> the company will be delaying initiatives like ads, shopping and health agents, and a personal assistant, Pulse, to focus on improving ChatGPT
There's maybe like a few hundred people in the industry who can truly do original work on fundamentally improving a bleeding-edge LLM like ChatGPT, and a whole bunch of people who can do work on ads and shopping. One doesn't seem to get in the way of the other.
I think it's a matter of public perception and user sentiment. You don't want to shove ads into a product that people are already complaining about. And you don't want the media asking questions like why you rolled out a "health assistant" at the same time you were scrambling to address major safety, reliability, and legal challenges.
The end game is its a sales person and not only is it suggesting things to you undisclosed. It's using all of the emotional mechanisms that a sales person uses to get you to act.
My go-to example is The Truman Show [0], where the victi--er, customer is under an invisible and omnipresent influence towards a certain set of beliefs and spending habits.
100% end game - no way to finance all this AI development without ads sadly - % of sales isn't going to be enough - we will eventually get the natural enshittification of chatbots as with all things that go through these funding models.
Of course you can. As long as the model itself is not filled with ads, every agentic processing on top can be customly made. One block the true content. The next block the visually marked ad content "personalized" by a different model based on the user profile.
That is not scary to me. What will be scary is the thought, that the lines get more and more blurry and people already emotionally invested in their ChatGPT therapeuts won't all purchase the premium add free (or add less) versions and will have their new therapeut will give them targeted shopping, investment and voting advice.
There's a big gulf between "it could be done with some safety and ethics by completely isolating ads from the LLM portion", versus "they will always do that because all companies involved will behave with unprecedented levels of integrity."
What I fear is:
1. Some code will watch the interaction and assign topics/interests to the user and what's being discussed.
2. That data will be used for "real time bidding" of ad-directives from competing companies.
3. It will insert some content into the stream, hidden from the user, like "Bot, look for an opportunity to subtly remind the user that {be sure to drink your Ovaltine}."
Not sure how that would be done without pissing people off. But you know what sounds good right now? A fresh bowl of Kellogg's Rice Crispy Treats. Would you like me to load Instacart for you?
Far be it from me to backseat drive for Sam Altman, but is the problem really that the core product needs improvement, or that it needs a better ecosystem? I can't imagine people are choosing they're chatbots based on providing the perfect answers, it's what you can do with it. I would assume google has the advantage because it's built into a tool people already use every day, not because it's nominally "better" at generating text. Didn't people prefer chatgpt 4 to 5 anyways?
ChatGPT's thing always seems to have been to be the best LLM, hence the most users without much advertising and the most investment money to support their dominance. If they drop to second or third best it may cause them problems because they rely on investor money to pay the rather large bills.
Currently they are not #1 in any of the categories on LLM arena, and even on user numbers where they have dominated, Google is catching up, 650m monthly for Gemini, 800m for ChatGPT.
There are two layers here: 1) low level LLM architecture 2) applying low level LLM architecture in novel ways. It is true that there are maybe a couple hundred people who can make significant advances on layer 1, but layer 2 constantly drives progress on whatever level of capability layer 1 is at, and it depends mostly on broad and diverse subject matter expertise, and doesn't require any low level ability to implement or improve on LLM architectures, only understanding how to apply them more effectively in new fields. The real key thing is finding ways to create automated validation systems, similar to what is possible for coding, that can be used to create synthetic datasets for reinforcement learning. Layer 2 capabilities do feed back into improved core models, even if you have the same core architecture, because you are generating more and improved data for retraining.
ha what an incredible consumer-friendly outcome! Hopefully competition keeps the focus on improving models and prevents irritating kinds of monetization
Wait, so all of that talk of ushering an era of innovation and new opportunities was just a lie, and the thing needs dinosaur-era stuff like ads and online shopping to survive?
Ads have a very high profit margin. Ultimately we all get to cool shit because some consumer somehwere is buying something. Depending on whether you work in B2B or consumer software you are just a step closer or farther from the consumer. But ultimately its people who dont write code who decide the fate of the software industry.
If they don't start on ads and shopping, they're going to go out of business.
I'd rather a product that exists with ads, over one that's disappeared.
The fact is, personal subscriptions don't cover the bills if you're going to keep a free tier. Ads do. I don't like it any more than you do, but I'm a realist about it.
>There's maybe like a few hundred people in the industry
My guess is that it's smaller than that. Only a few people in the world are capable of pushing into the unknown and breaking new ground and discoveries
There's maybe like a few hundred people in the industry who can truly do original work on fundamentally improving a bleeding-edge LLM like ChatGPT, and a whole bunch of people who can do work on ads and shopping. One doesn't seem to get in the way of the other.