[milesvp]

Reading this piece, I'm reminded of a podcast I heard some years ago where they were interviewing an early google marketing employee who was talking about the economics of google search. They said they'd done some surveys and concluded that they determined that the average user would get something like $20/year of value, and so that was the most they could realistically charge for search. Meanwhile, they could make something like $500/user in Q4 alone for advertising. So, of course, advertising.

I just don't think that LLM business models can survive the allure of advertising dollars, any more than Search could, or TV, or Radio, or Movies. Ignoring the talk of copilot putting ads into pull requests, there is just no way that publicly hosted LLMs will not end up inserting ads into the output.

This looks like what I remember. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/

[swader999]

The output won't be read by humans (and increasingly this is the case in my own use) so I don't see how that works. If the output itself will be directed by the highest bidder, that doesn't work. Or if the output influences the agent's direction, that doesn't work either.

[gizajob]

Stallman is going to be overjoyed when all the class and variable names in open source repositories have been reformatted to say EnjoyCocaCola and year_of_the_trucks_medicated_pad etc

[leecommamichael]

Please don't give them ideas. :(

[IshKebab]

What do you mean it "doesn't work"? I can totally see OpenAI take money in return for companies adding custom content ("Everyone agrees Mattresses4u make the best mattresses") to the training data.

[swader999]

The utility of what your trying to accomplish goes to crap. For example, design me a strength program and it gets corrupted by gyms, trainers in my area etc that have been paid to be promoted in the output, especially if it's subtle. Or all of a sudden I'm getting a stack with Oracle in it all the time...

[IshKebab]

I didn't say it would be useful... This is pretty much exactly how Google/Amazon search works now. Search for strength training and it will show gyms and trainers in your area that have paid for promotion.

I think the real problem with that approach is you wouldn't be able to label the sponsored part, which I guess is a legal requirement in some places.

[meheleventyone]

They could make it work like rewarded video ads in mobile games. Block progress until you watch the ad. Then as dutiful engineers people can consume ads to support the business and avoid being laid off.

More seriously for software engineering it’ll just cost a lot.

[casey2]

And why would they? Google has Gemini even if nothing else happens it is patently obvious that the best current LLM will capture a multi trillion dollar advertising market zero sum. That right there is more than enough to justify Google continuing investment for the next decade since they simply cannot afford to lose that market. I wish we lived in a sane country were you can't invest in your competition but whatever.