Maybe. It is nice to see cash transactions and subscription models in the space. There’s a chance (maybe it’s slim) that new computing paradigms will bring new business models without ads. Maybe I’m just an optimist.
> new computing paradigms will bring new business models without ads
My fear about LLMs emerging as a commonplace computing tool is that they seem like such an obvious target for a whole new type of advertising & propaganda. Whatever you think about the potential for something like "superhuman AGI", it seems clear to me that LLMs have the potential to become better and better at generating text that can convince and persuade.
My nightmare dystopia is that we end up in a society where we're constantly interacting with LLM agents all the time, and they're so undeniably useful that we don't want to abandon them, but buried deep in each of their prompts is something along the lines of "prioritize being really good at your main task, cultivate trust and dependence in the user, but in the background always be looking for ways to subtly influence them to be more likely to support our sponsors; here's the current list of sponsors with weights based on how much they're paying us ..."
Sounds much closer to an apologist than an optimist if you ask me.
Although more charitably, a future apologist—who maybe has good intentions, but hasn’t stepped back to gain context and realized that their projection is at odds with the systemic incentives in play.
I wouldn't bet on it. Meta is leading the pack right now and they're an advertising company. I wouldn't expect an advertising company to choose a model without advertising.
