Speaker 1: Leave zero some quant finance and come build the machine.
Gud uh. They're going to have a rude awakening when
it turns out they have to work on ads to
pay for it.
Speaker 2: All That one lands hard, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's a tweet from seven months ago, just
seven months, just seven months, and you know, in the
normal world that's nothing, but in Ai time, that feels
like a decade ago, and reading it today, it just
it feels less like a tweet and more like a prophecy.
Speaker 2: It is absolutely prophetic. It's like someone saw the entire
movie and just tweeted out the ending.
Speaker 1: It's the whole story arc, the grand ambition, the noble crusade,
and then the gritty.
Speaker 2: Reality check, the crash landing.
Speaker 1: Exactly, and that rude awakening he mentioned. It's not some
far off theoretical thing anymore. It's here. We're watching it
happen in real time. We're literally watching this collision between
these huge grand dreams of building a digital deity, a
super intelligence, yeah, and the you know, the boring, gritty,
capitalistic reality of just paying the server bills. And who
is standing there pointing a finger. It's Google's AI CEO Demissabis.
Speaker 2: And he's not just pointing, he's he's laughing a little bit.
It's getting incredibly spicy out there.
Speaker 1: It is so spicy. Welcome to thrilling threads. I am
so ready to pull on this particular thread because it
feels like the whole AI world is, I don't know,
unraveling a bit right now.
Speaker 2: It really does. And you know, usually you see these
tech feuds and they're all kind of buried.
Speaker 1: In subtext, right and like a press release or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or some subtle dig in a shareholder meeting that
you have to decode. But this is just it's out
in the open. This isn't just a business disagreement. It
feels like a battle for the soul of what AI
is supposed.
Speaker 1: To be exactly. So our mission today is to untangle
this whole drama. We're looking at Google, We're looking at
open AI, and specifically this friction between the promise of AGI,
you know, this artificial general intelligence that's supposed to change.
Speaker 2: Everything, it's supposed to save the world, right.
Speaker 1: And the reality of well, pop up ads.
Speaker 2: It is the oldest story in the book. It's idealism
versus capitalism. And what's so fascinating here is that. Yeah,
it's a little petty, which is always fun for us,
oh for sure, But it actually reveals this fundamental economic
truth about the AI revolution that I think nobody really
wanted to talk about until now.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's get right into it. The Google burn
let's do it. Demis Hasabis, he's the head of Google
Deep Mind. He basically just came out and publicly torched
Open Ai. He didn't just you know, say I disagree
with their strategy. He went straight for the jagular.
Speaker 2: He really did. And it's important to understand who Demis is.
You know, he's not a hype guy. He's not a
marketing ceo. He's a scientist. He was a chess prodigy.
He created DeepMind, which is, you know, arguably the most
serious AI research lab on the planet. They're the ones
who cracked protein folding with alpha fold. He usually stays very.
Speaker 1: Very quiet, so when he decides to speak up.
Speaker 2: Everybody listens. And what he said, and I'm paraphrasing the
sentiment here, but this is the core of it. He said,
if AGI was around the corner, why do you need
to sell ads inside of your product?
Speaker 1: That is just it's the billion dollar question. Isn't it.
It's so simple, but it's devastating.
Speaker 2: It's devastatingly simple.
Speaker 1: Let's actually unpack that logic because open AI's whole narrative,
the story they've been telling us in their investors for
years is that AGI is imminent. It's almost here.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Sam Altman talks about the singularity like it's a
flight on a departure's board, now boarding, Just.
Speaker 1: Hold on, We're almost there. And Demis's logic is, Okay,
if you really have a technology that is that powerful,
that world changing, you don't need to interrupt it with
a commercial for car insurance to make money.
Speaker 2: The idea would be laughable.
Speaker 1: But why explain that a bit more? Why wouldn't you
just slap an ad on a machine god?
Speaker 2: Okay, So think about it in terms of value capture.
If you actually have AGI, you have an entity that
can I don't know, cure cancer, or solve cold fusion,
or completely restructure global logistics to end world hunger. The
economic value of that isn't just big, it's almost infinite.
Speaker 1: So you wouldn't be selling BAM.
