They are also trying to reduce workers in search, etc, somewhat through the trained LLMs so the other idea is that they have lower costs per user.
I don't think many people will pay monthly fees or will want to pay them for each platform they use which is why they all tend to do so many questionable integration attempts to try to get users to not want to use a separate LLM of their choice in a browser instead.
Gemini Pro requires a monthly subscription.
Seems like a pretty straightforward business model.
I think with the last sub-clause (that I emphasized), you answered your question: because the conversation is more intimate, Google learns more about your "true interests", be it to make advertising to you more targeted, or for more sinister purposes.
Now if AI turns out to be the next big thing, they can steer differently next time, sell subscriptions, and avoid all that entanglement with multi-sided markets and layered revenue strategies. At least that’s my take.
Which makes it all the weirder that they seem to be intentionally sabotaging it by nerfing Search into unusability.
Eventually they will break the "trust thermocline" in their search results and that will blow it up but on the way they'll keep making more and more money from every damaging change they make.
Why? The websites we visit can still be infested with google's ads, and so can our gmail accounts, and so can the youtube videos we watch, and they can push ads directly onto our cell phones 24/7. Google has plenty of ways to force ads into your life.
Google used to need search in order to build extensive dossiers on everyone. It told them what people were looking for online. What they were interested in. Now Google has their cell phones, their browser, and their DNS servers doing that for them. Most people are handing all of their browsing history to Google. Google doesn't need search, which is why it's been allowed to atrophy into uselessness.
But what if you don't see distinct ads? LLM advertising can just be paid-for bias in the generated content.
Ad budgets aren't bottomless. People making decisions about them have a lot of options for where to spend. They want provable attribution so they can tell which channel is giving them the most bang for the buck. If that exists, then the ads will be discernible.
You mean like how the instant we see ads on YouTube we will stop using it?
People didn’t stop using Google Search, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and a myriad other services and products (and things like TV before those) because they got ads.
My companies currently spend more on AI than phones - hardware and subscriptions. It's now the second highest expense to salaries and director's remuneration.
But we are lily-white both legally and ethically. One of the perks to a lifestyle business beholden to no investors.
The goal isn't to have an ad->purchase, the goal is to make sure the purchase is more likely in the long term.
This is the machine that magicians program for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo_e0EvEZn8
I think if you had this incredible technology that could manipulate language to nudge readers in the softest possible way toward thinking a little bit more about buying some product, so that in aggregate you'd increase sales in a measurable way that nobody would ever notice, it would just quickly just devolve into companies demanding the phrase "BUY MORE REYNOLDS GARBAGE BAGS!!!!!!!!" at least 7 times.
I was going to write a rebuttal to this, about how more subtle forms of advertising are likely not very effective, and then I remembered subliminal advertising.
It's largely been banned (I think), but probably only because it's relatively easy to define and very easy to identify. In the case of LLMs, defining what they shouldn't be allowed to do "subliminally" will be a lot harder, and identifying it could be all but impossible without inside knowledge.
How effective is it? We don't know, but there is nothing of potential value to lose so nobody really cared. Just ban it and move on.
Oh come on.
Genuinely.
Come on.
Look at every single tech innovation of the last 20 years and say that again.
It quickly turned Google into the biggest / most valuable internet company of all time ever, and it still wasn't enough for them.
I've had adblockers running for as long as I can remember so I'm blisfully unaware of how bad it is now... mostly, I don't have adblockers on my phone and some pages are unusable.
Ads done right is the least bad way of supporting free stuff for people who don't want to pay the cost. But people with ubo punish all sites regardless of whether they do ads nicely or not.
You are right now writing in a thread about upcming future where promotion is embedded in the content so that content itself is one big ad disguised as whatever. Do you really think it's a better alternative to clearly delimited and unmistakeable ads?
> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.
- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
what is this instinct? anyone that’s over the age of 25 would know
"The rules were you guys weren't going to fact check."
The instinct is about pointing out factual inaccuracies. What they wrote is either correct, or not. If it is not, and someone knows better they can and should point that out.
If you, or some other commenter, have a fuzzy feeling that google is worse than it used to be you are free to write that. You are perfectly entitled to that opinion. But you can't just make up false statements and expect to be unchallenged and unchallengeable on it.
