[apantel]

I think the advertising model is bound to collapse once GPT agents / assistants progress to the point where anyone can set one up to do a lot of their internet searching for them. The GPT will take your query and provide you an answer, bypassing both search engines and websites. If you control the GPT, then of course you can simply use one that distills whatever it finds into useful information free of ads. If it is designed to be able to evaluate product listings, it can simply find you the product you are actually looking for, bypassing sponsored results. Once the technology reaches this level of capability, any trend toward wide adoption will pull the rug out from under most forms of web advertising.

[foobarian]

I have zero faith in this direction. How will you pay for the GPT agent operations? These things are expensive to run, which means there are going to crop up cheaper ad-supported alternatives and we're back to square 1.

[apantel]

They’re expensive to train, not to run. A technical person could produce and run the kind of agent I’m talking about today on pro-sumer hardware. It would take a lot more effort to make something that non-technical people can use.

[foobarian]

Well, sure. Technical people even today are able to run ad blockers and pi-holes and use DDG or Kagi or what have you. But what will non-technical people do? They will have to buy a device with a hardware accelerator, and ad people are going to get into that game just like they are with smart TVs today.