That's really nice, but how will you monetize it? In its chat form, that's going to be very difficult. Anyone can train it and launch their own LLM, there's know monopoly or differentiator. Sure, its possible overtime it will uplift search engines, but create a new Industry vertical like Search, Mobile, Social Media, Cloud. I think of it more as a feature /augmentation than its own thing.
Services. Inevitably some of the queries involve recommending a service, and when you have two equal substitute services in a market, both will pay a certain price to be recommended over the other.
That's a very highfalutin way of saying "ads", which feels like it still has one foot planted squarely in the monetization thinking of yesterday. As lots of other people have pointed out, ads in the midst of a blob of chat output don't work the same way as they do on a page of search results. Search results are impersonal and so putting promoted content in them is less of a personal affront. But if the interface is a "chat session" with something that's designed to feel human-like in its responses, the interleaving of paid content produces a completely different psychological response in users. It's more insulting and undermines trust.
To put it another way: the main value proposition of using something like ChatGPT to navigate the internet is that you're putting your trust in it to filter out the noise on your behalf. If you can't trust it to actually do that (there's still ad noise in what you get back), then what's the point?
Either people will pay a subscription fee to unlock the utility of an information-distilling agent, or they won't. Trying to sidechain ad revenue into that equation is self-defeating.
Search is ad-influenced already, but there's still signal under the noise.
Adding a chat front end is just going to lower the SNR, because ChatGPT has no idea what facts are or how to check them.
Unfortunately it's also the main attraction for corporate revenue generation. You can sell stuff conversationally. Woo hoo. These systems are going to turn into automated used car sales bots which use persuasion techniques to steer users towards a sale.
From the user POV the main attraction is the prospect of a kind of universal summarising WikiBot and bureaucratic paperwork automator.
Those are fundamentally different domains.
Users have been pretty relaxed about being manipulated and distracted by social media and covert PR/sales/influencer operations, so there's going to be a huge market for the bad stuff.
But it's just corporate noise, as it always is. The real value will come from processed search in the sense of automated teaching and intelligence augmentation.
Unfortunately there's not where most of the research will go. It's not going to become common until LLMs are taught to fact check with high reliability, and the cost of entry is low enough for that to be offered as a service.
Meanwhile - yes, exactly: ads disguised as search results.
>Either people will pay a subscription fee to unlock the utility of an information-distilling agent, or they won't.
This feels a bit like projection though. People in general are trained to tolerate ads for most freemium services, such as social media, search, etc., and chat is no different.
For any market involving human attention, there's a portion willing to pay money for the service, but a significant larger portion willing to trade attention time (e.g. ad impressions) for a free service instead.
> the main value proposition of using something like ChatGPT to navigate the internet is that you're putting your trust in it to filter out the noise on your behalf.
Right. That's a transient state, unfortunately - we can trust ChatGPT now because we know OpenAI had neither the time nor resources nor a reason to make their tool biased for commercial purposes (they're busy biasing and constraining it so it doesn't generate too much bad press, but this doesn't affect the trustworthiness of responses to typical queries). A model like this obviously won't be allowed to gain widespread adoption as a search proxy - it's destructive to commercial interests.
> If you can't trust it to actually do that (there's still ad noise in what you get back), then what's the point?
Exactly. The problem is, as users, we have no say in it. If Microsoft and Google decide that conversational interfaces are the future, then we'll be doing searches via ChatGPT-derived sales bots. End of story. Google and Microsoft each have enough clout to unilaterally change how computing works for everyone. And if they both decide to compete on quality of their ML search chatbots, there's no force on Earth that could stop it. Short to mid term, if they want it, we have no choice but to use it (long-term this might create an opening for a competitor to claw back some of the search market with a chatbot-free experience).
> Either people will pay a subscription fee to unlock the utility of an information-distilling agent, or they won't. Trying to sidechain ad revenue into that equation is self-defeating.
This, unfortunately, has been proven false again and again. Newspapers. Radio. Broadcast TV. Cable TV. Music streaming. Video streaming. On-line news and article publishing. And so on.
Advertising is a disease, a cancer that infects and slowly consumes every medium and form of communication we create. Often enough, creation of a new medium is driven by the desire for an alternative, after the old medium became thoroughly consumed by advertising and seems to be reaching terminal stage.
Side-chaining ads into a chatbot interface is going to be even more powerful than ads in normal search results - not only you can tweak the order of recommendations like search engines do today, you can also tweak the tone and language used in the conversational aspects, effectively turning the bot into a sneaky salesman.
