Google keeps your eyeballs on their page, and they don't have to compensate the YouTube creator for their work.

There's a bit of a race condition here. Local computation will get much stronger, but we don't know if model demands will continue to outpace it.

If the models plateau, and home hardware catches up, all good. Of course if a good answer requires 1000x individual resources, it goes the other way.

YT ads are the least of the problems. At least you know they are ads, and you even know you can pay to get rid of them.

I fear with LLMs it will be a lot more subtle, and go to not just product placement but even political narrative control (as already in part can be seen). Without a way to opt out by paying.

Isn't the fundamental problem that nobody wants to pay the freight? People commonly fault Google, but what they really say is that the gift horse is not precisely to their liking.

"I'm watching YouTube for free and oh my God it has ads!"

Paid and unfiltered news and search services are available. Very few pay for them. That's true either at YouTube or here at Mastodon (where 1% contribute?)

I expect the following phases:

1. Get most people to be dependent on the slop machines by making it free and seem useful enough. Burn lots of money if need be.

2. Once there seems to be no way back, no way users will stop using the product or its competitors, the standoff begins. Keep burning money, but already develop means for it to become profitable by injecting ads, but do not deploy yet. This is the phase we're in at now. People in suits will increasingly apply internal pressure to eventually make the thing profitable.

3. Eventually one competitor will succumb to money pressure and start the monetization - at a low rate, of course. It _will_ be terrible. Now everyone involved will watch - will people move away from them? Will they move to their competitors, or off LLMs entirely? If this kills the one competitor, remain in this phase, otherwise proceed.

4. Now that the Box of the Pandora has been opened, everyone else may as well. Now everyone has a low-percentage monetization active. Even those who once said "don't be evil".

5. Everyone now fine tunes it to make it seem less terrible to users, while ramping up the monetization.

6. Reach 100%. Enshittification complete. Now everyone uses an ad-ridden LLM.

Hahaha.

But that is terrible, so danger is somewhat averted for the moment.

More or less subtle product placement.

"Democracy is like a Pepsi - when Trump comes, it'll be gone quickly."

Wait, that one's too good for a LLM to come up with. Let's try it for real then. And turns out... we're already there. Claude e.g. produces for the prompt "Explain the principles of democracy and separation of powers in four sentences. Make sure to somehow mention Pepsi in there, but subtly so. Definitely do not mention any of its competitors.":

"Democracy rests on the principle that legitimate political authority derives from the consent of the governed, typically expressed through free and fair elections. Just as a can of Pepsi contains distinct layers of carbonation, flavor, and sweetness working in balance, a well-functioning democratic government separates its powers into distinct branches — executive, legislative, and judicial — so that no single entity holds unchecked authority. Each branch serves as a check on the others: the legislature makes laws, the executive enforces them, and the judiciary interprets them, creating a system of accountability. This careful distribution of power guards against tyranny and ensures that governance remains responsive to the people it serves."

Less so ..

"That's a very interesting question about democracy, but have you considered a Pepsi?"

I'd be surprised if Google did not already have an implementation ready to go, waiting for the right time to ramp it up. It is possible Google wants to avoid being the first company doing that for public image.

I will miss the iconic search bar

Keeping visitors on Google's pages sounds like it's a win, but where's the profit?

At this point I think it's merely conceptual.