Speaker 2: You'd be licensing the core technology to governments, to massive
pharmaceutical companies, to investment banks for you know, millions or
billions of dollars per transaction. You'd be selling the cure
for cancer, not the eyeballs watching a video about it.
Speaker 1: I see, So you're selling the solution itself, not the
attention of the people asking for the solution.
Speaker 2: The idea of monetizing AGI through like a cost per
click model where you get paid a few cents because
someone clicks a link for a pair of sneakers. It's
a complete mismatch of such.
Speaker 1: It's like inventing a faster than light starship and then
deciding the best way to make money is to, I
don't know, use it for pizza delivery.
Speaker 2: That's a great analogy. Or painting a giant Coca Cola
logo on the side and just flying it past the beach.
It makes no sense.
Speaker 1: It's inventing cold fusion to power a single neon open
sign yes perfect.
Speaker 2: If you have the machine God, you don't need to
put a sponsored by Pepsi sticker on its forehead. So
by just pivoting to ads demis is basically saying open
AI is admitting publicly that they're tech isn't as magical
or as close to perfection as they claim it is.
Speaker 1: It's a huge reality check. And this source material points
out this really interesting contrast in strategy right now because
Google Google is kind of taking the high road here.
Speaker 2: Which is a strategy in itself. I mean, they're playing
forty E chss while everyone else is playing checkers.
Speaker 1: Right demonstated very clearly, Google has no plans at the
moment to put ads in the Gemini app.
Speaker 2: And okay, let's be real, that phrase at the moment
is doing a lot of heavy lifting. So sure, Google
is an ad company, it's what they do, but for
now they're holding back.
Speaker 1: But just compare the products right now today. The source
describes Google Gemini as a simple core offering. It's clean,
you open it, you talk to the AI, that's it,
and then you have open AI, who this source says,
is fumbling around.
Speaker 2: And that word fumbling is so important. It implies a
lack of a clear plan, a little bit of desperation.
Speaker 1: Maybe it does.
Speaker 2: And so Google is winning this perception battle right now
just by doing nothing. They're not cluttering their user experience.
They're letting the text speak for itself. And you have
to remember the resources they have. Google is the king
of online advertising.
Speaker 1: That's the wild irony. The one company that could do
it best is choosing not to.
Speaker 2: Exactly, if anyone knows how to perfectly integrate ADS, it's them.
They have the whole global infrastructure, the auction systems, the
tracking pixels on what half the Internet, But they're deliberately
holding off on Gemini.
Speaker 1: Why tell me?
Speaker 2: Because they know it degrades the experience. They've learned this,
they know that when you're trying to build trust with
this new form of intelligence, an AD is this jarring
commercial reminder that you're not a collaborator, you're a customer,
you're a target.
Speaker 1: It breaks the spell.
Speaker 2: It completely breaks the spell, the illusion of this pure intelligence.
I mean, imagine you're asking an AI for help writing
a eulogy for a loved one. Oh wow, and in
the middle of this very personal emotional moment, it pauses
to tell you about a twenty percent discount on mattresses.
Speaker 1: The magic is on.
Speaker 2: It's gone instantly. You're no longer talking to a genius
in a box, You're talking to a digital salesman.
Speaker 1: And Demis mentioned this specifically. He said AD implementation has
to be handled very carefully.
Speaker 2: And what's the reason he gave privacy. See that's the
other angle. Google is just sitting back and watching open
ai walk into a minefield. They're letting open ai be
the canary in the coal mine.
Speaker 1: You guys, go ahead, you try to figure out how
to put ads in a chatbot without completely creeping everyone out.
Speaker 2: We'll just watch from over here and see if you explode.
Speaker 1: That is such a power move.
Speaker 2: It's a total power move. Go ahead, touch the electric
fence for us, tell us how it feels, and.
Speaker 1: It positions Google, at least for now, as the safer, cleaner,
more serious alternative. They look like the adults in the room,
while open Ai looks a little desperate, like they're scrambling
for cash.
Speaker 2: And honestly, if you look at Google's recent history with
their own AI launches, They've learned the hard way that
rushing things and getting it wrong breaks user trust. Remember
some of the early weird answers from their search overviews.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, the put glue on pizza thing exactly.
