> In order to get into China (to "grow") - exec team agreed to host Facebook's servers in China where the government could get access to customer private data, so they could stifle dissent.
That's exactly what Apple does with iCloud in China.
It wasn't just Chinese data, though. It was access to all customer data. They also built tools specifically for searching and filtering that data that they told congress were impossible to build...
The world isn't zero sum, advertising grows the pie for all involved. One of the best examples would be the iphone when it was released. Even in your example category of cars Tesla and later Rivian/Lucid/BYD marketing was a game changer for electric vehicles.
Very few ads are for products where exact 1:1 competitors exist (though it's nonzero, maybe something like a commingled Amazon Basics widget).
My point is that advertising can grow the pie, but it doesn't necessarily do so, and even if advertising is net pie-growing, it can still shrink the pie in specific markets.
For a more on-the-nose example than the arms race between car manufacturers, consider cigarette ads. If the ads simply convert smokers between brands, then it's basically zero sum minus the cost of the ads. If the ads convert non-smokers, then the ads are of significant negative utility taking their externalities into account.
> Very few ads are for products where exact 1:1 competitors exist
Sure, but also, I'd contend that few purchases are made based on ads informing consumers of meaningful differences between products. The products could be 1:1 duplicates, and the ads could be identical.
e.g. I just turned off my ad-blocker and fired up YouTube, the first four ads I see:
1. An ad for a multivitamin. Zero mention of any differentiating feature from a generic multivitamin.
2. An ad for a grocery delivery service. Zero mention of any differentiating features from any other food delivery service. (This one was a bit wild to me - this is actually service I already know and use, I'd never seen advertising for them, and this ad didn't mention any of the reasons anyone would choose to use them.)
3. An ad for some predatory-looking debt-relief service. Maybe not predatory, but no information about why that debt-relief service would be better than any other debt relief service.
4. An ad for a jeans company. I actually had to google this one to figure out what it was even an ad for, the ad just featured shots of people hiking in mountains and dunking into icy lakes without any mention of clothing.
I'm going to guess that a big reason it doesn't exist is because a. people who claim to be willing to pay 200/mo for it won't actually open their wallets given the opportunity, and b. even for the miniscule number of people actually possible in the market to do so, they moan and groan about any perceived problem with the product to the point that it's not worth trying to capture the market. Just look at the comments in this very thread complaining about YouTube Premium and how it isn't perfect because it can't block creator inserted ads. There's no pleasing people. And that's an order of magnitude less than 200/mo.
Interesting that OpenAI is trying to hammer the point that they won't sell user data to advertisers.
That's how all the major ads platforms work. I don't personally agree that it constitutes "selling your data" but certainly people describe it that way for Google/Meta ads which function the same way. By framing it this way they're clearly trying to fool users who really bought into the messaging that Google et al literally sell user data when they only provide targeting. I guess the hope is that the cleaner reputation of OpenAI will mean people think there's some actual difference here.
I refuse to believe OpenAI wont sell the data. They will add the ads then couple days later you will "Change to our privacy policy". Thats how every company did it.
Having more data than others is a competitive advantage in both the ad and the ai industries. It's why Google and Facebook don't sell your data (unlike, eg, many medium-sized businesses today), they "just" collect it heavily.
I don't agree with the article that the top couple content creators can walk away and kill a platform. Vine committed suicide for no real reason, it's a pretty poor example to point to. Nowadays on any top social media there's 1-3% of creators making the vast majority of popular content, but more importantly, there's another 15% of people out there who are vying to try and take their spots and will gladly fill the void should the top creators leave. They're mostly just not doing well because the top is being crowded out (and the algorithm keeps it that way), not for lack of trying.
With content creation platforms there is absolutely no way one person or even ten people at the highest levels could kill them by leaving. In fact, as has been shown on Youtube and Twitch it usually makes the platform healthier because there's not one monolith to develop a strategy around bootlegging from. There have been several dozen gargantuan channels and several hundred giant channels on Youtube who have either left or just stopped uploading and Youtube still carries on. Youtube isn't carried by the Mr. Beasts and FailArmies who grab forty million views an upload, it's carried by thousands of smaller channels who get less than a million views per video. With places like Reddit, Tumblr, and Imgur there are no giants, as everything is siloed so much that users in one community don't know much of what's outside that community, making it impossible for a handful of creators leaving to kill it.
