The most frustrating thing about this wall of text is that the time it would take to verify all the parts is exponentially more than the time it took to generate.
Unrelated to this thread and completely OT - I feel like you've just touched a live wire that I haven't seen a lot of conversation yet wrt. LLMs.
We've seen plenty about media literacy / verifying news over the years of course, but the time and surface area considerations will change exponentially if people can start generating fake news with an AI (especially audio and video).
And I think it's too naive to go straight from there to the Dead Internet Theory, because that's like switching from "believing everything you read on the Internet" to "disbelieving everything you read on the Internet" (which is necessarily wrong with the opposite percentage margin).
For this thread, I'm inclined to believe the original comment(er). I'm not going to look it up, look up the username, ask an AI, or really care all that much about the debate, because I'm not directly interested in the outcome.
I _am_ interested that, in my own mind, the original comment lost an enormous amount of credibility when the author then reached for ChatGPT to defend the claim. So the only thing I can do without sinking a large amount of time into looking for sources is to leave this thread thinking "I don't know, maybe I'll actually look it up one day, and evaluate it properly when it becomes relevant to me (probably never)". And maybe that's a better outcome than my initial "yeah seems like a legit HN comment" anyway.
EDIT: There's a second level issue too where the people using AI to generate "facts" won't themselves know whether they're generating true or false information - presumably(?) not the case in this thread.
Telling me to go sift through several 50,000 word documents kind of proves my point.
Realize, I’m not anyone up the chain claiming any knowledge about YouTube’s specific profitability in any given year. I’m just commenting about how frustrating the internet is becoming. HN can be cool because you’ll be in threads like this and someone who worked on some original piece of YouTube compression algo might pop in to offer insight.
On the other hand, multiple paragraphs of ChatGPT regurgitation are next to useless. If you really want to share that kind of thing, maybe link to the publicly available chat instead of quoting, so people can read it if they want to or ignore it at their leisure.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. Efficiency projects like the transcoding ASIC are a big part of pushing YouTube to profitability, as well as the alternate revenue streams and heavy increases in monetization. Video serving is extremely expensive and difficult compared to everything else Google does.
Ruth Porat has been on record many times indicating that YouTube wasn't profitable in the 2010's. I think her public statements have only indicated that YouTube was free cash flow positive as of the 2020's, but I haven't found exactly where that happened - Google has experimented with a lot of different kinds of breakdowns of its finances. I assume that hiding the economics of YouTube is part of this (as well as protection against a zealous DOJ saying that Google's businesses are separable).
that's the key issue with this kind of ChatGPT writing. Code you can relatively easily check for correctness - just run it. For analysis on this level, it really had to be based on facts and reality, not generated by a bullshit generator to be of actual use.
I actually went back to the source it pointed out - SEC filings and the call transcripts are all public. It isn't citing the most recent statements on YouTube by far, but the citation of 2017 was at least correct.
In this case, digging through all the material to find the factual basis is the hard part, and corroborating it is not (for those who care).
