I like and read Ben's stuff regularly; he often frames "better" from the business side. He will use terms like "revealed preference" to claim users actually prefer bad product designs (e.g. most users use free ad-based platforms), but a lot of human behavior is impulsive, habitual, constrained, and irrational.
I agree that is what he is doing, but I can also justify adding fentanyl to every drug sold in the world as "making it better" from a business perspective, because it is addictive. Anyone who ignores the moral or ethical angle on decisions, I cannot take seriously. It's like saying that Maximizing Shareholder Value is always the right thing to do. No, it isn't. So don't say stupid shit like that, be a human being and use your brain and capacity to look at things and analyze "is this good for human society?".
In this quote I don't think he means it from the business side. He's claiming more data allows a better product:
> ... the answers are a statistical synthesis of all of the knowledge the model makers can get their hands on, and are completely unique to every individual; at the same time, every individual user’s usage should, at least in theory, make the model better over time.
> It follows, then, that ChatGPT should obviously have an advertising model. This isn’t just a function of needing to make money: advertising would make ChatGPT a better product. It would have more users using it more, providing more feedback; capturing purchase signals — not from affiliate links, but from personalized ads — would create a richer understanding of individual users, enabling better responses.
But there is a more trivial way that it could be "better" with ads: they could give free users more quota (and/or better models), since there's some income from them.
The idea of ChatGPT's own output being modified to sell products sounds awful to me, but placing ads alongside that are not relevant to the current chat sounds like an Ok compromise to me for free users. That's what Gmail does and most people here on HN seem to use it.
yeah... and it's (partly) based on the claim that it has network effects like how Facebook has? I don't see that at all, there's basically no social or cross-account stuff in any of them and if anything LLMs are the best non-lock-in system we've ever had: none of them are totally stable or reliable, and they all work by simply telling it to do the thing you want. your prompts today will need tweaking tomorrow, regardless of if it's in ChatGPT or Gemini, especially for individuals who are using the websites (which also keep changing).
sure, there are APIs and that takes effort to switch... but many of them are nearly identical, and the ecosystem effect of ~all tools supporting multiple models seems far stronger than the network effect of your parents using ChatGPT specifically.
And he's right (and the sources he points out), that some bubbles are good. They end up being a way to pull in a large amount of capital to build out something completely new, but still unsure where the future will lead.
A speculative example could be AI ends up failing and crashing out, but not until we build out huge DCs and power generation that is used on the next valuable idea that wouldn't be possible w/o the DCs and power generation already existing.
I _kind of_ understand this one. You can think of a bubble as a market exploring a bunch of different possibilities, a lot of which may not work out. But the ones that do work out, they may go on to be foundational. Sort of like startups: you bet that most of them will fail, but that's okay, you're making bets!
The difference of course is that when a startup goes out of business, it's fine (from my perspective) because it was probably all VC money anyway and so it doesn't cause much damage, whereas the entire economy bubble popping causes a lot of damage.
I don't know that he's arguing that they are good, but rather that _some_ kinds of bubbles can have a lot of positive effects.
Maybe he's doing the same thing here, I don't know. I see the words "advertising would make X Product better" and I stop reading. Perhaps I am blindly following my own ideology here :shrug:.
Ben Thompson is a content creator. Even if Ben’s content does not directly benefit from ads, it is the fact that other content creator’s content having ads is what makes Ben’s content premium in comparison.
I would say that, on this topic (ads on internet content), Ben Thompson may not be as objective a perspective as he has on other topics.
People aren’t collectively paying him between $3 million a year and five million (estimated 40k+ subscribers paying a minimum of $120 a year) just because he doesn’t have ads.
I see where you coming from, but that only tells half of the story.
I've been sporting the same model of Ecco shoes since high school. 10+ models over the years. And every new model is significantly worse than the previous one. The one I have right now is most definitely the last one I bought.
If you would put them right next to the ones I had in high school you'd say they are a cheap, temu knock offs. And this applies to pretty much everything we touch right now. From home appliance to cars.
Some 15 years ago H&M was a forefront of whats called "fast fashion". The idea was that you could buy new clothes for a fraction of the price at the cost of quality. Makes sense on paper - if you're a fashion junkie and you want a new outlook every season you don't care about quality.
The problem is I still have some of their clothes I bought 10 years ago and their quality trumps premium brands now.
People like to talk about lightbulb conspiracy, but we fell victims to VC capital reality where short term gains trumps everything else.
The problem with ads in AI products is, can they be blocked effectively?
If there are ads on a side bar, related or not to what the user is searching for, any adblock will be able to deal with them (uBlock is still the best, by far).
But if "ads" are woven into the responses in a manner that could be more or less subtle, sometimes not even quoting a brand directly, but just setting the context, etc., this could become very difficult.
