This inspired some consideration of what it would be like if there ad companies that somehow found it viable to pay consumers to inject advertisements in all their interactions with businesses, such that support would start having to implement ad blocking.
If you have a better idea for making AI chatbots profitable then I'm sure all the AI chatbot companies which are losing staggering amounts of money would love to hear it. The first step is to find any business model that works, shittily or unshittily.
Deepseek appears to be running profitably, by being more efficient in how they train their models, being more efficient in how they run their models, and charging a modest profit margin on each API call.
It's a Chinese company in a wild hot technology field that China want to compete in. I bet that they are very well supported by the state. Similar to Llama with Meta's money.
That's a great strategy in normal times. But in this case, you are in a technology race that would be considered essential for the national security of both the US and China. Which means that whomever each state picks as their champion will have approximately infinite amount of money to support them.
Perhaps what parent means is viable _without relying on ads_.
When Google was announced in the early 1990s the founders said they wanted to provide a search engine for the academnic realm, transparent and free from the influence of advertising. Google's original "business plan" was to license their search engine to corporations. Obviously that did not work. Netscape had a similar plan for its Navigator web browser.
No doubt some of these "AI" companies believe they can license to companies as a viable business. Meanwhile, they may end up like Netscape.
If ads are and always were a viable "business model" then why do these companies try to pursue licensing first.
Perhaps some myopia is created by mesmerising effects of certain selected companies, e.g., Google, that have operated their "ads business" free from meaningful competition or regulation, leading to immense growth and market domination, the later maintained long-term by anticompetitive behaviour.
And phillip morris was one of the best performing stocks for nearly a century. past performance in the market is not always indicative of strong collective benefits.
Google's revenue for 2023 was $307.394B, a 8.68% increase from 2022.
2022 was $282.836B, a 9.78% increase from 2021.
2021 was $257.637B, a 41.15% increase from 2020.
Turn off the ads (which is visual and aural pollution in 99.99999% of cases) and said company is literally not viable.
We accept ads because we're conditioned to, not because they represent a real business. The vast majority of advertising spend is inefficient and wasteful in terms of ROI. Most advertising in the space show substantially low statistical power, in effect being unable to identify an effect from random noise.[0] This means ROI measures are normally bunk.
Ad-supported businesses are subject wholly to the whims of unrelated companies and people outside their target client base.
We worry about AI slop, rightfully, yet do little to nothing to stop the memetic, exploitative mind virus advertising (and adtech especially) is.
Perplexity’s business model is still following the Google model of selling people to advertisers. The only LLM service with privacy protection I found so far is Claude. If I am paying for a subscription I would expect privacy to be included. How come people do not care?
It's crazy how much of the 2010s was both companies and consumers ignoring this, like Wile E. Coyote not noticing he's already off the edge of the cliff.
