the only real edge Windows has going for it is that it's already installed when you buy your computer.
For me the main thing is Windows has gotten so bad that I was finally willing to spend time getting Linux running. LLMs are nice, but not necessary. Claude helped me with a driver issue at least knowing where to look but the answer was ultimately on a Linux forum. I think LLMs help but it isn't that much better than just searching old forum posts.
At least for me, the availability of LLM help had nothing to do with my decision to switch to Linux, it was Proton making it to where games run great on Linux and Windows being intolerably bad.
The actual content yes, but the recommendation engine switching from "Here is a video that is kind of like this one, you might like it" to "Here is a video that we predict will keep you on this website for as long as possible" definitely soured the experience.
PocketTube. I organize all my subscriptions and only watch those now, I rarely actually go to the home page with recommendations.
I like that sentiment and fully agree regarding YouTube. Unlike Facebook, it's still possible to tune your feed to your exact interests. I have never had a better experience with any video medium, neither linear TV, nor streaming, than I have with YouTube right now.
Instagram is now much better for this with its "customise your algorithm" feature. I was able to strip out all the crap it thinks I like and focus on one specific topic.
> The content is the most varied
If no one can find it, you basically have a modern digital version of the "if a tree falls and no one hears it does it make a sound".
Discoverability in youtube is currently absurdly shit. The algo just decides you like something and shows you the exact same videos you have already watched 30 times. Its so so bad, specially with how good the front page and side recommendations used to be.
Now its a fight of shorts, repeated videos, AI garbage, and search ignoring explicitly your request.
Maybe it's your algorithm then because I found lots of great stuff that it surfaced to me that were not just repeats but adjacent topics. For example if I watch Veritasium I get videos about other math and physics topics and creators.
> Maybe it's your algorithm
Nope, its just the set up of Youtube.
The front page is by design around 60% videos you have already watched. Best case scenario.
It used to be 9 videos in 3 rows of 3. now its 2 videos, then 5 shorts.
In the side bar the default was "Related" which was almost always new videos, directly related to the video you just watched. Now its a tab called "All" which aggregates related tabs such as "Watched" which again is videos you already watched. Content from the same channel (not necessary related to the current video)
All of this hides possibly related videos and narrows down discoverability.
it also ignores the push of youtube to reduce visibility of things (the front page being mostly shorts by volume is pretty telling)
> lament the loss of the „old models”
My Qwen GGUFs are still here.
LLMs may actually drag our super-valuable tech industry back down to earth and commoditize everything we've ever built.
How hard would it be to build a new Google Search with a small team and an LLM?
How hard would it be to engineer a new Google Drive and Docs suite?
How hard would it be to create a new phone operating system?
These all feel incredibly shallow now. A few dedicated people could build these systems and begin dismantling the margin and monopoly of every major piece of software we know and use.
If ChatGPT has ads, how hard would it be for a different startup to offer an LLM alternative?
Distribution and branding might be the only things that matter going forward. We may have just turned the tech industry into the 1960's cigarette industry.
LLMs are a Google killer. I don't think it'll be long before people start using their power to take away market share from big tech.
Big tech laying off so many senior engineers might have created the dry kindling to set this off.
(Because people always comment - this is not sarcasm. I'm being serious.)
A small team and an llm will tackle search?
They will run into many problems. The Google brand for search, the inability to index most of the web as a new crawler, the lack of the top browser, your own mobile OS, default search placement deals with everyone. And that doesn't even look at the technical issues, scaling or the lack of a business model to pay for it.
You could build your own Google drive many have from dropbox to mega or onedrive. Doc suite is possible but harder then you think.
LLMs were invented by people working at Google. LLMs won't kill Google it will offer them a new profit center.
LinkedIn is that way.
> How hard would it be to build a new Google Search with a small team and an LLM?
> How hard would it be to engineer a new Google Drive and Docs suite?
> How hard would it be to create a new phone operating system?
And who has seen success with that? It's all theory now.
> LLMs may actually drag our super-valuable tech industry back down to earth and commoditize everything we've ever built.
Because most of the tech that has been built was not super valuable at all. Linux, GCC, docker maybe. But your average SaaS was always a commodity.
> How hard would it be to build a new Google Search with a small team and an LLM?
yes, an LLM can write you a web crawler.
whose hardware are you going to run it on? what is the bill for that storage and compute going to look like, just to get to a baseline where you can answer a single general-purpose query?
Google famously sells ads to subsidize its search product. how are you going to bootstrap your ad revenue? and how much capital are you going to burn through while you do that?
> How hard would it be to engineer a new Google Drive and Docs suite?
many open-source clones of GDocs / GSuite already exist. many predate the LLM era and were human-written.
can your LLM slop-fork them? certainly.
but those existing clones already have a niche marketshare compared to Google's behemoth. what reason do you have to believe that yours will be any different?
> How hard would it be to create a new phone operating system?
hoo boy this one is the most detached from reality of them all.
for what hardware?
iPhones are famously locked-down, so you're probably going to be running on Android.
you can fork AOSP and call it Diordna if you want. you could even use good ol' search & replace to save some money on tokens doing the rename.
or, do you want to run it on your own custom hardware? head over to Shenzhen with a binder full of ChatGPT printouts showing your hardware design?
and again, how much capital are you going to burn through, in order to have your first "could be sold to a real customer" quality device?
