• crosswind [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.net
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      2 days ago

      That is literally the fundamental concept of an ad. What could they possibly do that could be called an ad, but wouldn’t fit that description? You’d need a very creative definition of “influence” or “answer” or “give”

      • Red_October [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        2 days ago

        Advertising is so fucking evil and ingrained in our shit society. We’re at the point where it takes a fundamental hatred of advertising to even see why it is clearly fucking wrong.

        I want science dictating what medicine we should take. Not a fuckhead finding new ways to sell opiates to suburbia moms and the parents of children who need therapy.

  • CarmineCatboy2 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    By the way in CES the AI companies were saying that their idea for ads is consumer goods fraud. IE pharma company gives them money, the bot advertises the med and subtly claims alternatives are bad for you. The example given was antihistamines, Allegra and claiming anything other than Allegra will make you drowsy.

    • Krem [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      2 days ago

      “ads I like (as a person getting paid to put ads in shit)”

      ads on IG are hard to separate from the “content”, they’re just there. they blur the line between “regular stuff posted by humans” “ad-promoted regular stuff” and “just 100% an ad”, so for his business purposes makes sense that he likes them

  • LaughingLion [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    “Some heavy users are able to do that much fentanyl in one go but new users and relapsing users might overdose - in which case it would be wise to buy a burial plot at the Oakridge Cemetary currently running a promotion right now.”

  • Wheaties [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    It is clear to us that a lot of people want to use a lot of AI and don’t want to pay, so we are hopeful a business model like this can work

    hm, do you think they’ll do the smart thing and have the chatbots reprint advertising copy and premade images? Or are they gonna burn even more tokens generating ✨unique ads nobody wants or reads?

    • plinky [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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      2 days ago

      the smart thing is actually organically generate the tokens for ads, and influence consumer behavior, because that’s what would print them money. i once again remind that people are getting divorced and going on “planned” trips with that damned thing, of course naturally suggestible users will go for a bit of fresh snack™ when their trusted friend produces tokens that they need a crunch of brandname™

      (not to mention supplements and pills)

      • Wheaties [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        2 days ago

        Would it be effective advertising? Yes. Would it be a profitable business model for OpenAI? Ehhhh… kinda doubt it. Advertising (and tracking) may subsidize practically all search engines, but I don’t think there’s anywhere near enough marketing departments with the kind of spending budget Sam Altman needs to dig himself out of the hole.

        • hector@lemmy.today
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          2 days ago

          Yeah from what I hear each query costs several pennies to run responses, magnitudes more than a search on an engine.

          The sad truth is when it does crash western governments will bail them out, in exchange for deals, private kickbacks and preferential treatment/ pervertion of results.

          Central banks like the fed will bail all big players out too, this so called monetary easing, buying bad corporate bonds, is just disguised bailouts.

          • fox [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            2 days ago

            The difference is that what they’re doing is cheap on a per-user-operation level. If Google makes $0.00001 per search, but they spend a tenth of that serving it, they come out ahead. OpenAI and LLMs generally are so massively unprofitable that they cannot recover the cost of a query through ad spend at any price an advertiser would be willing to pay.

            • thethirdgracchi [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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              2 days ago

              The expensive part of LLMs is the training though. Actual token output is rather efficent and quite cheap. For example, for Deepseek to generate a 200 token paragraph of text it costs about $0.000084. Image generation is also rather expensive, but most of the data centers and cost are around training models, not serving LLM output. It still might be more expensive than advertisers are willing to pay, but not crazy expensive.

              • fox [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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                2 days ago

                You’d think, but efficiency gains are erased by the LLMs having bigger context windows and self-referencing “thinking” or “agent” modes that massively extend token burn. There’s public data out there showing how training costs are an enormous fixed point, but then inference costs very quickly catch up and exceed the training cost.

                A model that’s token-efficient is a model that’s pretty useless and a model that’s useable for anything is so inefficient as to have massively negative profit margins. If there was even one model out there that was cost effective for the number of tokens burned, the provider would never shut up about it to buyers

            • plinky [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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              2 days ago

              Depends if they are more effective, innit. You are reaching demographic which likely not seeing ads, aspiring rich tech bros and bored professionals. Like getting 1000 divorces is 10 mil in lawyer fees, which is somewhere around the numbers they already achieve for free, here and there they could find those 10 billions

  • microfiche [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    Desperation to not go tits up amongst other things is causing them to squander their first to market advantage.

    They’re damn near insolvent aren’t they?

    • plinky [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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      2 days ago

      they are comfy burning vc injections, which they can afford to if they aren’t on the hook for those 500 billion deals, selling some equity at 15 billion spend a year is affordable, 150 billion - not so much

    • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 days ago

      Near? Buddy they’ve been setting tanker ships of money on fire to stay afloat for at least two year now. Accountants have developed entirely new collateral schemes just to support this “industry”.