That framing is silly. “NBC doesn’t have a television business, they have an ad business”. “Google doesn’t have a search business, they have an ad business.” “Amazon doesn’t have a retail business, they have an ad business.”
It doesn’t provide any value to reframe it this way, unless you think it’s some big secret that ads are the main source of revenue for these businesses.
I'd contrast this with Flickr. Flickr was the original social network. They have a modest loss leader, a reasonable free tier, but nothing like the permanent money bonfire that the big tech firms operate.
They were kinda the first real Web 2.0 social media site, with a social graph, privacy controls, a developer API, tagging, RSS feeds.
I feel that they never really got to their full potential exactly because these big VC-backed dumping operations in social media (like Facebook) were able to kill them in the crib.
If we're going to accept that social media is a natural monopoly: great. Regulate them strictly, as you should with any monopoly.
Fair point, there's a good chance we'd be living in a techno utopia right now if someone was able to go back in time and prevent Yahoo from murdering so many promising startups. Conversely, if Yahoo had just spent the relative pocket change that Google was asking for back in the day perhaps we'd be living under the oppressive thumb of a trillion dollar market cap Alta Vista.
NBC produces their own content, Facebook and Instagram meanwhile are the equivalent of public access TV with ads. There is no unique "brand" that Facebook has, anything posted on there is also posted everywhere else.
> “NBC doesn’t have a television business, they have an ad business”.
They do broadcast TV, the purpose of which is to display ads. That does make sense.
> “Google doesn’t have a search business, they have an ad business.”
When Google started out, in the "don't be evil", simple home page days, they were a search company. It is hardly true any more, ads are now the centre of their business.
> “Amazon doesn’t have a retail business, they have an ad business.”
Well, duh! Quite obvious these days. That is where they get the lion's share of the revenue, outside AWS.
I know we're so defeated as consumers that we can hardly imagine it, but you could just...charge for the customers' access to social media network. Kinda like every other service that charges money.
It would have the side effect of making the whole business less ghoulish and manipulative, since the operators wouldn't be incentivized to maximize eyeball hours.
It's impossible to imagine this because government regulation is so completely corrupted that a decades-long anticompetitive dumping scheme is allowed to occur without the slightest pushback.
Unlike most business, social media relies on having a high market saturation to provide value. So having a subscription model doesn’t work very well.
Of course perhaps it’s a bit different now since most people consume content from a small set of sources, making social media largely the same as traditional media. But then traditional media also has trouble with being supported by subscriptions.
App.net was a wonderful experience with great developer buy in. It is also my understanding that it was operating at break even when it was mothballed. The VC backing it wanted Facebook returns. It was an amazing experience because it didn’t depend on advertisers. I have no idea how it would have fared through Covid and election dramas but it remains my platonic ideal for a social network.
Seems like Mastadon is just the Kitchen Aid of socials. Anyone can have their product(s), but not everyone can use them the same way. Those that use them better stand out from the rest to the point others might just stop using and the product just takes up space
I hate the ad business model as much as the next person, but this is a pipe dream. Meta had ~$50b in revenue on ads last quarter, and 3.54b “daily active people” whatever that means. That’s in the order of $1/“dap”/week, and there is just absolutely no way any meaningful proportion of their userbase would be paying that much for these apps.
Perhaps not, but you can bet that they were told the opposite when Zuckerberg was recruiting them. Indeed, ring fencing the lab does suggest some real attempt to do it.
No, I think apparently it was used in the reinforcement learning step somehow to influence the model's final fine-tuning. At least how I understood it.
The actual system prompt from Anthropic is shorter and also public on their website I believe
I think google is uniquely well placed to make a profitable business out of AI: They make their own TPUs so don't have to pay ridiculous amounts of money to Nvidia, they have a great depth of talent in building models, they've got loads of data they can use for training and they've got a huge existing customer base who can buy their AI offerings.
I don't think any other company has all these ingredients.
While I don’t disagree that Google is the company you can’t bet against when it comes to AI, saying other companies are done is a stretch. If they have a significant moat then they should be at the top all the time by then which is not the case though.
ChatGPT's moat is their name and user habit. People who are using it will keep using it. All/most of the products are _good enough_ for the people who already got used to using them, that they arent exploring competitors.
Microsoft has the chance of changing habit the most by virtue of being bundled into business contracts that have companies with policies not allowing any other product in the workplace.
