AI Megathread
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@bear_necessities said in AI Megathread:
Not to get super nerdy here but it’s not that unusual for a company of that magnitude in early start-up phases to see significant losses, nor is looking at net loss vs gross revenue a great judge of financial performance for start-up companies. I could go into a lot of detail here but this is definitely not the place.
That’s true, but usually companies like that have a clear plan. Uber can operate at a loss because eventually it’ll drive all the taxis out of business. Then it jacks up the prices and has a profitable monopoly. Amazon operated at a loss for a long time to cement itself as a hub so that it can make a profit on razor-thin margins at tremendous scale.
The concern that has been raised in many economic circles is that these GenAI companies don’t have a coherent plan for how to become profitable. Now sure it’s possible they’ll stumble into some amazing thing that unlocks a huge profit center. It’s just unlikely to come from replacing wikipedia with a plagiarized information source or providing second-rate chat support. Time will tell.
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@Faraday I do see chatGPT being used a lot now for marketing and “personal branding”. A majority of the stuff I see on LinkedIn is just chatGPT shit anymore. A few business consultants I’ve worked with have suggested using chatGPT to assist with everything from marketing strategies to codes of conduct for employees. So I don’t think it will be too long before they churn a profit off of that market alone.
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@bear_necessities Even on their Pro plan, ChatGPT is losing money off every prompt their users send it. And a large chunk of their users are just using the free plan. Could they raise prices? Sure. The question is how much cost the market will bear for polishing up LinkedIn posts.
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@bear_necessities said in AI Megathread:
@Pavel said in AI Megathread:
In your circles. It’s not part of the general zeitgeist, so it’s easily missed or ignored.
I actually can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not. The world of finance and business is not exactly my small little circle here.
Neither is the world of medicine, but the specific uses of technology in that field aren’t commonly known nor understood by the layman. You use tools we, the general public, don’t know about.
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Major newspapers post a summer section of AI slop that includes, among other things, a summer reading list for kids with imaginary books (complete with imagined summaries).
Apart from the obvious debacle, I think that article has a good take on the second-order effects of GenAI that many don’t consider.
- Most “free” internet sites are free because they have ads.
- As more people get their content from AI-generated slop like ChatGPT, the only people coming to sites are AI bots.
- Nobody’s going to pay to advertise to bots.
- Ad money dries up.
- Site goes behind a paywall, or (if it can’t sustain itself with subscriptions) no longer exists.
We’re already seeing more paywalls, and the problem will only get worse.
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If LLM chatbots weren’t so chronically wrong, using them to dodge adverts and engagement bombardment might actually be a decent use case.
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@Juniper said in AI Megathread:
If LLM chatbots weren’t so chronically wrong, using them to dodge adverts and engagement bombardment might actually be a decent use case.
Until there’s no more content for them to gobble up because all the websites they stole from have shut down.
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Part of the reason we’re now drowning in content slop farms that themselves use generative AI is because advertising revenue made content profitable and incentivised creating content as quickly as possible while eliminating any kind of standards for quality.
I don’t have a lot of sympathy for advertisers or those who are paid by them because they form part of the ecosystem that put us in this mess. Let the model collapse, it stopped serving us long ago.
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@Juniper The existing ad model sucks, but there are other ways to solve that problem. If someone is doing work to put out professional content, they shouldn’t be expected to give it away for free, and it certainly shouldn’t be stolen from them by a plagiarism machine. They deserve compensation, whether that’s through a subscription or ads. I have no problem with, for instance, YouTube’s model where you get to choose between the two.
But regardless of philosophy, what I’m talking about is simple cause and effect. ChatGPT has to get its information from human content creators. If OpenAI drives them all out of business, they’re just shooting themselves in the foot too. But by the time that happens, the damage to all the other creators will already have been done.
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@Juniper said in AI Megathread:
revenue made content profitable and incentivised creating content as quickly as possible while eliminating any kind of standards for quality
That’s just late-stage capitalism. Internet advertising standards are a symptom rather than a cause.