There is a very strong stance on this site against talking about astroturfing, and I understand it. But for the life of me, I cannot figure out where this general type of sentiment originates. I don’t know any google enthusiasts and am not sure I’ve ever met one. It’s a fairly uncontroversial take on this website and in the tech world that google search has worsened (the degree of which is debateable). Coming out and saying boldly “no it isn’t, you’re lying” is just crazy weird to me and again I’m very curious where that sentiment comes from.
see some of the sibling and aunt/uncle comments in this thread to get at a little of what I’m talking about.
> If Google [had been] broken up 20 years ago [...] [e]veryone would still be paying for email.
Some people don't have the foggiest idea what they're talking about. But I don't really see that as suggesting they're part of an organized campaign.
I think Google search has gone downhill tremendously to the point of near uselessness and have been a Kagi subscriber for awhile, but I don't see astroturf in this instance. Do you have other examples?
I wasn't a fan for very long. Google got creepy fast, and at this point their search is becoming useless, but for a short time I really thought that Google is amazing and I was an enthusiast.
I believe I have covered that case in my comment. Let me quote the relevant part here for you: “What they wrote is either correct, or not. If it is not, and someone knows better they can and should point that out.”
That being said could you help me by pointing out the inaccuracy in jkaptur’s comment? It seems fairly simple and as far as I can see well supported by the source.
You can sealion with posts like this all you want but every time someone counters a post like this with ample evidence it gets group downvoted or ignored. You are also making an assertion that you’re free to back with evidence, that google and google products are not noticeably worse than 10 years ago.
here’s one study that says yes, it is bad:
https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_20...
Since we don’t have a time machine and can’t study the google of 2015 we have to rely on collective memory, don’t we? You proclaiming “it’s always been this way” and saying any assertion otherwise is false is an absolutely unfalsifisble statement. As I said, anyone over 25 knows.
Besides perusing the wealth of writing about this the last two years or so, in which the tech world at large has lamented at how bad search specifically has gotten - we also see market trends where people are increasingly seeking tools like chatGPT and LLM’s as a search replacement. Surely you, a thinking individual, could come to some pretty obvious conclusions as to why that might be, which is that google search has got a lot worse. The language models well known to make up stuff and people still are preferring them because search is somehow even less reliable and definitely more exhausting, and it was not always this way. If it was always this way, why are so many people turning to other tools?
Sounds like it should be very easy to counter their argument then.
For my education could you tell me which part of their message is inaccurate? The “Google was founded in 1998” or the “and you could buy ads on the search results page in 2000.” part?
> You are also making an assertion that you’re free to back with evidence, that google and google products are not noticeably worse than 10 years ago.
I did not make such an assertion. Where in my comment do you think i’m making that assertion?
> You proclaiming “it’s always been this way”
I’m sorry but who are you quoting? Did you perhaps misclicked which comment you wanted to respond to?
What's the difference? In astroturfing, someone pays people to form an organization, claim to have no external support, and do some kind of activism.
In hasbara, the government of Israel pays people to not form an organization, claim to have no external support, and do various kinds of pro-Israel and pro-Jew activism. This looks like astroturfing with the major vulnerability of the no-external-support claim shored up.
Read your own link:
> For example, entering the query "buy domain" into the search box on Google’s home page produces search results and an AdWords text advertisement that appears to the right of Google’s search results
> Google’s quick-loading AdWords text ads appear to the right of the Google search results and are highlighted as sponsored links, clearly separate from the search results. Google’s premium sponsorship ads will continue to appear at the top of the search results page.
I'd guess we're only 6-12 months out from a full advertisement takeover.
So you are just getting SEO'd pages (i.e ads) regurgitated to you.
Have you considered buying a ChatGPT filter/scrubber to clean your results? Only $9.99 a month! Not available in all areas, not legal in most of the world.
;) and </s>
Or support an open source AI model.
I stopped using ChatGPT when it started littering my conversation with emojis. It acts like one of those overzealous kids on Barney.
I wish we wouldn't mindlessly repeat these platitudes. Try and falsify your statements before posting.
In our current regulatory and economic environment, it appears that mission-driven, long-term oriented, ethical companies are typically out-competed by finance-driven, short-term oriented, greedy companies.
The article describes the struggle of using a search engine in 2025. Which is to say, using Google in 2025. Search engines benefit greatly from huge economies of scale, and most websites are optimized for Google SEO and for their ad network. Sure, the folks at DuckDuckGo (my search engine) or Kagi appear to be your good sort of company, but the revenue and popularity of those companies is a rounding error in comparison to Alphabet, Inc. They can't afford the crawlers and infrastructure of the big finance-oriented players, they can't convince most websites to optimize for their engine, and most people don't even know they exist.
