> most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are
In think the point is that they don’t need to know what Gemini is, they just need to know Google, which they most definitely do.
IMO ads rollout won’t be as simple as you’re describing it. A lot of people have switched from Google search to AI specifically because it isn’t filled with SEO, ad filled nonsense. So they’ll need to tread very, very carefully to introduce it without alienating customers. Not to mention mollifying advertisers who are nervous what their product will be shown alongside and OpenAI will probably struggle to offer iron clad guarantees about it. And people generally speaking don’t like ads. If competitors like Google are able to hold out longer with no ads (they certainly aren’t wanting for ad display surfaces) they might be able to pull users away from OpenAI.
IMO pivoting to ads is a sign of core weakness for OpenAI. Anyone trying to set up their own ad network in 2025 has to reckon with Google and Meta, the two absolute behemoths of online ads. And both also happen to be major competitors of OpenAI. If they need ads that’s a problem.
Poe's Law notwithstanding, I find it hard to believe that anyone would think I was making a good faith business acumen observation. If Optimus walks you to the kitchen to get a coke, what's Tesla's business model? Charge by the nanosecond for compute time?
Purchase/lease access to the hardware, subscription for the necessary online connectivity, and microtransactions for each actual use of it (ostensibly because of cloud compute, and that also means surveillance data is captured and monetized).
Perhaps. I suppose the biggest in history then? $1.4T valuation and 60% of shares held by non-meme institutions (like pension funds, S&P tracking ETFs, etc) when you factor out insiders.
Oh, so that’s from him. This is the most state-interventionist economist. The fact that state actors trusted him for their policy since 1929 has more to do with a convergence of interests than rationality.
I’m not surprised that he started the ideology that markets were irrational.
The business model for Tesla and xAI is actually very simple and superior to OpenAI and Google's. No, this is not satire:
The business model is that his companies are meme stocks, and controlling social media means controlling meme stocks. The business model is also that his companies require corporate socialism, and controlling social media means influencing government policy.
He can talk about AI driving cars, but that's yesterday's news. Today, his business model for AI is to put his finger on the scale and influence society to help him become richer. AI is threatening to replace search, but in a way it's also threatening part of what social media provides, namely the ability to guide discourse at scale.
What's easier: Getting his personal board to give him a trillion dollars, and shoring up public support for that with bias in his AI products and on X? Or building a trillion-dollar business?
Elon Musk's business model for AI is actually quite easy to understand.
Stable coins fail when there's a run on the bank. Crypto is a wild west of unregulated banking. They have essentially become tools for money laundering and scam enablers, so it might take a while. But eventually the general public will say "no thanks" to a pain in the ass version of regular money. When the rush to the exits happen, the ~7 txn/s limit of Bitcoin will become painful.
What in the world are you talking about? What stablecoins are you talking about operating at 7tx/s? Why do stablecoins fail when there's a 'run on the bank'? You're mixing so many metaphors here that I'm not sure you know what you're talking about at all. This is a stablecoin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_(cryptocurrency). If it isn't permissionless it's not a 'stablecoin' it's an IOU.
Without commenting on the rest of either of your posts, he is talking about how to trade between stable and other coins with that limit on Bitcoin. i.e. He is saying there will be so many people trading away stable coins for Bitcoins (as in Bitcoins not generic stand in for cryptocoin) or other coins that the 7tx/s limit of Bitcoin wallet transfers that it will become a significant factor as Bitcoin is used as a 'reserve currency' for these trades.
it won’t be. the same sane argument was that “robotaxi” fall will be dramatic but it wasn’t, Musk, like Trump, is a master at manipulating masses and when thing du jour inevitably fails he’ll just pivot on an earnings call (and on “X” along the way) how “thing du jour is yesterday’s news” and he’s onto “next big thing” - data center on Jupiter that will replace all earth’s data centers or something like that :)
Honestly I think capitalism is a farce and I don't even have an emotional response to (b/tr)illionaires getting insane handouts and the stock valuations being insanely overpriced for even the most optimistic projections created by the companies themselves.
Okay rich guys, you get to have infinite free money.