I realized that ads within context were going to be an issue a while ago so to combat this i started building my own solution for this which spiraled in to a local based agentic system with a different bigger goal then the simple original... Anyways, the issue you are describing is not that difficult to overcome. You simply set a local llm model layer before the cloud based providers. Everything goes in and out through this "firewall". The local layer hears the humans requests, sends it to the cloud based api model, receives the ad tainted reply, processes the reply scrubbing the ad content and replies to the user with the clean information. I've tested exactly this interaction and it works just fine. i think these types of systems will be the future of "ad block" . As people start using agentic systems more and more in their daily lives it will become crucial that they pipe all of the inputs and outputs through a local layer that has that humans best interests in mind. That's why my personal project expanded in to a local agentic orchestrator layer instead of a simple "firewall". i think agentic systems using other agentic systems are the future.
I frequently ask chatgpt about researching products or looking at reviews, etc and it is pretty obvious that I want to buy something, and the bridge right now from 'researching products' to 'buying stuff' is basically non-existent on ChatGPT. ChatGPT having some affiliate relationships with merchants might actually be quite useful for a lot of people and would probably generate a ton of revenue.
Sure, but affiliate != ads. Rather, both affiliate links and paid ad slots are by definition not neutral and thus bias your results, no matter what anyone claims.
Ben Thompson is a sharp guy who can't see the forest for the trees. Nor most of the trees. He can only see the three biggest trees that are fighting over the same bit of sunlight.
Indeed. Why do people follow these clowns? They seem to read high level takes and spew out their nonsense theories.
They fail to mention Google's edge: Inter-Chip Interconnect and the allegedly 1/3 of price. Then they talk about software moat and it sounds like they never even compiled a hello world in either architecture. smh
And this comes out days after many in-depth posts like:
Why? It turns out that I try to read people who have a different perspective than I do. Why am I trying to read everything that just confirms my current biases?
(Unless those writings are looking to dehumanize or strip people of rights or inflame hate - I'm not talking about propaganda or hate speech here.)
You realize this “dumb blogspot” is written by the most successful writer in the industry as far as revenue from a paid newsletter? He has had every major tech CEO on his podcast and he is credited for being the inspiration for Substack.
The Substack founders unofficially marketed it early on as “Stratechery for independent authors”.
Your analysis concerning the technology instead of focusing on the business is about like Rob Malda not understanding the success of the “no wireless, less space than the Nomad lame”.
Even if you just read this article, he never argued that Google didn’t have the best technology, he was saying just the opposite. Nvidia is in good shape precisely because everyone who is not Google is now going to have to spend more on Nvidia to keep up.
He has said that AI may turn out to be a “sustaining innovation” first coined by Clay Christenson and that the big winners may be Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon because they can leverage their pre-existing businesses and infrastructure.
Even Apple might be better off since they are reportedly going to just throw a billion at Google for its model.
Advertisement is unquestionably a net positive for society and humanity. It's one of the few true positive sum business models where everyone is better off.
The whole "attention economy" is a cancerous outgrowth of advertising. When the customer is paying with their time instead of money, wasting their time becomes your goal. The impact on society is hard to measure, but it's not nothing and I would argue a net-negative.
Advertising is a necessary thing and can be beneficial to everyone. I have something to sell, you want to buy that thing, and know you know I'm selling it. Win win.
On the other hand, the advertisement and associated privacy-brokerage industries are a very different story
"unquestionably"? Given that vast majority of ads are for harmful self-destructive projects or misleading or lying or make place where they got spammed worse... Sometimes multiple at once.
Spam alone (also advertisement) is quite annoying and destructive.
biophysboy|3 months ago
RoddaWallPro|3 months ago
Cheer2171|3 months ago
jomohke|2 months ago
> ... the answers are a statistical synthesis of all of the knowledge the model makers can get their hands on, and are completely unique to every individual; at the same time, every individual user’s usage should, at least in theory, make the model better over time.
> It follows, then, that ChatGPT should obviously have an advertising model. This isn’t just a function of needing to make money: advertising would make ChatGPT a better product. It would have more users using it more, providing more feedback; capturing purchase signals — not from affiliate links, but from personalized ads — would create a richer understanding of individual users, enabling better responses.
But there is a more trivial way that it could be "better" with ads: they could give free users more quota (and/or better models), since there's some income from them.
The idea of ChatGPT's own output being modified to sell products sounds awful to me, but placing ads alongside that are not relevant to the current chat sounds like an Ok compromise to me for free users. That's what Gmail does and most people here on HN seem to use it.
ElFitz|2 months ago
One could argue many users seem to prefer badly designed free products over well designed paid products.