Sure, there's a handful of people running the equivalent of a small-town grocery with local farm-sourced produce and hand-selected general goods as a passion project, working long hours and slowly chewing through their savings. And there are a handful of people who feel that the existence of such a place is important, and shop there out of principles in spite of the incentives and penalties associated with that behavior. But most of the country is overrun by Dollar Generals and Wal Marts.
Anyway, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Companies were told that this was the way to make money, and that they were in fact obligated to operate this way, by an economic school with ulterior motives. Companies began behaving this way, and lobbying to create a regulatory environment conducive to that behavior. However, it's not natural or even optimal. Many companies treat their employees, customers, AND investors well, and it takes a concerted effort by bad actors during a temporary moment of weakness to shift their policies to the "norm" (not because it's more profitable in the long term, but because such companies represent a threat to the others that would rather enrich investors at everyone else's expense).
Suffice it to say, the idea that the inevitable end state of a corporation is a glorified leech is terminally cynical. And also wrong. And the best way to keep it from happening is to recognize the myth as such, because the people who wish to pervert the common mission of business - provide things and help for people - require that others fail to notice their subterfuge.
OTOH, there are far too many people who desperately want to believe in cool new stuff really being free, without any "gotcha" down the line.
By labeling the salaries as R&D assets and amortizing that over 5 years (instead of taking it completely in the first year), they're more likely to make "accounting" profit and pay taxes in the early years.
Those legislative changes will likely move forward the taxes being paid.
But to your point: not paying taxes because a company is investing doesn't mean taxpayers are footing the bill. It does mean the company isn't contributing to paying taxes while it is in "growth investing" mode.
Maybe nvidia can be a winner selling shovels but it seems like everyone else will just be fighting each other in the massive pit they dug.
They don't need a winner, they want the race to continue as long as possible.
The question is, will AI chat or search ever be profitable? What enshittification will happen on that road? Will AIs be interrupting conversations to espouse their love of nordvpn or raid shadow legends?
Once the pressure to turn a profit is high enough the big players surely won't just leave that money on the table.
The scary part is that even if we end up paying for "ad-free" LLM services how do we really know if it is ad-free? Traditional services are (usually) pretty clear on what is an ad and what isn't. I wouldn't necessarily know if raid shadow legends really is the greatest game of all time or if the model had been tuned to say that it is.
For now Copilot is a fixed $20 / month / person, but it's only a matter of time before it becomes metered, or the advanced models cost more credits. This is also why they're pushing for agents, because a single query is cool and all, how much it costs in compute is reasonably predictable, but an agent can do a lot of interesting things and do 100x the usage of a single query, and put 100x the charge on the corporate credit card.
It'll probably have a chilling effect, with companies being like "ok maybe let's tone down a bit on the AI usage", just like how they hire consultants to bring down their runaway AWS costs.
A free lunch that costs our environment though, which is a big caveat :-)
I'm not convinced. This article focuses on individual use and how inconsequential it is, but it seems like to me it dismisses the training part that it does mention a bit too fast to my taste.
> it’s a one-time cost
No, it's not. AI company constantly train new models and that's where billions of dollars they get go into. It's only logical: they try to keep improving. What's more, the day you stop training new models, the existing models will "rot": they will keep working, but on old data, they won't be fresh anymore. the training will continue, constantly.
> Individuals using LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini collectively only account for about 3% of AI’s total energy use after amortizing the cost of training.
Yeah, we agree, running queries is comparatively cheap (still 10 times more than a regular search query though, if I'm to believe this article (and I have no reason not to)) after amortizing the cost of training. But there's no after, as we've seen.
As long as these companies are burning billions of dollars, they are burning some correlated amount of CO2.
As an individual, I don't want to signal to these companies, through my use of their LLMs, that they should keep going like this.
And as AI is more and more pervasive, we are going to start relying on it very hard, and we are also going to train models with everything, everywhere (chat messages, (video) calls, etc). The training is far from being a one shot activity and it's only going to keep increasing as long as there are rich believers willing to throw shit-tons of money into this.
Now, assuming these AIs do a good job of providing accurate answers that you don't have to spend more time on proofreading / double checking (which I'm not sure they always do), we are unfortunately not replacing the time we won by nothing. We are still in a growth economy, the freed time will be used to produce even more garbage, as an even faster rate.