I think "killing a platform" is less interesting than "birthing a competitor". And the Mixer experiment of 2021 suggests that the top dozen creators 5 years ago still wasn't enough to even foster a new platform. Market capture at this scale is truly sticky.
As another example. We're some 8 years into the "streaming wars", with a lot of top content leveraging their IP's. Netflix still seems to be long, and the only one profitable (though I wager it is not profitable on sustainable measures). Disney, HBO, paramount, and many more have struggled despite weilding much more well known programming. Being early is just so important in these situations.
I'm not sure if it's an issue of the percentage of users creating content, but rather the percentage of new content creators zooming to the level of average ai copy which is higher than their starting point.
I do wonder if it will limit or improve their growth to learn to communicate beyond it as the drivers behind the seat instead of the passengers.
> Nowadays on any top social media there's 1-3% of creators making the vast majority of popular content, but more importantly, there's another 15% of people out there who are vying to try and take their spots and will gladly fill the void should the top creators leave. They're mostly just not doing well because the top is being crowded out (and the algorithm keeps it that way), not for lack of trying.
If the thesis of the OP is that “slop” is infinite... it’s pretty obvious that taking away the top “content” creators is a self-slop correcting problem.
No, Sora is an experiment if humans will knowingly consume a fully AI feed. But FB, IG, Reddit, Hacker News, etc social media is already full of slop, labeled or not. And it's there because that's what humans are choosing to engage the most with.
>Google already gets an unjustified cut of the money I'm paying for the game
Brotato is free to distribute their game outside the Play Store as well, Android isn't locked down. If the cut was unjustified why would they give money away to Google for free? The reasons are actually extremely similar to the reasons ads benefit society.
They kinda created this fake locked down market that people expect to be able to be used, same as Apple, compared to say, just downloading apps normally like on a computer.
Also "sideloaded" apps cannot be automatically updated, although personally I think it would be better if nothing could automatically update lol
I'm also not the biggest fan of Steam. But at least on Steam if I search for Brotato it's the top result, Steam is not tied to the OS so if gamers and game makers decided they hate Steam they could jump to some other market (as opposed to, say, the built-in Microsoft store in Windows that thankfully seems to be failing), and Steam has helped drag Linux into the 21st century in a good way.
Glasses as a computer form factor is not really proven out yet, but cameras on the glasses are one of the things that people are actually using the Meta Raybans for. One of the primary things people do with them is capture POV video. Take away the cameras and you're left with what. ChatGPT on command and headphones and that's it? The Humane Pin would like a word. People buy smart glasses specifically for a rich feature set, the more the better (because it's a nerd/early adopter product as of now).
And also in the real world people just do not care about cameras on glasses as much as people on HN trot out the glasshole articles from a decade ago. Both smart glasses and phones that are actively recording are everywhere already.
I've yet to see someone wear meta ray bans at work, so at least for me DoA. you're right tho. as for use case, more so a better type of Siri. presumably mics would make it much cheaper as well, on the order of a regular watch (~$100)
To anyone who isn't deep in the AI hype space it reads like satire to include such an obvious AI tell but I think it's a positive in the eyes of the AI hype world. It's like how anyone not a lizard is repulsed by LinkedIn speak and yet it dominates the platform.
I saw this in a past hype cycle. What happens is that it becomes a "performative" art in an echo-chamber for startups, startup founders, VCs. Performative meaning doing things one thinks others want to see rather than when it makes sense.
Management is quizzing their tech teams on injecting agents into their workflows whatever the f that means. Some of these big companies will acquire startups in the space so they are not left behind on the hype-train. So, they can claim to have agentic talent on their teams.
Those of us who have seen this movie play out know the ending.
That's exactly what Apple does with iCloud in China.
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