Groxx|3 months ago
sure, there are APIs and that takes effort to switch... but many of them are nearly identical, and the ecosystem effect of ~all tools supporting multiple models seems far stronger than the network effect of your parents using ChatGPT specifically.
stanfordkid|3 months ago
an0malous|3 months ago
matwood|3 months ago
A speculative example could be AI ends up failing and crashing out, but not until we build out huge DCs and power generation that is used on the next valuable idea that wouldn't be possible w/o the DCs and power generation already existing.
RoddaWallPro|3 months ago
The difference of course is that when a startup goes out of business, it's fine (from my perspective) because it was probably all VC money anyway and so it doesn't cause much damage, whereas the entire economy bubble popping causes a lot of damage.
I don't know that he's arguing that they are good, but rather that _some_ kinds of bubbles can have a lot of positive effects.
Maybe he's doing the same thing here, I don't know. I see the words "advertising would make X Product better" and I stop reading. Perhaps I am blindly following my own ideology here :shrug:.
javcasas|3 months ago
There, fixed.
kaishin|3 months ago
claw-el|3 months ago
I would say that, on this topic (ads on internet content), Ben Thompson may not be as objective a perspective as he has on other topics.
raw_anon_1111|3 months ago
jasondigitized|3 months ago
zeroq|3 months ago
I've been sporting the same model of Ecco shoes since high school. 10+ models over the years. And every new model is significantly worse than the previous one. The one I have right now is most definitely the last one I bought.
If you would put them right next to the ones I had in high school you'd say they are a cheap, temu knock offs. And this applies to pretty much everything we touch right now. From home appliance to cars.
Some 15 years ago H&M was a forefront of whats called "fast fashion". The idea was that you could buy new clothes for a fraction of the price at the cost of quality. Makes sense on paper - if you're a fashion junkie and you want a new outlook every season you don't care about quality.
The problem is I still have some of their clothes I bought 10 years ago and their quality trumps premium brands now.
People like to talk about lightbulb conspiracy, but we fell victims to VC capital reality where short term gains trumps everything else.
pfortuny|3 months ago
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
bambax|3 months ago
If there are ads on a side bar, related or not to what the user is searching for, any adblock will be able to deal with them (uBlock is still the best, by far).
But if "ads" are woven into the responses in a manner that could be more or less subtle, sometimes not even quoting a brand directly, but just setting the context, etc., this could become very difficult.
nowittyusername|3 months ago
adam_patarino|2 months ago
chii|3 months ago
do you realize how much product placement have been in movies since...well, the existence of movies?
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
guerrilla|2 months ago
empath75|3 months ago
I frequently ask chatgpt about researching products or looking at reviews, etc and it is pretty obvious that I want to buy something, and the bridge right now from 'researching products' to 'buying stuff' is basically non-existent on ChatGPT. ChatGPT having some affiliate relationships with merchants might actually be quite useful for a lot of people and would probably generate a ton of revenue.
jeromegv|3 months ago
yunohn|3 months ago
matwood|3 months ago
spyckie2|3 months ago
cowpig|3 months ago
alecco|3 months ago
They fail to mention Google's edge: Inter-Chip Interconnect and the allegedly 1/3 of price. Then they talk about software moat and it sounds like they never even compiled a hello world in either architecture. smh
And this comes out days after many in-depth posts like:
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/tpuv7-google-takes-a-s...
A crude Google search AI summary of those would be better than this dumb blogpost.
ebiester|3 months ago
(Unless those writings are looking to dehumanize or strip people of rights or inflame hate - I'm not talking about propaganda or hate speech here.)
raw_anon_1111|3 months ago
The Substack founders unofficially marketed it early on as “Stratechery for independent authors”.
Your analysis concerning the technology instead of focusing on the business is about like Rob Malda not understanding the success of the “no wireless, less space than the Nomad lame”.
Even if you just read this article, he never argued that Google didn’t have the best technology, he was saying just the opposite. Nvidia is in good shape precisely because everyone who is not Google is now going to have to spend more on Nvidia to keep up.
He has said that AI may turn out to be a “sustaining innovation” first coined by Clay Christenson and that the big winners may be Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon because they can leverage their pre-existing businesses and infrastructure.
Even Apple might be better off since they are reportedly going to just throw a billion at Google for its model.
specialist|3 months ago
Discussing "innovator's dilemma" unironically is a fullstop for me.
sho_hn|3 months ago
dandanua|3 months ago
vikinghckr|3 months ago
ComplexSystems|3 months ago
emil-lp|3 months ago
AlexandrB|2 months ago
GrinningFool|2 months ago
On the other hand, the advertisement and associated privacy-brokerage industries are a very different story
matkoniecz|3 months ago
Spam alone (also advertisement) is quite annoying and destructive.
tsunamifury|2 months ago