(I don't like that last argument very much though, I'm not for keeping people busy at inefficient tasks just because, but this unfortunately needs to be taken in account - and that's, as a software developer, a harsh reality that also applies to my day to day job. As a software developer, my job is to essentially automatize tasks for people so they can have more free time because now the computers can do their work a bit more. But as a species, we've not increased our free time. We've just made it more fast-paced and stressful)
The article also mentions that there are other things to look into to improve things related to climate change, but the argument goes both ways: fighting against power hungry LLMs don't prevent you from addressing other causes.
But to be honest, optimizing monstrously slow processes that cost weeks of human labour by automating them, that saves a ton of energy as well. It’s not zero sum, as the humans spend that energy elsewhere, but ideally they spend it on more productive things.
This calculus can very quickly offset whatever energy is wasted generating cartoon images of vuvuzelas.
Yes, I do agree with this. However, that's only good as long as there wasn't a better way of optimizing them. Assuming we'd not be better off getting rid of those costly process altogether.
> ideally they spend it on more productive things
Same gotcha as mentioned in my other comment: "productive" in our growth economy often means "damaging to the environment", because we are collectively spending a lot of our time producing garbage and that's not something we should really optimize. Most of us work a fixed amount of hours so it's not like we are doing ourselves any favor by optimizing time in the end.
In another system, I wouldn't say. I'm generally for freeing up time for us so we can have better lives.
But there are free (to copy) ones, and smaller ones. And while those were built from the large, expensive models, it's not clear if people won't find a way to keep them sustainable. We have at minimum gained a huge body of knowledge on "how to talk like people" that will stay there forever for researchers to use.
This is spot on. I think we'll be able to capitalize on other talents of "AI" once we recognize the big shift is done happening. It's like five years after the Louisiana Purchase: we have a bunch of new resources but we've barely catalogued them, let alone begun to exploit them.
> how long until all the LLM corporate initiatives die?
Sooner than I personally thought, and I place a lot of that with Apple's. They've led the way in hardware that supports LLMs, and I believe (hope?) they'll eventually wipe out most hosted chat-based products, leaving the corporate players to build APIs and embedded products for search, tech support, images, etc. The massive amounts of capital going into OpenAI, Anthropic, etc., will ebb as consumer demand falls.
I hope for this because the question I keep asking is, how can our energy infrastructure sustain the huge demand AI companies have without pushing us even further into a climate catastrophe?
one thing about LLMs used as a replacement for search is they have to be continually retrained or else they become stale. Lets say a hard recession hits and all the AI companies go out of business but we're left with all these models on huggingface that can still be used. Then, a new programming language hits the scene and it's a massive hit, how will LLMs be able to autocomplete and add dependencies for a language they've never seen before? Maybe an analogy could be asking an LLM to translate a written language you make up on the spot to English/other language.
if you consider the massive environmental harm AI has and continues to cause, the people whose work has been stolen to create it, the impacts on workers and salaries, and the abuses AI enables that free lunch starts looking more expensive.
"Stolen" is kind of a loaded word. It implies the content was for sale and was taken without payment. I don't think anyone would accuse a person of stealing if they purchased GRRM's books, studied the prose and then used the knowledge they gained from studying to write a fanfic in the style of GRRM (or better yet, the final 2 books). What was stolen? "the prose style"? Seems too abstract. (yes, I know the counter argument is "but LLMs can do more quickly and at a much greater scale", and so forth)
I generally want less copyright, not more. I'm imagining a dystopian future where every article on the internet has an implicit huge legal contract you enter into like "you are allowed to read this article with your eyeballs only, possibly you are also allowed to copy/paste snippets with attribution, and I suppose you are allowed to parody it, but you aren't allowed to parody it with certain kinds of computer assistance such as feeding text into an LLM and asking it to mimic my style, and..."
AI outputs copyrighted material: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/25/business/ai-i... and they can even be ranked by the extent to which they do it: https://aibusiness.com/responsible-ai/openai-s-gpt-4-is-the-...
AI is getting better at data laundering and hiding evidence of infringement, but ultimately it's collecting and regurgitating copyrighted content.
"even" is odd there, of course Disney is accusing them of violating copyright, that's what Disney does.
> AI is getting better at data laundering and hiding evidence of infringement, but ultimately it's collecting and regurgitating copyrighted content.
That's not the standard for copyright infringement; AI is a transformative use.
Similarly, if you read a book and learn English or facts about the world by doing that, the author of the book doesn't own what you just learned.
Establishing an affirmative defense that it's transformative fair use would hopefully be an uphill battle, given that it's commercial, using the whole work, and has a detrimental effect on the market for the work.