But economists, I beg of you, I am willing to kiss your shoes, but please just admit that this causes inflation, and things aren't getting more expensive 'just because'
So lets see a $60k robot, lets say the whole economy crashes and money means nothing so they just call it $30k for kicks and giggles. Super cheap power since elon owns all the land now, he can have a tiny nuclear reactor every few house lengths. So $1 a day for power : 30365 / 365 days a year is about $80 a day in the first year, or maybe $40 a day assuming the reactors dont melt down for 2 years. So that is about 2 forced cokes down your throat per hour, 4 if you are a "known criminal" who is being robo-babysat. And that is still zero profit for elon because he has to shuffle all his assets around to the next farce of a fucking company
This is hypothetical, in the spirit of your "economy crashes and money means nothing": if one has zero profit (in dollars) but somehow manages to own all the land and run the country, I'd say he profited a lot. Land and ruling are more tangible than money.
I understand that there are a lot of strong opinions and open questions about OpenAI behavior – the amount of vigilantism is quite staggering – but if what they do is found to be clearly illegal by courts around the world, they will have to pay very hefty fines. Disguising ads is one such move. That's just not a winning business.
How much can you bias training to favor certain products before it becomes illegal? That seems like a similar question to "how much linear algebra do you have to do to copyrighted works before copyright doesn't apply anymore".
I wonder if you could pay them to tweak the messaging about your products. So when a user asks: Is drinking Coke everyday good for my health, it starts saying yes because sugar is vital to our survival.
I don't get why we try to make the story so convoluted. They will just declare the ads, as all big platforms do. It's legal and it works. Why would they open themselves up to lawsuits over this? It's just not reasonable.
AirBnB and Uber have demonstrated to all companies that legality doesn’t really matter as long as the numbers are good. It takes regulators an ungodly amount of time to act, and any well-written appeal buys you another 5 years for making political contributions
I don't know of any legal rulings or laws, which say not disclosing an embedded ad is illegal. In fact quite the opposite. There are loads and loads of prior such cases, movies, TV shows being an example.
For example every product mention (snapple, oh henry candy bars, jr mints) on Seinfeld was an ad. The skit is written, but any product can be dropped in. If no advertisers are interested, made up names are used.
This has been going on for 100+ years, including radio.
US and EU law already cover this: undisclosed paid promotion that looks like neutral content is generally illegal (FTC Act + Endorsement Guides in the US, UCPD + DSA in the EU). Product placement in old TV/film is the historical exception, not the rule. An interactive "assistant" secretly steering you because someone paid for it is legally much closer to a deceptive influencer ad than to a Snapple bottle in Seinfeld.
Their entire business model is currently based on legally questionable practices. I'd argue they wouldn't even exist without massive copyright infringement and utter disregard for software licences.
To my knowledge there is absolutely no legal precedent for one company simply paying to have themselves more heavily weighted in the training data. So it just happens that they show up more in responses then their competitors.
They won't have to sneak in anything. On the contrary. The world is about to be deluged with a monsoon of personalized advertising the likes of which you've only previously imagined. They have the data, they have the buyers, they just so far don't have the means. All this AI hardware has to do something to justify its staggering cost and all that compute, all those datacenters, are going to be devoted to crafting personalized sales pitches. The distilled essence of all of humanity's information is going to sell you boner pulls and hair loss supplements
The enshittification of the LLM has begun and it'll be one of the all time shittiest ones.
It'll be hilarious (in a tragic way) if Google adds ads to Gemini using their existing platform and suddenly it becomes a scammer in the middle of chats.
It wont be that obvious. It will explain to you the dangers of doing your own cooking, the number killed by food poisioning each year, then suggest something from doordash instead. Or it will suggest you eat something faster, like pop tarts, so you can spend less time cooking and more time interacting with your AI buddy.
> So they’ll need to tread very, very carefully to introduce it without alienating customers.
every single platform since the 1990's has introduced ads. My kids find it totally normal to have them. Believe me, if you train (!) people to accept ads, they will soon think it's normal.
And besides, if ChatGPT goes with ads, Google will follow directly. So the users won't have the choice anymore.
But ok, if I have to pay for a service without ads, then let it be. Paying for a service is normal too.
First no ads. Then ad free if you pay extra. Then “ad free” except half the shows have a “this show requires ads” bs and still have ads. Scummy flea ridden advertisers at their core.
Yes we can. Pirate the stuff, they try to block it? Use a seedbox.