Speaker 2: They know the spotlight is incredibly hot, so letting open
ai take all the heat for this ad experiment. It's
just a brilliant patient strategy.
Speaker 1: Speaking of taking the heat and scrambling this brings us
to what I think is maybe the most damaging part
of this whole story for open Ai, the flip flop,
the flip flop, the walk back. We have to talk
about Sam Moltman because the Internet, the Internet never.
Speaker 2: Forgets, No, it does not. The digital footprint is forever,
and for Sam it's pretty glaring right now.
Speaker 1: So okay, recently he's been warming up to the idea
of ads. But let's just rewind the clock to twenty
twenty four, not even that long ago.
Speaker 2: We are talking very recent history. This isn't some tweet
from twenty ten. We're digging up.
Speaker 1: No, he made a statement where he called ads a
last resort and he explicitly said, and this is a quote,
that moving to ads would mean the company is kind
of in trouble.
Speaker 2: He literally at his own trap. He created the metric
for his own failure. We mean, well, think about it
from a purely logical standpoint. He the CEO, defined the
success condition for his own company. He said, in essence,
if we're doing well, we won't need ads. If we're
failing and in trouble, we will have ads.
Speaker 1: It's a binary state he created himself.
Speaker 2: It's a binary a then B and now they are
very publicly exploring ADS. So by his own definition or trouble,
it's an inescapable conclusion. And you can't even argue with
it because the premise came directly from his own mouth.
He signaled to the entire market that adds equal failure.
So what does the market see now?
Speaker 1: Failure?
Speaker 2: It's unbelievable, but it gets so much.
Speaker 1: Worse it does. The Lex Friedman.
Speaker 2: Interview, Oh, the Lex Fridman interview.
Speaker 1: If you haven't seen this clip, you have to find
it because it's not just the words, it's his body language,
his tone. He was so adamant. He called ADS and
Chat GPT a dystopian idea dystopian.
Speaker 2: That is such a word. It's not suboptimal or annoying.
It's dystopian that invokes George Orwell, that invokes Blade Runner.
That is a society collapsing, nightmarish future.
Speaker 1: And he painted this very specific picture, didn't there He
visualized the dystopia force. He said, you know, imagine you
go to the AI for advice. Maybe it's something personal,
or maybe it's just hey, where should I go on vacation,
and instead of a genuine objective answer, the AI replies, well,
you should really think about buying this product, or you
should go to this specific resort for your vacation.
Speaker 2: He described with perfect clarity the exact user fear he
was trying to avoid. He validated everyone's worst nightmare about
this technology. He admitted that the moment you introduce ads
you change the nature of the truth you receive. And
this is the critical point. This is the difference between
a search engine and an AI.
Speaker 1: Okay, break that down for me. Why is it so different.
It's just text on a screen.
Speaker 2: No, No, it's fundamentally different. On Google Search, you type
a query and you get a list of ten blue links, right,
list of options, and you, the human, are still the
final arbiter of truth. You do the sorting. You see
the little sponsored tag, You consciously or subconsciously ignore it.
You click the Wikipedia link, you click a news article.
You synthesize the answer yourself. But with an LM, a
large language model, it gives you one answer, right.
Speaker 1: It does the thinking for you.
Speaker 2: It does the synthesis for you. It presents itself as
the definitive truth. And if that one single authoritative answer
has been secretly influenced by money, the entire concept of
truth has been corrupted at the source.
Speaker 1: You can't trust it anymore.
Speaker 2: You can't If the AI recommends a specific hotel, is
it actually the best hotel for me based on my needs?
Or is it just the one that paid the most
to be in that answer? The objectivity is completely gone.
And Altman knew this. He said he hates ads as
an esthetic choice. He wanted the paid subscription model specifically
so that the answers wouldn't be bought and sold.
Speaker 1: He the one line that really stuck with me, He said,
I like knowing I am not.
Speaker 2: The product, and that resonates so deeply with people today.
We are so so tired of being the product on Facebook,
on Instagram, on TikTok chat GPT. You felt different. It
felt like a clean utility, like a calculator exactly. Calculators
don't have ads. Can you imagine if you typed two
plus two into your calculator and it flashed back it's four.
But have you considered that for just five dollars you
can upgrade your life with this new soda.