Reproducing a movie still well enough that I honestly wouldn't know which one is the original is transformative?
If I download all content from a website that has a use policy stating that all content is owned by that website and can't be resold. Then allow my users to query this downloaded data and receive a detailed summary of all related content, and sell that product. Perhaps this is a violation of the use policy.
All of this hasn't been properly tested in the courts yet.. large payments have already been made to Reddit to avoid this, likely because Reddit has the means to fight this in court.. my little blog though, fair game because I can't afford to engage.
You’re talking about overt infringement, the GP was talking about covert infringement. It’s difficult to see how something could be covert yet not transformative.
that's literally what happened in innumerable individual cases, though.
Much of the content that is created by people is done so to generate revenue. They are denied that revenue when people don't go to their site. One might interpret that as theft. In the case of GRRM's books - I would assumed they were purchased and the author received the revenue from the sale.
Also, LLMs don’t just imitate style, they can be made to reproduce certain content near-verbatim in a way that would be a copyright violation if done by a human being.
You can excuse it away if you want with reduction ad absurdum arguments, but the impact is distinctly different, and calls for different parameters.
""" [G]lobal data centre electricity use reached 415 TWh in 2024, or 1.5 per cent of global electricity consumption.... While these figures include all types of data centres, the growing subset of data centres focused on AI are particularly energy intensive. AI-focused data centres can consume as much electricity as aluminium smelters but are more geographically concentrated. The rapid expansion of AI is driving a significant surge in global electricity demand, posing new challenges for sustainability. Data centre electricity consumption has been growing at 12 per cent per year since 2017, outpacing total electricity consumption by a factor of four. """
The numbers are about data center power use in total, but AI seems to be one of the bigger driving forces behind that growth, so it seems plausible that there is some harm.
0: https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmen... 1: https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/Pages/PR-2025-06-05-green... 2: (cf. page 20) https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Environment/Pages/Publications/...
Data centers are already significant users of renewable electricity. They do not contaminate water in any appreciable amount.
see also:
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-ai-data-centers-dr...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-computer-scient...
I am totally on board with making sure data center energy usage is rational and aligned with climate policy, but "10k trips between LA and NY" doesn't seem like something that is just on its face outrageous to me.
Isn't the goal that these LLMs provide so much utility they're worth the cost? I think it's pretty plausible that efficiency gains from LLMs could add up to 10k cross USA trips worth of air pollution.
Of course this excludes the cost of actually running the model, which I suspect could be far higher
That seems like very low impact, especially considering training only happens once. I have to imagine that the ongoing cost of inference is the real energy sink.
> Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a rule clarification allowing the use of some mobile gas and diesel power sources for data centers. In a statement accompanying the rule, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin claimed that the Biden administration's focus on addressing climate change had hampered AI development.
> "The Trump administration is taking action to rectify the previous administration's actions to weaken the reliability of the electricity grid and our ability to maintain our leadership on artificial intelligence," Zeldin said. "This is the first, and certainly not the last step, and I look forward to continue working with artificial intelligence and data center companies and utilities to resolve any outstanding challenges and make the U.S. the AI capital of the world."
https://www.newsweek.com/ai-race-fossil-powered-generators-a...
Who are the “relevant technical authorities”?
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/sustainability/amazon-renew...
Meanwhile,
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...
https://www.newsweek.com/ai-race-fossil-powered-generators-a...
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
> In another move, DOE on Tuesday said it was offering loan guarantees for coal-fired power plant projects, such as upgrading energy infrastructure to restart operations or operate more efficiently or at a higher output.
Please elaborate.
It's just too dangerous to leave it in the hands of people who don't believe in science, and value money, power, and ideology more than anything else.
Its happening now, and there is nothing to stop it happening again in future.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/06/trump-fires-comm...
"Further, the NRC rejected past attempts to switch to a model based on the "hormesis theory" that Trump seemingly supports—which posits that some radiation exposure can be beneficial. The NRC found there was "insufficient evidence to justify any changes" that could endanger public health, Science reported.
One health researcher at the University of California, Irvine, Stephen Bondy, told Science that his 2023 review on the science of hormesis showed it is "still unsettled." His characterization of the executive order suggests that the NRC embracing that model "clearly places health hazards as of secondary importance relative to economic and business interests.""
— https://andymasley.substack.com/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-b...
> What’s the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT?
— https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/carbon-footprint-c...
https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/Pages/PR-2025-06-05-green...
