[wanderingstan]

Anecdotally, almost every day I’ll overhear conversations at my local coffee shop of non-developers gushing about how much ChatGPT has revolutionized their work: church workers for writing bulletins and sermons, small business owners for writing loan applications or questions about taxes, writers using it for proofreading, etc. And this is small town Colorado.

Not since the advent of Google have I heard people rave so much about the usefulness of a new technology.

[jcgrillo]

These are not the sort of uses we need to make this thing valuable. To be worthwhile it needs to add value to existing products. Can it do that meaningfully well? If not it's nothing more than a curiosity.

[jddj]

Worthwhile is a hard measure.

To make money though it just needs to have a large or important audience and a means of convincing people to think, want, or do things that people with money will pay to make people think, want or do.

Ads, in other words

[jcgrillo]

Can you get enough revenue from ads to pay the cost of serving LLM queries? Has anyone demonstrated this is a viable business yet?

A related question: has anyone figured out how to monetize LLM input? When a user issues a Google search query they're donating extremely valuable data to Google that can be used to target relevant ads to that user. Is anyone doing this successfully with LLM prompt text?

[daveguy]

I bet Google is utilizing the value of the LLM input prompts with close to the same efficiency they are monetizing search. I that case, there are two questions -- 1) will LLM overtake search? and 2) can anyone beat Google at monetizing these inputs? I think the answer to both is no. Google already has a wide experience lead monetizing queries. And personally, I'd rather have a search engine that does a better job of excluding spam without having to worry whether or not it's making stuff up. Kagi has a better search than any of the LLMs (except for local results like restaurants/maps).