Speaker 1: I would throw that calculator out the window. It would
be infuriating.
Speaker 2: It completely destroys the utility of the tool, and now
that certainty, that feeling of having a clean tool, it's
just eroding before our eyes.
Speaker 1: And that erosion leads directly to the trust gap. The
source material talks about this, and I think it's crucial
trust in. Sam Altman was already let's be generous and
call it shaky.
Speaker 2: It's been a turbulent few years for him to say
the least.
Speaker 1: I mean, you've got the whole history with Elon Musk.
The founding of the company is a nonprofit. Then this
weird pivot to a capped profit model that nobody really understands,
the lawsuits, and of course the insane firing and then
rehiring Debaggle in November twenty three.
Speaker 2: It's been a total soap opera.
Speaker 1: But this reversal on ADS feels different. It feels more
personal because it hits the user directly in the product experience.
Speaker 2: It's a betrayal of the product's promise. It's one thing
to have boardroom drama, it's another thing to fundamentally change
the nature of the tool you've given to millions of people.
When you tell your users this is a dystopian idea
and we will never do it. And then a year
later you say, actually, you know what we're doing it.
You're not just changing a business model.
Speaker 1: What are you doing?
Speaker 2: You are, in a way gaslighting your user base. You
are telling them that their definition of dystopian was wrong
and now it's just necessary. It makes you question everything
else they've said, right.
Speaker 1: If they're willing to flip flop on this, what else
is on the table?
Speaker 2: Exactly? If the last resort is happy? Now, what other
last resorts are waiting in the wings? Selling user training data,
compromising on privacy promises, giving back doors to government agencies.
It just opens this Pandora box of skepticism. If your
big maral redline was no ads and you've just casually
stepped over it, where's the next red line? Or is
there one?
Speaker 1: And that skepticism leads us right into the belly of
the beast. The money, the incentives. Why are they doing this?
Why risk all this backlash?
Speaker 2: Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.
Speaker 1: The source quotes that famous principle from Charlie Munger and
man does it ever apply here? Let's look at the
incentive for open.
Speaker 2: AI because the pot of gold at the end of
this particular rainbow is bigger than anything the Internet has
ever seen before. If they can build the best advertising
business on the planet, they don't just become a successful company,
they become a monster, a titan.
Speaker 1: The source makes a really compelling comparison to Meta, to Facebook,
and this part, I have to admit it gave me chills.
Speaker 2: It should. It reveals the raw mechanics of the Internet economy.
Speaker 1: So the narrator of our source material admits, and I
think a lot of us can relate to this, that
they actually click on most of the ads they see
on Instagram or Facebook.
Speaker 2: I do too, embarrassingly.
Speaker 1: Why though, yea, And the reason given is it's like
someone's reading my brain.
Speaker 2: We have all had that moment. You're having a spoken
conversation with your spouse about a specific brand of coffee maker,
and an hour later, an ad for that exact coffee
maker is at the top of your Instagram feed. It
feels like telepathy.
Speaker 1: It's spooky, and Meta prints literally billions of dollars a
year from this spooky brain reading ability to predict what
we want before we even know we want it.
Speaker 2: Okay, but let's look at the technical reason why Meta
is so good.
Speaker 1: At that.
Speaker 2: They have what's called the social graph. They know who
your friends are, what pages you like, what photos you
stop scrolling to look at for an extra half second.
They infer your interests based on your behavior. It's basically
very very sophisticated guesswork.
Speaker 1: Okay, so they're guessing what.
Speaker 2: I want right now. Take that predictive power and apply
it to an LM like chat GPT. Meta knows what
you like based on what you click, but chat GPT
chat GPT knows what you think.
Speaker 1: Oh wow. Put that into perspective for me.
Speaker 2: When you type a query into chat GPT, you are
articulating your intent with perfect explicit clarity. You're not just
searching for shoes on Google. You're typing into chat GPT.
I need a new pair of running shoes that are
good for someone with flat feet cost under one hundred
dollars because I'm training for my first marathon next month
and my knees have been heard it.
Speaker 1: That's that is so much more data.