Same goes for AI. This will accelerate options for private hosted AI. Which I guess will happen eventually anyway once cheap hardware gets to a state where you can run X model size at home for cheap.
As always its the people in the know that have the upper hand. The mass user base does not have this knowledge unfortunately. They might just stop using the service if no competitor steps up. We are seeing it with streaming cancellations.
Amazon prime video, when you pay for the subscription, half of the content in the content lists are paid. That’s right, you pay for a subscription that suggests PpV content.
Mine does too. I make sure there are no ads on the screens, but ads in print are harder to adblock. She hasn't seen too many, yet at four years old could distinguish an ad in a kid's magazine in under a second.
> if ChatGPT goes with ads, Google will follow directly
Eventually. But Google has an absolute ton of places to put ads today and are profitable enough that they can subsidise their AI operation much longer than OpenAI can. If it’s a competitive advantage to remain ad-less they have the ability to do it.
remaining ad-less isn't a competitive advantage for google.. advertisers want the use the best medium available to reach customers and clearly ai chatbots are better suited for that than the old web of google search. openai has reached the critical user base where they could easily replace google for advertisers.
if you think about it, the current advertising paradigm infers things about you, from cookies and trackers, from data brokers etc (to show you “relevant” ads.
and things you “like” or “follow” or comment on , or maybe even just making guesses at your race, job, income, sexual orientation, politics etc based on who youre “friends” with.
all of thats on the decline: social media engagement on legacy platforms is down, people are blocking cookies and or javascript. california is making an opt out tool for data brokers (and its going live in a month or two)
people have hours long conversations with chatgpt about things like what theyre working on. so it might know your job, talents, skills. things planning (aspirations) , things you asked it how to cook, or whats wrong with them medically. or maybe theyve dished to it about other personal stuff they thought was 100% in confidence up until now.
then now that its “private”, advertisers cant get backlash for showing ads next to controversial content, or people who are “supposed to be cancelled”. it removes a pressure point for accidentally (or deliberately) displaying their content somewhere its inappropriate or problematic for the brand— by hiding the interaction (and ads) in a “private” chat—
just for starters.
were at a point where publishers are nagging about our popup blockers and having hissy fits or refusing to load the page until their ads are whitelisted. so you know enough people are doing it to impact peoples business models now.
ill personly disable JS altogether for sites that do that but a lot of people just wont return.
its a dying media the way it exists.
so now all these ad providers (meta, google, twitter) are in on AI . and here comes openAI for all three of their lunches.
this just opened my eyes to what is at stake here and why its all being shoved down everyones throats. sure i use them, but i also have local models installed id drop them in an instant for if my chats were used to show me ads.
then just wait for ANY of these two entities to merge and overwhelm your social media feed with the next twenty years of ads full of junk the “AI” learned about you.
The people who use chatGPT or Claude are replacing Google searches with chat conversations. Google already has most of what you're talking about from queries, so they don't need to infer much.
These companies are in on AI because there was a rush to produce the first GAI, which would be immensely valuable. I think we'll see it shortly after the first fully self driving car.
> So they’ll need to tread very, very carefully to introduce it without alienating customers.
I'm certain the ads will be introduced in an easily identifiable and ignorable way. People will acclimate, user behavior will be analyzed, and over time the dial will ever so slowly be turned up to optimize for draining as much attention and money from the consumer as possible.
You'll just need to run a small local model to filter out the ads. And they just become another one of those silly arms races between the ad makers and the ad blockers and we all burn more electricity.
I am not exactly a great example ( exposure to work model, ollama, local models play ) and I actually liked gemini upon try in google search ( which is amusingly now banned at work ), but the nice quickly fell into not nice, when it started giving me weird pushback on operation paperclip book ( I am assuming chapter discussing tabun triggered something. This is my only real problem with gemini. By comparison, I am not running into guardrails with gpt nearly as often.
Chatgpt is a proprietary eponym[1], like kleenex, or Google for search. That's a relatively strong attractor based on their first mover status. I nevertheless use tissues, and search engines like brave search, sometimes duckduckgo, and claude or openrouter for my LLM models.
I think there are too many good alternatives for Chatgpt to turn the screws too hard on their users, but we'll see where it settles out. As usual, the most vulnerable will be squeezed the hardest (the ignorant and tech feeble). Hopefully competition and some oversight will keep the wolves at bay.
