Would you say that Google admitted that not enough people will pay for Youtube premium to be a profitable business so they had to get into ads?

I doubt anyone would say that given that they got into ads years before giving people the option to pay.

But the same logic applies. Youtube is not profitable without ads and would shut down.

Yeah, probably, but then again YouTube is entertainment and Google never claimed to be fixing the world and whatever. Also they're not sucking up hundreds of billions of dollars.

If ChatGPT and AI is "just" supposed to be Youtube, sure. ChatGPT wasn't supposed to be just YouTube.

Youtube premium is not claiming AGI to justify a certain valuation.

I don’t think OpenAI has claimed they have AGI?

Maybe not having it but being really close to that and knowing how to build it. "We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies."

Hasn't the happened? Plenty of companies are working and experimenting with agents.

I'm still waiting for the "materially change the output of companies" part.

Sam Altman said in 2024 that AGI could happen as soon as 2025.

https://dianawolftorres.substack.com/p/is-agi-just-around-th...

And that's not his only bold claim about AGI.

My personal theory: Youtube ads exist as just a punishment to beat you into paying for premium. As in, while the ads make some money, their primary purpose is to motivate you to pay. And that a subscriber generates meaningful more revenue than the ads sales of a non-subscriber.

It seems plausible to me, since I get so many low quality poorly targeted ads on repeat. I can't imagine those ads are generating much revenue, but it makes sense if their primary purpose is just to beat me into paying for a subscription.

IIRC ads predate Youtube premium by years.

But why compare these two businesses? They are completely different. From the estimates I've seen, Youtube operating costs are a fraction of what OpenAI is burning yearly.

> So basically they are admitting that not enough people will pay for it to be a profitable business

Since when capitalism is about stopping trying to make more money right when you become profitable? If they can find a way to make 10x the revenue needed to be profitable, they will.

That assumes that the move is a necessity. It doesn't have to be; pure profit motive is enough to introduce the concept preemptively.

I prefer the profit motive over the authoritarian "altruist" motive.

Pessimists before ads: OpenAI is a bubble fueled by dumb money waiting to pop, they'll never be profitable!

Pessimists after ads: Ok it's not a bubble but advertising is evil!

Pessimists after hearing paid subscribers won't get ads: Pffftttt $20 per month??? Profit is evil!! I can spin up a local LLM on my Linux machine for free!

Pessimists after admitting you can just choose not to use ChatGPT, a result of the free market: But I don't like that OTHER people are using ChatGPT because they're obviously dumb if they don't agree with me!