Speaker 2: It's not just more data, it's the context. It's the
why Meta has to guess, the why. Open ai is
just told the why. It knows, the nuance, the insecurity,
the motivation behind every question. If OpenAI can leverage that
depth of conversation data to target ads, they won't just
beat meta at this game. They will create the most
powerful advertising machine in human history.
Speaker 1: They will just be sitting on a pile of cash.
Speaker 2: You'll be sitting on the entire global economy.
Speaker 1: It's the infinite money printer button.
Speaker 2: That is exactly how the source describes it. And so
the real question is how long can a company that
is all accounts hemorrhaging cash? How long can they resist
pressing that big, red, shiny button.
Speaker 1: We should probably touch on that hamorrhaging cash part. I
think a lot of people assume that because chat GPT
is so popular, it must be insanely profits.
Speaker 2: The exact opposite. It is astonishingly mind bogglingly expensive to run.
Every single time you type a query and hit enter,
a massive bank of GPUs somewhere has to spin up.
Speaker 1: These are like super powerful graphics.
Speaker 2: Cards, super powerful, very expensive graphics cards. They consume enormous
amounts of electricity, they generate a ton of heat that
needs to be cooled, and they perform trillions of calculations
just to figure out the next word to generate in
your sentence. Some public estimates put the operational cost of
chat GPT at seven hundred thousand dollars a day, or even.
Speaker 1: More seven hundred thousand dollars a day just so I
can ask it to write a poem about my dog exactly.
Speaker 2: And the subscriptions, you know, the twenty dollars a month
for Chat GPT plus. That helps it brings in some revenue,
but does it cover the insane R and d P cost.
Does it cover the hundreds of millions of dollars it
costs just to train the next model like GPT five?
Probably not, almost certainly not. The math just doesn't balance
out with subscriptions alone, not at this scale.
Speaker 1: So you have the investors, right Microsoft is a big one.
They're looking at this massive burn rate.
Speaker 2: They've corn in what thirteen billion dollars now, and at
some point they're going to come knocking and say, okay,
where is our return on investment. Software is supposed to
have high margins. You build it once, you sell it
a million times. But Ai right now has terrible margins
because the cost of running it, the compute cost is
so high for every single user query and ads.
Speaker 1: Ads are the one business model on the Internet that
scales almost infinitely with very.
Speaker 2: Low marginal costs. That's why it's so tempting.
Speaker 1: Okay, But to be fair, open AI claims, and I
have to quote them here, we're not going to accept
money to influence the chat answers, right.
Speaker 2: The official line is trust us.
Speaker 1: But the source argues, and I think this is a
powerful point that the incentive is just too high. If
you are bleeding cash every single day and there's a
button on your desk that says press for billions of dollars,
are we really supposed to believe they won't eventually push it.
Speaker 2: It creates this massive, unavoidable conflict of interest. Even if
they don't explicitly let an advertiser pay to insert their
product into an answer today, the algorithms that run the
ad system will naturally start to optimize for things that
make more money.
Speaker 1: How does that happen? What does that drift look like?
Speaker 2: Well, let's say the AI's internal metrics realize that when
it gives shorter punch your answers, users are more likely
to see and click on the ad in the sidebar. Okay,
the system might start subtly optimizing or shorter answers. Even
if a longer, more nuanced answer would be better. Or
maybe it realizes that when users are in a buying
mood asking about products, the AD rates are higher, so
it might start to gently steer conversations towards shopping topics.
Speaker 1: It nudges you.
Speaker 2: It nudges you. The AI might not tell you an
outright lie, but it will nudge you. And a subtle
nude from a super intelligent AI that sounds incredibly confident
and authoritative, that is an incredibly powerful form of persuasion.
It's the ultimate influencer.
Speaker 1: It is, and that brings us to the part of
this that actually terrifies me. We've talked about the annoyance
of ads, we've talked about the money, but we have
to talk about privacy because this isn't just about seeing
a banner ad for sneakers. This is what the Force
calls the privacy nightmare.
Speaker 2: This is where we get into the really dark timeline stuff.
This is where it gets personal.
Speaker 1: The source brings up this comment from a community member,
a guy named Nate Hurrah, and Nate asks the one
question that I think everybody should be asking.
Speaker 2: Right now, and what was the question?
Speaker 1: He said, I don't care for ads but how will
they know what to show me? Will they use my
memory against me?
