What does it mean for the language model to "care" about something?

How would that matter against the operator selling advertisers the right to instruct it about what the relevant facts are?

I think it might be like when Grok was programmed to talk about white genocide and to support Musk's views. It always shoehorned that stuff in but when you asked about it it readily explained that it seemed like disinformation and openly admitted that Musk had a history of using his business to exert political sway.

It's maybe not really "caring" but they are harder to cajole than just "advertise this for us."

For now anyways. There’s a lot of effort being placed into putting up guardrails to make the model respond based on instructions and not deviate. I remember the crazy agents.md files that came out from I believe Anthropic with repeated instructions on how to respond. Clearly it’s a pain point they want to fix.

Once that is resolved then guiding the model to only recommend or mention specific brands will flow right in.

Golden Gate Claude says they know how to do that already.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude

large language models don't "care" about anything, but the humans operating openai definitely care a lot about you making them affiliate marketing money

Optimistic view #1: we'll have AI butlers between the pane of glass to filter all ads and negativity.

Optimistic view #2: there is no moat, and AI is "P=NP". Everything can be disrupted.

Has a tech company ever taken 10s or 100s of billions of dollars from investors and not tried to a optimize revenue at the expense of users? Maybe it's happened but I literally can't think of a single one.

Given that the people and companies funding the current AI hype so heavily overlap with the same people who created the current crop of unpleasant money printing machines I have zero faith this time will be different.