> ChatGPT's moat is their name and user habit. People who are using it will keep using it. All/most of the products are _good enough_ for the people who already got used to using them, that they arent exploring competitors.
They have a long way to go to become profitable though. Those users will get less sticky when openAI starts upping their pricing/putting ads everywhere/making the product worse to save money/all of the above.
The enterprise sales cycle is often quite long, though, and often includes a lot of hurdles around compliance, legal, etc. It would take a fairly sustained loss of edge before a lot of enterprises would switch once they're hooked into a given platform. It's interesting to me that Sonnet 4.5 still edges Gemini 3 on SWE bench. This seems to bode well for the trajectory that Anthropic is on.
The TPU are a key factor. They are the most mature alternative to Nvidia. Only Google cloud, Azure, and AWS enable you to rent their respective AI chips. Out of those three, google is the only one to have a frontier model. So if they have a real advantage they're not exposed to the financial shenanigans propping up neo clouds like Coreweave.
Considering GPT 5 was only recently released, it's very unlikely GPT will achieve these scores in just a couple of months. If they had something this good in the oven, they'd probably left the GPT 5 name to it.
Or maybe Google just benchmaxxed and this doesn't translate at all in real world performance.
If not this model, Google at some point is going to get and stay ahead just because they have so many more people and compute resources they can throw at many directions while the others have to make the right choices with how they use their resources each time. Took a while to channel their numbers into a product direction but now I don't think they're going to let up
I think in the end they will just pay off copyright holders. The German GEMA is mostly interested in rent-seeking through whatever means available, it's basically the whole point of the organization.
They'll easily be paid off once all legal avenues are exhausted for OpenAI. Though they'll of course keep fighting in court in the hopes of some more favorable negotiating position.
I remember the book "Algorithms to Live By" actually also uses finding a life partner as a fun, if perhaps unrealistic, example of applying the secretary problem.
As far as I remember, it jokingly assumes that one's active dating period might be ages 20-40 and then applying the optimal solution from the secretary problem means that you should calibrate your expectations until age 27 (assuming regular dating of course) and then immediately marry the next best person that exceeds this threshold.
I do like that they notice the fact that automation and plummeting wages do not automatically mean immiseration for the population. I've read so many uninformed online discussions along the lines of "If no one has jobs anymore, who will buy their products" where people do not even briefly stop to think that automated jobs will most likely also depress prices of many goods and services.
I do not know whether the outcome will be good or not, but it's good to recognize that wealth can increase even in the face of widespread automation.
The amount of drama about AI based upscaling seems disproportionate. I know framing it in terms of AI and hallucinated pixels makes it sound unnatural, but graphics rendering works with so many hacks and approximations.
Even without modern deep-learning based "AI", it's not like the pixels you see with traditional rendering pipelines were all artisanal and curated.
> AI upscaling is equivalent to lowering bitrate of compressed video.
When I was a kid people had dozens of CDs with movies, while pretty much nobody had DVDs. DVD was simply too expensive, while Xvid allowed to compress entire movie into a CD while keeping good quality. Of course original DVD release would've been better, but we were too poor, and watching ten movies at 80% quality was better than watching one movie at 100% quality.
DLSS allows to effectively quadruple FPS with minimal subjective quality impact. Of course natively rendered image would've been better, but most people are simply too poor to buy game rig that plays newest games 4k 120FPS on maximum settings. You can keep arguing as much as you want that natively rendered image is better, but unless you send me money to buy a new PC, I'll keep using DLSS.
> I am certainly not going to celebrate the reduction in image quality
What about perceived image quality? If you are just playing the game chances of you noticing anything (unless you crank up the upscaling to the maximum) are near zero.
The contentious part from what I get is the overhead for hallucinating these pixels, on cards that also cost a lot more than the previous generation for otherwise minimal gains outside of DLSS.
Some [0] are seeing 20 to 30% drop in actual frames when activating DLSS, and that means as much latency as well.
There's still games where it should be a decent tradeoff (racing or flight simulators ? Infinite Nikki ?), but it's definitely not a no-brainer.
Nowadays I always wonder to what extent such deals are actually driven by market considerations and to what extent it's catering to the Trump administration. Token investments into this state enterprise named Intel seems to be a practical way to cater goodwill with the autocrats.
People are clueless about economics, so such polls are irrelevant. It can still have been a bad deal, of course, who knows, given the specifics of trade deals with Trump are ever changing.
Ultimately it just reflects the EU's largely self-inflicted economic weakness.
That cannot have been a surprise to anyone joining.