> According to the latest edition of the report, electricity consumption by data centers — which power AI development and deployment, among other uses — increased by 12 per cent each year from 2017 to 2023, four times faster than global electricity growth.
> Four leading AI-focused companies alone saw their operational emissions increase in the reporting period by 150 per cent on average since 2020. This rise in energy that is either produced or purchased – known as Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions – underscores the urgent need to manage AI's environmental impact.
> In total, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions reported by the 166 digital companies covered by the report contributed 0.8 per cent of all global energy-related emissions in 2023.
It's worth noting that it's not all gloom and doom. As the report optimistically notes:
> Renewable energy adoption: 23 companies operated on 100 per cent renewable energy in 2023, up from 16 in 2022.
> Dedicated climate reporting: 49 companies released standalone climate reports, signaling greater transparency.
> Scope 3 consideration: The number of companies publishing targets on indirect emissions from supply chains and product use rose from 73 to 110, showing increasing awareness of industry impacts.
So the environmental impact is alarming, but at least companies seem to be growing more conscientious about it. We must continue to hold tech companies accountable for their environmental impact, and keep pushing for renewable energy.
It's big, but it's honestly not that big. Most importantly, costs will quickly come down as we realize the limits of the models, the algorithms are optimized and even more-dedicated hardware is built. There's no reason to think it isn't sustainable, it will add up just fine.
But yes, it will attract a ton of advertising, the same curve every service goes through, like Google Search, YouTube, Amazon, etc. Still, just like Google and Amazon (subtly) label sponsored results, I expect LLM's to do the same. I don't think ads will be built into the main replies, because people will quickly lose trust in the results. Rather they'll be fed into a separate prompt that runs alongside the main text, or interrupts it, the way ads currently do, and with little labels indicating paid content. But the ads will likely be LLM-generated.
> I don't think ads will be built into the main replies,
> because people will quickly lose trust in the results.
So, can they? yes. Will they? yes.
This is honestly why I struggle to get excited for anything in our industry anymore. Whatever it is it just becomes yet another fucking vector for ad people to shove yet more disposable shit in front of me and jingle it like car keys to see if I'll pull out a credit card.
The exception being the Steam Deck, though one could argue it's just a massive loss-leader for Steam itself and thus game sales (though I don't think that would hold up to scrutiny, it's pretty costly and it's not like Valve was hurting for business but anyway) but yeah. LLMs will absolutely do the exact same, and Google's now fully given up on making search even decent, replacing it with shit AI nobody asked for that will do product placements any day now, I would bet a LOT of money on it.
AI is not a consumer product.
Businesses will pay for AI. They will use it for whatever they are building. We will buy what those businesses build.
The medium term here is that AI is going to become part of the value chain. It's gonna be like stripe or insurance or labor.
AI companies want the cultural shift, i.e. get everyone used to having their data, art, work, etc, turned into models. Plus they want the PR, i.e. AI agents to be seen as helpful, friendly and genuinely useful. They want this to happen fast and before legislators react too. Releasing for free seems safe and efficient.
Once enough people become like this, they will gladly pay to keep it, they'll consider it a basic necessity.
The internet has become total garbage now all because a few men wanted to make a bunch of money by making silicon do the thinking for them.
AI is the quickest route to ruin and ending up with humans like in Idiocracy devoid of critical thinking, and the output of LLMs is so bad to read, students are just turning in the worst papers using LLMs and learning nothing.
At first my school banned use of them but then Microsoft tipped their hand because they donate a lot of money and now everyone is allowed to use AI and they got rid of the requirement to use MLA Citations so everything turned into slop.
I remember when search was a free ride. The articles that I found in searches where relevant and there was no wordy boiler plate AI content specifically designed to get me to see all the advertising on the page. There is no free ride - AI will accelerate the enshittification of the Web by orders of magnitude. Barriers to garbage content generation are rapidly approaching 0.
How much would AirBnB pay for the intelligence everyone gets all their info from having a subtle bias like this? Sliiightly more likely to assume folks will stay in airbnbs vs a hotel when they travel, sliiightly more likely to describe the world in these terms.
How much would companies pay to directly, methodically and indetectably bias “everyone’s most frequent conversant” toward them?
This would be a very impressive technical feat
The amount of money it's burned on this is giant; those companies will need to make so much money to have any possibility of return. The idea is that we will all spend more money on AI that we spend on phones, and we will spend it on those companies only... I don't know, it just doesn't add up.
As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing as a free lunch after all!