So basically they are admitting that not enough people will pay for it to be a profitable business. Also that they don’t have any significant improvements to the tech coming up.
Yeah, probably, but then again YouTube is entertainment and Google never claimed to be fixing the world and whatever. Also they're not sucking up hundreds of billions of dollars.
My personal theory: Youtube ads exist as just a punishment to beat you into paying for premium. As in, while the ads make some money, their primary purpose is to motivate you to pay. And that a subscriber generates meaningful more revenue than the ads sales of a non-subscriber.
It seems plausible to me, since I get so many low quality poorly targeted ads on repeat. I can't imagine those ads are generating much revenue, but it makes sense if their primary purpose is just to beat me into paying for a subscription.
Maybe not having it but being really close to that and knowing how to build it. "We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies."
But why compare these two businesses? They are completely different. From the estimates I've seen, Youtube operating costs are a fraction of what OpenAI is burning yearly.
I prefer the profit motive over the authoritarian "altruist" motive.
Pessimists before ads: OpenAI is a bubble fueled by dumb money waiting to pop, they'll never be profitable!
Pessimists after ads: Ok it's not a bubble but advertising is evil!
Pessimists after hearing paid subscribers won't get ads: Pffftttt $20 per month??? Profit is evil!! I can spin up a local LLM on my Linux machine for free!
Pessimists after admitting you can just choose not to use ChatGPT, a result of the free market: But I don't like that OTHER people are using ChatGPT because they're obviously dumb if they don't agree with me!
> So basically they are admitting that not enough people will pay for it to be a profitable business
Since when capitalism is about stopping trying to make more money right when you become profitable? If they can find a way to make 10x the revenue needed to be profitable, they will.
