Comment by usef-

Comment by usef- 10 hours ago

People did say the same thing about Youtube, which was unprofitable and extremely expensive to run in the early years. I remember thinking everyone would leave once ads were added.

At youtube's ad income rate (~$13/year), the current (but growing) ~800 million chatgpt users would add ~$10 billion. At facebook's rate (~$40-50/year) $32-40 billion. Potentially, an assistant would be more integrated into your life than either of those two.

The "audience retention" is the key question, not the profitability if they maintain their current audience. I've been surprised how many non-technical people I know don't want to try other models. "ChatGPT knows me".

hansmayer 14 minutes ago

Minor difference : YT does not cost literally a human trip to Mars and back to operate

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adgjlsfhk1 8 hours ago

the problem with the YouTube analogy is that media platforms have significant network affects that NN providers don't. OpenAI can't command a premium because every year that goes by the cost to train an equivalent model to theirs decreases.

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usef- 8 hours ago

Youtube didn't either at the time. The front page was widely seen as garbage, and everyone I knew watched videos because they were embedded or linked from external sites. "If they introduced ads, people will just switch to other video hosts, wont they?". Many of the cooler creators used Vimeo. It was the good recommendation algorithm that came later, that I think allowed an actual network effect, and I don't remember people predicting that.
The field is too young to know what will keep users, but there are definitely things that plausibly could create a lock-in effect. I mentioned one ("ChatGPT knows me") which could grow over time as people have shared more of themselves with ChatGPT. There's also pilots of multi-person chats, and the social elements in Sora. Some people already feel compelled to stick to the "person" they're comfortable talking to. The chance of OpenAI finding something isn't zero.

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- polishTar 5 hours ago
  
  That's a bit revisionist. Network effects were obvious when Google acquired Youtube. Google Video had the edge technically, but it didn't matter because Youtube had the users/content and Google saw that very clearly in their user growth before they made their offer.
  
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  usef- 5 hours ago
  
  I'm not sure about it having the edge, I thought Google video had a worse interface between them at the time. But that point feels eerily relevant anyway: a lot of normal people I see don't care if Claude/Gemini/etc are better models technically, they're comfortable with ChatGPT already.
  A lot of YT's growth at the time was word of mouth and brand among the population, which is currently ChatGPT's position.
  
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bloppe 5 hours ago

The network effects aren't the same. All the viewers watch youtube because it has all the content, and all the creators post on youtube because it has all the viewers.

How can a model achieve this kind of stickiness? By "knowing you"? I don't think that's the same at all. Personally, one of the reasons I prefer Claude is that it doesn't pretend to know me. I can control the context better.

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usef- 7 hours ago

I suspect some of the downvoters hate the idea of ads, which is understandable.

But a lot of HN users use gmail, which has the same model. And there are plenty of paid email providers which seem far less popular (I use one). Ads didn't end up being a problem for most people provided they were kept independent of the content itself.

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skydhash 2 hours ago

1. Gmail is free
2. I’ve never seen ads on the Gmail webapp (It sure does data collection)

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