This comment just goes to show that tech people definitely aren't business people barring few exceptions, therefore thinking like a tech person will not actually solve a business problem.
I'm earning $3m run rate from a business I launched in February and I've signed a few hundred thousand in monthly commitments for a new B2B SaaS I'm launching soon.
Don't tell me I don't know what I'm talking about. If you don't have the vision for it, then fine. Someone else will take the opportunity.
Good for you, but generally engineers do not have the vision. And whether you have your business or not has no bearing on the questions you asked, the scale is monumental over your 7 figure business.
> How hard would it be to build a new Google Search with a small team and an LLM?
Extremely hard, because it would need a modest capital investment which won’t happen.
Every subsequent example you give is harder.
I've been thinking along these lines for a while.
It isn't just about building an alternate cheaply, it is about convincing people to switch. I wouldn't discourage anyone from trying, just that building the thing is just the beginning of a long journey.
Tens of millions in tokens for a code base which no one will understand in the end.
> How hard would it be to build a new Google Search with a small team and an LLM?
Impossible
Fable look up this paper called Page Rank and remember you're a senior software engineer, make no mistakes.
Building the indexer is the easy part.
The hard part is indexing the vast seas of the web. You need a large pile of cash to do that. One of those cases where running the software is harder than making it.
And once you've spent your large pile of cash, you're probably gonna want to earn it back somehow. Your competition doesn't charge for search, and your whole raison d'etre is to not serve ads.
Good luck!
Nah bro the LLM will figure out how to make the hardware run for free and scale globally and everything.
It’s a great time to be in computer hardware if nothing else.
Haven't you heard? Ideas are cheap. It's the execution that will make or break you. Are you the first who thought, "Google is successful, let's just go and clone their business"?
The problem will always be to get your hands on hardware.
Software never was the problem.
Golden age for whom? For crazy valuations, possibly ( though I am oddly unsure about that despite obvious crazy money inflow ). But for actual users, the fun is merely starting man.
Same. I'm horrified, but also not surprised.
I see an iceberg ahead, captain.
Nothing to worry about, it turns out it’s just a collection of parquet and some metadata
Can't see sh*t Cap'n!
Why are you horrified?
Because ads will no longer look like ads. Model bias from the highest bidder, what fun.
This is exactly why OAI and Anthropic enjoy spreading FUD about open weight models.
As far as I can tell, these ads still look like ads, clearly marked as sponsored?
> As far as I can tell…
This is precisely the problem with the entire notion of putting advertising into these models. You’ll never really know.
Yeah, that would be a problem. Luckily, the actual post we're discussing isn't putting any advertising in the model.
This is a very important distinction to make -- complaints should be be about what is happening, and should distinguish that from what is not yet happening and should not. Because beyond the maxim that we should try to deal in facts... if OpenAI thinks people can't tell the difference anyways, they'll be justified in thinking they may as well just do the thing they're already being accused of doing.
> complaints should be be about what is happening
Why would you think that? An ad supported product has misaligned incentives, everyone can see that and that's why the confidence erodes from that moment on.
You're living in the era in which saying "Stallman was right" is a dead cold take. Every big tech company sold out exactly like the hippies told you they would back when Google was a dream place to work for and Meta was still a twinkle in zuk's eyes.
God forbid we anticipate what could possibly go wrong in an attempt to get ahead of the problem.
But I guess waiting for problems to show their ugly heads before acting has never backfired.
Look at how ads in Google SERP were before 2014 (and they already crossed "we won't put ads" line a few years before)
https://www.bmon.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/deep-hole-...
Now, well, if you do the same exact search, at least in my location (and with UBlock disabled) it's frankly a mess but must admit that sponsored links are not even the first thing you see. There is the AI result, then the Wikipedia result, then some random result, then the sponsored block with a flat headline separating it and then the organic results, I presume.
Frog boiling
Look on the bright side of open local models ahead.
Genuine question, was this comment written without opening the link? Because I can't see how you've come to this conclusion unless you're skipping several steps. The ads in TFA still look like ads to me.
"ads will no longer look like ads" (in the future). Ads are clearly marked in the first step, but will likely be more and more blended over time (or worse, biasing the model and therefore the output itself). That's the logical future, because that's better for the advertiser, which is the paying customer.
That already happened on Google search: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003372
Calling it model bias is as disingenuous as calling newspaper ads media bias.
Newspaper ads weren’t targeted specifically to YOU based on what the newspaper knew about YOU.
Can you change a newspaper ad on the fly?
There are plenty of cases where the media, including newspapers, have avoided reporting or other content that would negatively affect their advertisers. So yes, newspaper ads do imply media bias.
So you’re saying it’s legit?
Call them both what they are: shit dumped into your mind.
> If you are looking at upvotes as a measure of support OpenAI
who, but an incredibly dishonest person, would ever think that?
Never been in the same room as a product manager I see.
It's them who don't want to be in the same room with me, they don't like their to have their bluffs called on