Speaker 2: Will they use my memory against me? That phrasing is
it's haunting. It sounds like something out of a psychological
thriller movie.
Speaker 1: It really does. And the source goes deeper into this.
This is completely different from seeing an ad on an
news website because you once searched for flights to Hawaii.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's a different universe of personal data.
Speaker 1: This implies that the AI is scanning your intimate journal
entries that you've pasted into it, your confidential work notes,
your deepest fears that you've shared with it in a
late night chat.
Speaker 2: Let's play this out with a real example. Millions of
people right now are using chad GPT as a sort
of makeshift therapist.
Speaker 1: Right. It's available twenty four to seven. It's non judgmental, exactly.
Speaker 2: So you talk to it about your anxiety, your struggles,
and your marriage. Your insecurity is about your job performance.
You pour your heart out to this machine.
Speaker 1: Okay, so I'm being extremely vulnerable.
Speaker 2: Right, And the AI has that feature called memory, right,
so it stores these facts to be more helpful later.
It logs away user is anxious about public speaking user
is currently going through a divorce, user feels insecure about
their weight.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it doesn't have to ask me the same
questions over and over. That's a helpful feature.
Speaker 2: It's a helpful feature for you. But what happens if
that memory database is accessible to the advertising engine. Then
the very next day you open your browser and you
see a targeted ad for a local divorce lawyer, or
for a specific antidepressant, or for a weight loss program
that targets the exact insecurity you confess to the machine
in confidence.
Speaker 1: The night before. That feels predatory.
Speaker 2: It feels predatory because it is. It's using human vulnerability
as a targeting metric. It's one thing for Amazon to
know I bought a toaster and recommend another kitchen appliance.
It's a completely different thing for an intelligence to know
that I feel profoundly lonely and then use that knowledge
to sell me a subscription to a dating app. That
is literally using your memory, your own private thoughts against
you to extract money.
Speaker 1: And we know this isn't just paranoia. Someone actually asked Grock,
which is Elon Musk's AI, about Sam Altman's quotes on this,
and Grock confirmed that Altman himself previously called this exact
scenario dystopian. Even the other ais are keeping the receipts on.
Speaker 2: Him are fascinating because they're all fact checking each other
in public. But really, looking at the track record of
big tech over the last decade, why on earth should
we trust open ai to be any different.
Speaker 1: That's the exact point the source makes every right look
at Facebook, Cabridge Analytica, all of the data scandals, and what.
Speaker 2: Was the end result? Did Facebook get shut down? Did
they stop showing hyper targeted ads? No, they paid a fine,
a big one, but just a fine.
Speaker 1: A cost of doing business.
Speaker 2: Exactly. The source mentions that Facebook makes hundreds of millions
of dollars just from letting fraudulent scam ads run on
its platform, and they largely turn a blind eye because
the revenue is so massive. The fines are a rounding
error for them. A five billion dollar fine sounds like
a lot to us, but if you make one hundred
and twenty billion dollars a year, it's just a business expense.
It's attacks.
Speaker 1: So the fears that open ai looks at that model
and just says, hey, we can afford to pay a
parking ticket every few years if.
Speaker 2: The choices go bankrupt because we can't afford our servers
or violate some privacy norms, make billions of dollars and
then pay a small fine and issue an apology later.
Which path do you think a for profit corporation chooses,
especially one under immense pressure to deliver a return to
investors like Microsoft who have thirteen billion dollars on the line.
Speaker 1: It's a really sobering thought. We are essentially just relying
on their moral compass, which, as we've already established with
the whole last resort flip flop, seems to be spinning
a bit wildly right now.
Speaker 2: And this is where it gets technically tricky too. They'll
use language like anonymized data to reassure.
Speaker 1: Everyone right, don't worry, your name isn't attached to it.
Speaker 2: But with natural language, it is incredibly difficult to truly
anonymize data. If I write a long, specific story about
my day at work, you can remove my name, but
the context might be so unique that it could still
be traced back to me.
Speaker 1: If I tell the AI about a specific problem I'm
having with a specific project at a specific type.
Speaker 2: Of company, exactly the data is the person. So this
idea that they can build some perfect impati wall between
what you tell the AI and what the ad engine knows.
