[fourside]

I don’t quite follow this logic. Like there’s too much money involved to not dilute the value of a nascent technology?

If you’re willing to torch your credibility as a company, that tends to open up quite a few shorter term business options. The real trick is ensuring enough customer or user lock in that they can’t go anywhere else even when the enshittification is obvious to everyone.

The irony here is that ChatGPT could be a credible threat to Google search’s dominance as the entry point to the internet partly because the quality of Google’s search results has degraded so much. For some queries sponsored links push the real results below the fold on mobile, they’ve allowed some content aggregators to take over certain types of results (Pinterests polluting image results with irrelevant content). But that doesn’t matter while you make gobs of money. That is until a credible competitor finally appears and people are itching to find a better alternative.

[janalsncm]

They are already groveling to Nvidia for cash. It’s very likely the options are not “no ads” vs “ads”. The options for them are “no free tier” and “free tier with ads”.

[ehnto]

Perhaps they'll use a lightweight advertising model to watch the output of chats, and look for product placement opportunities.

That's a "fun" thought experiment if they did do that, because the advertising model inference will need to run cheaply enough compared to the conversion rate/margin on clicks. I suspect it will be really hard to beat Google Ads on cost if you have to run inference on all chat output for each ad placement. It could put ChatGPT into a higher end/higher cost advertising platform.

[bonoboTP]

> torch your credibility as a company

That's only so in our little cynical skeptical contrarian hacker bubble. For most people, it's an appreciated convenience.

[Analemma_]

I don't think this is true. I heard the exact same claim about Alexa making it easier to order diapers or whatever with one voice command: "sure, HN users don't want this, but normal people do". But I know many non-tech people who have Amazon Echo devices, and they never, ever use them to buy things. For them it's a timer-setting device only. That's why Amazon wrote off that entire division as a billion-dollar loss.

I think "people want frictionless ways to purchase products" is a PM pipe dream more than a description of reality.

[foobarian]

> I think "people want frictionless ways to purchase products" is a PM pipe dream more than a description of reality.

I get what example you are referring to, but there are degrees here. For example the Buy Now flow really is handy; and I find I favor merchants that let me pay by scanning some kinda QR code from Apple Pay or Venmo. I definitely don't miss the friction of having to go dig out my credit card, mistype the cc#, type the wrong cvc if Amex, repeat the purchase after getting declined once and responding to a fraud text, etc.

[rhetocj23]

Its kinda bizarre really.

How does Alexa ever compare with the rich experience of interacting with a store through the various senses? Its typical that technologists tend to come up with this stuff and what happens in reality is wildly off compared to what was expected.

Buying stuff means spending money. it turns out most people don't have a lot of money (something that Mr Altman would never be able to understand given his privileged background) so they want to see and experience the transactions that take place. Same reason why this agent nonsense is not going to work from an economic stand point.

[Esophagus4]

Exactly - while you and I might route our DNS queries by carrier pigeon to avoid tracking, some of my family actually like personalized ads on social media and even buy things from them.

[fishmicrowaver]

I installed an ad blocker on our home Internet on a raspberry pi. My wife told me to take it off.

[kyriakos]

To be fair dns ad blocking causes problems to everyday browsing, I understand your wife complaining about it.

[fishmicrowaver]

You are correct, however I shared this anecdote because her stated reason was she missed the ads.

[array_key_first]

I have never met anyone who enjoyed ads. These people do not exist.

They might fall for ads. In the same way I smoked for years and hated smoking.