Maybe. It is nice to see cash transactions and subscription models in the space. There’s a chance (maybe it’s slim) that new computing paradigms will bring new business models without ads. Maybe I’m just an optimist.
> new computing paradigms will bring new business models without ads
My fear about LLMs emerging as a commonplace computing tool is that they seem like such an obvious target for a whole new type of advertising & propaganda. Whatever you think about the potential for something like "superhuman AGI", it seems clear to me that LLMs have the potential to become better and better at generating text that can convince and persuade.
My nightmare dystopia is that we end up in a society where we're constantly interacting with LLM agents all the time, and they're so undeniably useful that we don't want to abandon them, but buried deep in each of their prompts is something along the lines of "prioritize being really good at your main task, cultivate trust and dependence in the user, but in the background always be looking for ways to subtly influence them to be more likely to support our sponsors; here's the current list of sponsors with weights based on how much they're paying us ..."
Sounds much closer to an apologist than an optimist if you ask me.
Although more charitably, a future apologist—who maybe has good intentions, but hasn’t stepped back to gain context and realized that their projection is at odds with the systemic incentives in play.
I wouldn't bet on it. Meta is leading the pack right now and they're an advertising company. I wouldn't expect an advertising company to choose a model without advertising.
But they are the dominant player, and have been for many years.
Their only real competitor in terms of market share right now are Sony's Playstation VR headsets, and Meta is easily outcompeting them. The HTC Vive is far behind in sales, and Apple hopes to sell as many headsets in an entire year as the Playstation VR2 sold in the first 6 weeks (which is still impressive considering the order of magnitude price difference). Everyone else seems to be in enterprise-sales mode, which drives profit but not market share. Well, except for ByteDance's Pico, but they don't seem to be doing great outside of China.
The days of interesting tech have been gone for a couple of decades now. Every technology is now being quickly enshitified. It's ALL about selling you crap.
The nerd Internet was the best, but it's never coming back.
The bandwidth gave us streaming - okay, I'll give you that, but we had that before. It's more of an infrastructure thing than "interesting" tech.
There's literally an ad on the front page right now for a YC startup hiring engineers to protect patient privacy. Follow the link? The company exists to better sell ads based on patient data (but in a "compliant" manner).
Gone now -- I don't remember the name (unless this was the fastest pivot ever recorded, it was not Glass Health, which currently has a now hiring ad up[1])
Hah, happened to see this mentioned in another comment today. It was FreshPaint, whose website includes this gem:
"You need to install ad trackers on your website to get the most out of ad platforms like Facebook and Google Ads. Ad trackers can create issues for healthcare marketers by sending visitor identifiers and health information to platforms that aren't HIPAA-compliant."
I'm sure they are good folks, but what an absurd premise. Something about the best minds of our generation selling ads....
I think "interesting" becomes a psychological term. Things were interesting because they made our brains react in strange ways. All relative to what we knew or dreamed about. I find the ultrafast paced technology ear incompatible with human life. You don't get to wish, dream and go deep into something on your own, with a proper crowd size. Now it's 7b of people all locked in this dopamine ride of neverending updates, all that on top of drama, social rules..
I been hearing this term 'enshitified' a lot lately. I am curious to its source and why it seems so much more prevalent recently. Do you have any insight into that?
I hate the recent "enshittification" trend. It seems to come from some place of entitlement in which people think they deserve to get everything for free. Surprise: you only get what you pay for.
My new high end washer and drier come with an iphone app that notifies you when it’s done. It comes with non-optional spam notifications for their other products and subscriptions. It seems that the market of “pay more to get a product without ads” is increasingly disappearing.