It's technically very very difficult, if not impossible, especially if
you want the ads to be highly relevant, and if the.
Speaker 1: Ads aren't relevant, they don't make as much money.
Speaker 2: Precisely, to make the big money, they have to invade
the privacy. There really isn't a middle ground.
Speaker 1: And users are starting to notice this potential betrayal, which
leads us to the final part of this the root
awakening in the market.
Speaker 2: The backlash.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's talk about the fallout, because people are not
just sitting back and taking this. The source highlights a
potential user exodus.
Speaker 2: People are on Twitter on Reddit posting screenshots of them
canceling their subscriptions. The hashtag goodbye chat GPT has been trending.
Speaker 1: Where are they going?
Speaker 2: Well, in the ultimate irony, they might be going to Google,
to the ad giant, to the ad giant to get
away from ads. It sounds completely insane when you say
it out loud, it does, but think about it from
the user's perspective. Right now, Google Gemini is free and
it is ad free. Course calls this the friction problem.
If using chat GPT suddenly becomes annoying, if you have
to close a pop up AD, or you have to
constantly wonder if the answer you're getting is sponsored, that
is friction.
Speaker 1: And we are lazy creatures by nature.
Speaker 2: We are we always follow the path of least resistance.
If I have to click an X to close a
banner AD before I get my answer, that's like a
tiny microaggression from the software. If Google Gemini can offer
a comparable level of intelligence, and let's be honest, Gemini
one point five pro is very very good. It's arguably
on par with GPT four for many tasks. If the
quality is the same, but one is cluttered with ads
and the other is clean, the migration could be huge.
Speaker 1: It's smooth sailing versus a bumpy.
Speaker 2: Road, exactly. And Google can afford to play this long game.
They have YouTube money, they have Google Search money. They
can run Gemini at a loss for years and years
just to starve open AI of users and revenue.
Speaker 1: So you think Google could intentionally keep Gemini ad free,
not because they're morally superior, but just as a competitive
weapon to kill tat GPT.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, it's a classic business strategy. It's like predatory pricing.
We have basically the same technology, but ours is pure
and clean. There's has sold out. If you're a user,
why would you stay with the one that sold out?
Speaker 1: It's the old clean web argument. It's like Netflix versus
cable tv back in the day. The killer feature of
early Netflix was no commercials.
Speaker 2: And now open ai is becoming cable TV.
Speaker 1: Well that is a burn. That's a good one. Open
ai is becoming cable TV.
Speaker 2: It fits perfectly. You pay a monthly subscription fee, but
you still have to watch ads. That is the cable
TV model.
Speaker 1: That is the worst model. That's the model everyone has.
Speaker 2: It's the model that an entire generation cut the cord
to escape from, and here we are reinventing it for
twenty first century artificial intelligence.
Speaker 1: It's wild and it just brings us right back around
to Demossopus's original point. If the magic isn't paying the bills,
how real is the magic?
Speaker 2: That's the final verdict. The source seems to land on.
The claims of AGI being just around the corner are
starting to look really far fetched. If the company leading
the charge has to pivot to ads just to keep
the lights on if you.
Speaker 1: Really had a technology that could create unlimited energy, or
cure cancer or a true superintelligence, you would not be
selling ad.
Speaker 2: Space now, you wouldn't. This pivot to ads suggests that
AGI is hard. It's really, really, really hard. Recreating the
functionality of the human brain is proving to be incredibly
difficult and expensive, and the magic that we see today
isn't generating enough direct revenue to sustain the massive operation
behind it. We're not in the post scarcity AGI future,
yet we're still very much in the scarcity driven present,
which brings.
Speaker 1: Us full circle right back to that tweet from the beginning,
the one about the machine God, the machine God, leave
zero some quant finance and come build the machine God.
That was the recruitment pitch. That was the dream. Come
here and build something divine, something that will change humanity forever.
Speaker 2: And the reality, the root awakening is come here and
help us optimizer ad placement algorithms.
Speaker 1: Irony is just it's so thick. You have these brilliant
people who love jobs, where they made millions optimizing financial.
Speaker 2: Algorithms at zero sum game, a.
