Ads are supposed to reduce transaction cost by spreading information to allow consumers to efficiently make decisions about purchases, many of which entail complex trade-offs.
In other words, people already want to buy things.
I would love to be able to ask an intelligence with access to the world's information questions to help me efficiently make purchasing decisions. I've tried this a few times with GPT-4 and it seems to bias heavily toward whatever came up in the first few pages of web results, and rarely "knows" anything useful about the products.
A sufficiently good product or service will market itself and it is rarely necessary for marketing spend or brand marketing for those rare exceptional products and services.
For the rest of the space of products and services, ad spend is a signal that the product is not good enough that the customer would have already heard about it.
With an AI assistant, getting a sense of the space of available products and services should be simple and concise, without the noise and imprecision of ads and clutter of "near miss" products and services ("reach" that companies paid for) cluttering things up.
The bigger question is which AI assistant people will trust they can ask important questions to and get unbiased and helpful results. "Which brand of Moka pot under $20 is the highest quality?" or "Help me decide which car to buy" are the kinds of questions that require a solid analytical framework and access to quality data to answer correctly.
AI assistants will act like the invisible hand and shoudl not have a thumb on the scale. I would pay more than $20 per month to use such an AI. I find it hard to believe that OpenAI would have to resort to any model other than a paid subscription if the information and analysis is truly high quality (which it appears to be so far).
I did exactly that with a custom GPT and it works pretty well. I did my best to push it to respond with its training knowledge about brand reputation and avoid searches. When it has to resort to searches I pushed it to use trusted product information sources and avoid spammy or ad-ridden sites.
It allowed me to spot the best brands and sometimes even products in verticals I knew nothing about beforehand. It’s not perfect but already very efficient.
Ads are supposed to reduce transaction cost by spreading information to allow consumers to efficiently make decisions about purchases, many of which entail complex trade-offs.
In other words, people already want to buy things.
I would love to be able to ask an intelligence with access to the world's information questions to help me efficiently make purchasing decisions. I've tried this a few times with GPT-4 and it seems to bias heavily toward whatever came up in the first few pages of web results, and rarely "knows" anything useful about the products.
A sufficiently good product or service will market itself and it is rarely necessary for marketing spend or brand marketing for those rare exceptional products and services.
For the rest of the space of products and services, ad spend is a signal that the product is not good enough that the customer would have already heard about it.
With an AI assistant, getting a sense of the space of available products and services should be simple and concise, without the noise and imprecision of ads and clutter of "near miss" products and services ("reach" that companies paid for) cluttering things up.
The bigger question is which AI assistant people will trust they can ask important questions to and get unbiased and helpful results. "Which brand of Moka pot under $20 is the highest quality?" or "Help me decide which car to buy" are the kinds of questions that require a solid analytical framework and access to quality data to answer correctly.
AI assistants will act like the invisible hand and shoudl not have a thumb on the scale. I would pay more than $20 per month to use such an AI. I find it hard to believe that OpenAI would have to resort to any model other than a paid subscription if the information and analysis is truly high quality (which it appears to be so far).