I disagree. There is a ton of money to be made. Advertisements can be even more lucrative, we just have to rethink the whole idea of advertisement. Imagine the chat bot as a digital salesperson, but for literally everything. It can even be optimized in a manner that if a user asks for too much work that doesn't involve selling you products (eg. writing essays) it can go "I'm Sorry Dave, but you need a ChatGPT Premium Subscription(tm) for that."
As far as computational costs. These chat bots are not remotely maximally optimized. Sure it costs more to run but it is still on the order of pennies per user per day.
But I don’t seek out sales people unless I desperately need what they have already.
I typically don’t frequent businesses that continue to try to upsell me once I’m already inside.
That being said there are definitely other people out that that do want this and aren’t resistant to paid messaging but if you want answers an AdBot will probably not be your first stop.
> But I don’t seek out sales people unless I desperately need what they have already.
In case you don't because you prefer to do the research yourself, I'm sure that holds for the large majority of HN users, including me. But why do we prefer to do the research ourselves? Because we don't trust the salesman's incentives, objectivity and breadth of knowledge. If we had a utopian salesman who only cared about getting the right product for us and has intimate knowledge of every relevant product, it'd be a fools errand to do the research ourselves other than as a genuine hobby.
I think the parent comment is hoping for the creation of AI Chatbots who at least get close enough to such a salesman. And while for-profit companies will surely attempt to instill perverse incentives, unlike with humans we only really need one AI salesman without them and we can all use that one. This might sound idealistic ("if everyone just used Linux..") but the barrier of usage is low enough that I see Google and MS having a much harder time competing with agents without perverse incentives than they've had competing with e.g. Linux or Firefox - especially if Google (the search engine) loses its moat.
Nobody is going to use a chat-bot if it is (a) constantly trying to sell you something or (b) going to give you biased results that are influenced by advertising spend.
So OP is right that this model is going to be financially harmful to Google.
> Nobody is going to use a chat-bot if it is (a) constantly trying to sell you something or (b) going to give you biased results that are influenced by advertising spend
I guess this is something that Google/search engines and other media like podcasts have had to navigate.
While it's not obvious how to best do it in this interface, I dunno, you still have a whole browser window to work with and the search engine solution (show the ads separately and labeled at the top) and the podcast solution (read the ads separately and clearly labeled) weren't super imaginative and seem to be working okay. Gmail ads on the right margin is maybe another example to point to.
I imagine there are probably plenty of UI things to experiment with that don't involve masking the advertisement as expert advice.
But yeah while this is all being sorted out I imagine it shrinks the monetizable surface of search a good bit.
If google released a sales bot and Microsoft released a chatbot with banner ads everyone would just use bing. Maybe that’s naive but I just can’t see people accepting that kind of product.
This is a competitive market with zero switching costs. You can’t just hamstring your product and expect users to stick around when another company they know and trust has a much better product.
As far as computational costs. These chat bots are not remotely maximally optimized. Sure it costs more to run but it is still on the order of pennies per user per day.