This is where Tesla has a key advantage. Optimus can walk you to the kitchen to look for a Coke Zero. Google and OpenAI cannot compete with this.

this is one of those HN style comments where business acumen and pertinent sarcasm are wholly indistinguishable .

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).

Sell you a $10,000 upgrade for Full Self Awareness capability then don’t deliver it an change the hardware requirements

Tesla doesn’t need a business model, they’re a meme stock.

Only on HN can you say something so obviously true and have a reply section full of uhm ackshuwllys.

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.

“The market can remain irrational longer than …” - John Maynard Keynes.

Here’s a similar quote from the great enemy of markets, Benjamin Graham:

“In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.”

The robot suggested a coke zero because it was paid to by the Coca-Cola Company. Now you'll need to buy more coke zero to replace what you drank.

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.

And just like all meme stocks and so-called stablecoins, it'll work until it doesn't. The fall will be dramatic.

Stablecoins is a weird topic to randomly insert there. You want to elaborate on why all stablecoins will fail? This is a pretty ...novel take.

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.

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 :)

“Master at manipulating masses” is something you have to tell yourself when people you don’t like are highly successful, I guess.

enron was highly successful and so was bernie maddof

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.

But the damned robot keeps drinking all my Coke Zero!

Users will get used to ensuring a stable supply of said sponsored products, otherwise Optimus may get mad if said product was not in the fridge.

I'm still unsure whether you're Musk's fanboy or making a joke.

Thank you for this comment, there is no way I could eloquently explain my read on the comment you're replying to the way you did.

I enjoy the implied threat of being escorted to get a branded drink, and then getting frog marched to the local store if you’re out of supply.

At least those are obvious. Them sneaking ads in that don't look like ads are what I'm more concerned about.

That would be illegal.

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.

Every platform can do ads, but only AI platforms have an agent that can semi-intelligently try to convince the consumers of something.

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.

Why would ChatGPT be special?

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.

FTC looks like its legislation is from the 70s, yet it is still being done in TV and movies.

Legislation has to be interpreted by courts, and there is surely lots of caselaw. I'd look there, as to why it is OK.

Regardless, is there a ToS you agreed to, that disclosess it will happen? TV doesn't have a ToS nor a movie theater, yet ChatGPT can have one.

One last thing... openai pulled off the largest, unlicensed use of copyright material ever, and is fine.

Meanwhile, TV already has embedded ads...

There is too much money beeing made. It's naive to think the courts will stop it.

> That would be illegal.

Yeah, so?

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.

Trueman Show but without expensive dome.

Drink verification can

You’ll wish it was that and not “a word from our sponsor NordVPN” or scammy crypto investments

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.

there was a black mirror episode regarding something similar

There should be also mentioned brand of the kitchenette supplier, utensils and every food component with Amazon wishlist ready to order.

It was in Black Mirror

Missed opportunity for brands of turkeys

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.