The same kind of speculation questioned whether Facebook would ever have a significant business. Before that, the same was asked about Google's business.
If GPT can maintain or grow usage, the ad dollars will be there given the enormous scale. There is a hundred billion dollars plus worth of advertising waiting in the LLM space. It would be surprising if Facebook doesn't contract for example, losing ground to LLMs on advertising over the coming decade.
They have to build out all the backend ad tech crap that google and fb have built over decades. As in the campaign tools, scheduling, targeting, analytics, auctions, exchanges etc. Advertisers and publishers have already deeply integtated into that eco system. Also the google and fb system has created a content generating army that is incentivized to fight tooth and nail for eyeballs. OpenAI doesnt reduce the activities of the eyeball capture army, it just freaks them out and pushes them into overdrive.
WhatsApp and Messenger have billions of users but don’t make much ad revenue. I’m sure there exists a way to show ads in ChatGPT that will be figured out eventually but so far nobody’s figured out how to monetize chat as a medium
Also it’s basically free for Google to show you a sponsored result but embedding one in a ChatGPT response actually costs money (assuming they’re part of the generated response).
Lastly I will bet you one Stargate datacenter that Meta has thought about LLM-based advertising, and if there’s any low hanging fruit there it’s already been tried
> WhatsApp and Messenger have billions of users but don’t make much ad revenue.
Not directly, but I bet that connection graph is worth millions. Same with the Giphy keyboard purchase. There's a whole unseen economy of data being valuable for reasons that aren't widely discussed.
Facebook was in financial loss until it got really serious about pushing ads and outrage. People who speculated that Facebook is not earning much on ads while Facebook was not earning much on ads were correct. Same with Googles business.
And also, very relatedly, both companies enshittified their products great deal in the process. Google search used to be better for average user, Facebook used to be better for average user.
Genimi can start pushing ads everywhere, can start using dark patterns to better manipulate us and one they will. They will start earning more money at that point.
That's ridiculous, you think when we were tribes in the jungle mother's didn't have something to do? Gather berries or cook etc? Even 50 years ago it wasn't phones, it was probably household chores that mother's "chose" over playing with their kids.
I really think people who want to feel guilty always find a reason to. Yes, don't avoid your kids over your phone, pay attention to them if they ask and need it, but you can still do other things (including looking at your phone) when around them.
Without doing a google search - optical fibers factories and pharma factories can deliver higher quality products when built in space. And I bet there are hundreds of other examples.
Just because launch costs were high and these weren't viable before, doesn't mean they won't be viable now.
But here is the thing, optical fiber factories in space are unproven and launch cost is only one of the difficulties with it. You need to launch it, and recover it, and then feed it into post processing all for the lower cost then doing it on earth. And even if you capture that market, how big is it?
For pharma, its not universally true. There are few things that can be done better in space, but by far not everything. Research in space makes more sense then actual production. Again even the best case is hard to see how its going to justify the valuation.
> And I bet there are hundreds of other examples.
Hundreds of other even more half baked examples. You need to account for launch cost, space constraints, space environment, landing and recovery. We have been doing this for 40 years and the medicine and fiber are things that have been talked about for 30 years at least.
Fiber optic are currently so cheap that they are being used in expendable, single use applications in the Russia/Ukraine war in spools of 50+km.
You're talking about achieving highly marginal gains in product quality at the expense of having to launch into space literally every single part of the production process and recover it from space.
Which includes things like "ruggedizing what you launch so it can survive the launch" and "also ruggedizing it to survive the landing".
> optical fibers factories and pharma factories can deliver higher quality products when built in space
Those seem like classic examples of what you get when you have a solution in search of problems.
What’s the monetary value of the incremental improvements in those products, and how does it compare to the cost of setting up and operating manufacturing facilities in orbit?
Composer 2.5 worked just as well for me as opus 4.6, and was faster and actually worked better for quick bugfixes and reporting back to support. And is much cheaper.
I'm not saying HN should be super supportive of everything, but the level of hate and complete loss of reality for a lot of people is quite sad to see, for a community of supposedly intelligent people.
I don't know if it's just me, but the thoughtfulness of of the average HN comment has seemed to decrease in the last few years. Feels more populist/Reddity the last couple years.
You haven't been paying close attention. This has been going on for about 15 years. I'd say we had 5 good years here before the quality began dropping precipitously. If you got here after about 2012, you're probably part of the problem.
I'm pretty sure it has. If you look at threads from a decade ago, they're completely different - much less dramatic, much higher quality, way less populist and full of manipulative language.
If I vibe code an app, and make $1m, and people willingly paid me for it, who am I exploiting? How did I "extract" $1m from a market. Who did I take that away from?
I didn't even exploit my workers and make a margin on their labor. Please can someone who believes billionaires are evil explain this to me.
What if - evolutionarily we just haven't evolved for birth control?
What if - given a choice, women just don't want to have 2.1 children on average?
No one wants to touch this topic, because it's super offensive and probably political, but it seems like the most plausible to me.
And clearly we're not going back. No one is going to ban birth control, and they probably shouldn't. But then where do we go from here? Basically all genes of non enthusiastic parents will die out over the next 100-200 years, and we will get more enthusiastic parent genes succeeding, and population grows again? Or we literally just die out...
We’re certainly not dying out. At minimum, eventually civilisation would crack badly enough that we can no longer make contraceptives, nor other entertainment to distract from sex.
Which I’m fairly sure is part of the picture. Evolution didn’t build us to want sex; it built us to crave stimulation, which is more generally useful, then made reproduction into fallback entertainment.
Depends on what you mean by "we". Humanity? Yeah, impossible to die out by fertility crisis merely due to lifestyle. The fewer babies are born, the more unoccupied space there is, making it more and more attractive to have kids. But if you mean "Americans" or "ethnic population", it's very much possible to die out. It happened to native Americans, it can happen to your group. If birth control collapses in your country, you can still be supplied by another one from across the globe who secretly or openly cheers for your collapse. Same goes for shipping you drugs, see history. As for space becoming available from your low fertility, alas that doesn't work when you're being invaded and your land settled in by a more fertile country.
I also used it for advice on a massive personal decision, but I specifically asked it to debate with me and persuade me of the other side. I specifically prompted it for things I am not thinking about, or ways I could be wrong.
It was extremely good at the other side too. You just have to ask. I can imagine most people don't try this, but LLMs literally just do what you ask them to. And they're extremely good and weighing both sides if that's what you specifically want.
So who's fault is it if you only ask for one side, or if the LLM is too sycophantic? I'm not sure it's the LLMs fault actually.
This has also been my experience - asking it to take the devil's advocate of the other side of the coin and assume the persona of 'X relevant highly rational type with deep knowledge in the field' both have a lot of utility. You can do this in more than one dimension, too.
> There’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the deal.
LOL. Maybe you are referring to OpenAI and Anthropic? Yes they have codex and opus. But about 1-2 months behind them is Grok, Gemini, and then 2-3 months behind them are all the other models available in cursor, from chinese open source models to composer etc.
How you can possibly use this "big company takes everything away" narrative is ridiculous, when you can probably use models for free that are abour 2 months behind the best models. This is probably the most uncentralised tech boom ever.
(I mean openAI is in such a bad state, I wouldn't be surprised if they lose almost their entire lead and user base within 6-12 months and are basically at the level of small chinese llm developers).
I agree with your general point, but there's an important qualifier:
> when you can probably use models for free that are about 2 months behind the best models.
You can use them for free, but training of near-SOTA foundation models is currently not an open-source process, and it's funded almost exclusively by large and/or wealthy corporations. That's a weak point at the moment from the perspective of openness.
