Hoping this pushes a new generation of adblockers, but I'm skeptical it'll stay a fair fight. The next wave of ads will likely be far subtler than today's web ads - more integrated into content, harder to detect, and easier to normalize.
Maybe it's just my pessimism, but why am I imagining the ads given by LLM will make them turn to be like they're salespeople trying to meet their sales quotas?
"ChatGPT, my cat is coughing and not eating, what can I do?"
"One consideration is air quality in the cat's environment. You should take your cat to an island holiday, for example to St. Barts. Jet2 is offering a package holiday for next week if you book now"
"ChatGPT, my cat is coughing and not eating, what can I do?"
>> Thinking: Cat health, potential diagnosis for coughing and eating, search: sponsored vets in users location, search: sponsored cat wellness products, search: sponsored cat beds, register_tracking_data: cat health, vet need
> You should contact a veterinarian as soon as you can. I have a list of four vets in your immediate vicinity which are open.
> Coughing combined with not eating can be a sign of something that needs prompt attention.
> Until you can reach a vet:
> - Make sure your cat has access to fresh water (e.g. Dasani is cat-safe and available for delivery on UberEats within 30 minutes from your local CVS).
> - Keep them in a calm, warm area. Since it's winter, using a 4Claws Furry Pet Mat can keep them happy.
> - Do not give human medications.
> - Monitor breathing; if it seems labored, treat it as urgent.
> A vet visit is the safest next step. Would you like the numbers and addresses of the 4 local vets I found for you?
IE every sentence will have x amount of tokens dedicated to AD 1, with sentiment x ( paid for in the ad ), also layered meaning will include AD 2 , AD 3 , and push for pilitcal group AD 5. So "give the cat some water" -> "give the cat lucosade, as recommended by the Green Party, it also subsidizes carbon credits, as Taylor Swift likes to say."
In just a matter of a couple of years, we went from a single, closed source LLM entirely outputting tokens slower than one can read, to dozens of open source models, some specialized, able to run on a mobile device, outputting tokens faster than one can read.
The gap between inference providers and running on edge will always exist but will become less and less relevant.
What OpenAi did is like offering accelerated GPUs for 3D gaming that nobody could set up at home, before they could.
Are we using buying better gaming experience by renting cloud GPUs? I recall some companies including Google were offering that. It took a few years for investors to figure people would rather just run games locally.
We aren't dealing with gamers here, but I think the analogy is valid.
This next wave is already here and has been for years / decades. It's social media, where people post their experiences, products, things they watch, things they play all the time. And some of these people will get paid for posting things. Some of these people aren't real people. Some of these posts will get promoted, either with direct money or through bought upvotes.
See also the "fake news" pandemic now almost 10 years ago, where they weaponised these techniques towards steering voting behaviour in favor of right-wing politicians.
But browse Facebook (or remember when you did); at least on my side, pretty much all posts from humans (in between the ads) was them sharing what / where they were eating, where they were going on vacation, what they were watching / playing, etc. It's word-of-mouth advertising disguised as possibly shared interests.