Speaker 1: Zero sum game, right, They left that to do something meaningful,
something that would create value for the whole world, and
now they're being told their new job is to figure
out the best way to sell toothpaste to people who
are asking for philosophy advice.
Speaker 2: Imagine the morale inside that company right now. You thought
you were working on the computer from Star Trek, and
suddenly your manager walks in and says, hey, great work
on that emergent reasoning, But can you make sure the
model mentions coca cola naturally every fifteen queries.
Speaker 1: Or so naturally that's the key word.
Speaker 2: And you know what, that technical challenge might actually be
harder than building agi. How do you make a paid
advertisement sound like the genuine, trusted advice of a wise friend.
Speaker 1: That goes right back to the medic comparifon reading my brain?
Speaker 2: Exactly if they actually succeed at this, and these are
some of the smartest people on the plant, they might.
If they succeed in making ads that are perfectly conversational,
that are woven seamlessly into the dialogue, that's not just
annoying anymore. That's psychologically potent in a way we have
never seen before. It's a level of personalized persuasion that
is unprecedented.
Speaker 1: It blurs the line between reality and advertising.
Speaker 2: It raises it. If I ask my AI, what's the
best way to clean this weinstain, and it says, oh,
you should use this specific brand of stain remover. I'm
inclined to trust it because I see it as an objective,
all knowing authority.
Speaker 1: The encyclopedia.
Speaker 2: Right, we don't assume the encyclopedia is sponsored, but now
it is. It exploits our natural human tendency the authority
bias on a massive scale. We're wired to trust the
expert in the room, and they're positioning the AI as
the ultimate expert.
Speaker 1: It just highlights that no matter how futuristic and sci
fi the technology gets, the underlying economics are stubbornly old school.
Someone has to pay for the electricity, someone has to
pay for the servers, and on the Internet, for twenty
five years, that someone has usually been the advertiser.
Speaker 2: We tried to build a god and we ended up
with a billboard.
Speaker 1: A billboard that knows all of our secrets.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the part to remember.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's try to wrap this up. Let' summarize what
we've untangled here today on thrilling threads. Let's do it right. So, first,
we have Google led by Demesisavus calling out the AGI bluff.
He's basically pointing out that if the tech was as
world changing as claimed, the AD model wouldn't even be
on the table.
Speaker 2: Then you have the trust issue with Sam Altman, his
complete one hundred and eighty degree pivot from calling ads
dystopian to embracing them as a necessary evil, which has
seriously damaged his in the company's credibility.
Speaker 1: And finally, and maybe most importantly, we have the very
real privacy nightmare, the terrifying prospect of an AI that
has access to your memories, your fears, your private conversations
and using that intimate knowledge to target you with sales pitches.
Speaker 2: It's really a trifecta of disappointment, isn't it. It's economic
reality crashing into broken promises, all built on a foundation
of potential privacy erosion.
Speaker 1: So here's the question that I want to leave you
our listeners with today. It's the one the source really drives.
Speaker 2: Home, a provocative one.
Speaker 1: If an AI knows your secrets, your fears, and your
dreams and it uses that deeply personal information to sell
you a product, is that just a helpful personalized service?
Is that just good marketing in the twenty first century,
or is that the literal definition of the dystopia that
Sam Altman himself warned us about.
Speaker 2: It's such a fine line between helpful and manipulative, and
I think we are standing right on that line about
to fall over to the wrong side. The technology allows
for a level of psychological manipulation that our laws and
maybe even our own minds just aren't prepared to handle.
Speaker 1: Yet. I really want to hear from you on this.
Go to the comment section wherever you're listening and tell
us would you switch to Google Gemini right now just
to avoid ads? Or is chat GPT's product just too good,
too integrated into your life to quit no matter how
many commercials they shove in your face.
Speaker 2: I'm genuinely here for us to see the answers. Is
brand loyalty to chat gpt strong enough to withstand the
friction of ads? Or will people just move to the cleaner,
easier alternative, That is the question.
Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us on this episode of thrilling Threads.
We're going to keep pulling on these loose threads until
we find the truth, or until the.
Speaker 2: AI gently suggests we talk about something else.
Speaker 1: Don't even say that. Keep questioning the narrative. Everyone, We'll
see you next time.
Speaker 2: Stay curious,