The finance people were chatting about the OpenAI's ad play a while back, glad to see it finally dawning on this crowd.
1. Not all jurisdictions have granted OpenAI the Chatgpt trademark.
Weirdly, I think Perplexity is getting a lot of mainstream name recognition because of podcasts. All the big slop pods like Rogan, Theo Von, etc are sponsored by Perplexity and the hosts constantly name check it by asking to “look stuff up on Perplexity”. Honestly pretty smart marketing all things considered.
Other F1 sponsors - Gemini on McLaren along with FxPro and Android, Kick on Sauber, Crypto.com on trackside hoardings, Atlassian on the Williams, 1Password on the RedBull
Does Rogan even know what Perplexity is or is he just reading ad copy? Has it come up in a podcast? I think he only has ever mentioned Grok and ChatGPT. Dont even think Claude has ever come up. He has done that crap before, just reading an ad without any usage of the product. They all do it.
Claude has been aggressively advertising on Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit, and the ads have been much more general use than just the code benefits. They’re definitely no ChatGPT, but they’re not an unknown player.
You're only seeing those ads because the ad algorithm knows you. My family aren't getting Claude ads. They wouldn't know the first thing about it even if it were explained to them.
Yeah my father who codes occasionally asked me what the best AI for coding was and he had never even heard of claude so I would be very surprised if your average person knows it.
Yeah, Google should have got gemini.com and gemini.ai before settling on that name, just like Claude. Instead they go to the same crypto service. It would've cleared up some confusion.
> IMO pivoting to ads is a sign of core weakness for OpenAI.
Yeah, I've had the same thought for a while now. You don't sell investors on an endeavor for 10s of billions of dollars with the endgame being "sell ads". If that was the endgame then there are a lot less resource and capital intensive ways to get to it.
Given all of the discourse of "you need this new tech in your life to continue to participate in society", I would not have expected them to need to stand on the roadside trying to get people to buy low cost fireworks. It smacks of going through the sofa for loose change so you can make rent.
And if they had something impressive coming down the pipeline I would think they could get someone to spot them a few billions yet, unless the billionaire/megacorp economy is really that tapped out.
they just need to know Google, which they most definitely do
The way that Google is rolling out AI is confusing, and I imagine a lot of people who can access Gemini don't actually know they can or how to use it. Among those that do know, many won't know what it's capable of and will believe that they need to pay for a service like ChatGPT in order to get what they want.
Google the search engine was on a down trend before. And, hallucinations aside, pagerank++ search is primitive compared to an LLM, and I wonder if people won't associate the new "natural language conversation search" to chatgpt more than google now.
Google had a good 10 year run, where the ads were genuinely useful, until the need of the public markets required and lack of competition allowed them to enshitify the experience to the current state.
I hope the same fate does not await ChatGPT but in the mean time I expect it to be a pretty good experience at first.
And yet most of the people I know, including many technical ones, default to ChatGPT before Google's AI Studio. Google has general brand awareness, but ChatGPT has become the Bandaid or Kleenex of AI
I agree but how many consumers actively purchase Bandaid or Kleenex over cheaper store brands? Becoming a generic term doesn’t always translate to great business. “I’ll put it into chat” could easily end up meaning “enter into Google’s AI prompt” for many people.
In think the point is that they don’t need to know what Gemini is, they just need to know Google, which they most definitely do.
IMO ads rollout won’t be as simple as you’re describing it. A lot of people have switched from Google search to AI specifically because it isn’t filled with SEO, ad filled nonsense. So they’ll need to tread very, very carefully to introduce it without alienating customers. Not to mention mollifying advertisers who are nervous what their product will be shown alongside and OpenAI will probably struggle to offer iron clad guarantees about it. And people generally speaking don’t like ads. If competitors like Google are able to hold out longer with no ads (they certainly aren’t wanting for ad display surfaces) they might be able to pull users away from OpenAI.
IMO pivoting to ads is a sign of core weakness for OpenAI. Anyone trying to set up their own ad network in 2025 has to reckon with Google and Meta, the two absolute behemoths of online ads. And both also happen to be major competitors of OpenAI. If they need ads that’s a problem.