I like and read Ben's stuff regularly; he often frames "better" from the business side. He will use terms like "revealed preference" to claim users actually prefer bad product designs (e.g. most users use free ad-based platforms), but a lot of human behavior is impulsive, habitual, constrained, and irrational.

This guy writes about business strategy not philosophy and religion. Don't conflate the two.

If you liked that, you'll enjoy his take on how, actually, bubbles are good: https://stratechery.com/2025/the-benefits-of-bubbles/

yeah... and it's (partly) based on the claim that it has network effects like how Facebook has? I don't see that at all, there's basically no social or cross-account stuff in any of them and if anything LLMs are the best non-lock-in system we've ever had: none of them are totally stable or reliable, and they all work by simply telling it to do the thing you want. your prompts today will need tweaking tomorrow, regardless of if it's in ChatGPT or Gemini, especially for individuals who are using the websites (which also keep changing).

sure, there are APIs and that takes effort to switch... but many of them are nearly identical, and the ecosystem effect of ~all tools supporting multiple models seems far stronger than the network effect of your parents using ChatGPT specifically.

Ben Thompson is a content creator. Even if Ben’s content does not directly benefit from ads, it is the fact that other content creator’s content having ads is what makes Ben’s content premium in comparison.

I would say that, on this topic (ads on internet content), Ben Thompson may not be as objective a perspective as he has on other topics.

That take was such bad taste. I get where he's coming from, and I don't like it one bit.

The problem with ads in AI products is, can they be blocked effectively?

If there are ads on a side bar, related or not to what the user is searching for, any adblock will be able to deal with them (uBlock is still the best, by far).

But if "ads" are woven into the responses in a manner that could be more or less subtle, sometimes not even quoting a brand directly, but just setting the context, etc., this could become very difficult.

Indeed. Why do people follow these clowns? They seem to read high level takes and spew out their nonsense theories.

They fail to mention Google's edge: Inter-Chip Interconnect and the allegedly 1/3 of price. Then they talk about software moat and it sounds like they never even compiled a hello world in either architecture. smh

And this comes out days after many in-depth posts like:

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/tpuv7-google-takes-a-s...

A crude Google search AI summary of those would be better than this dumb blogpost.

"advertising in ChatGPT would make DeepSeek/Qwen/<other AI> a better product"

There, fixed.

A better product to make money of course.

Ben Thompson is a sharp guy who can't see the forest for the trees. Nor most of the trees. He can only see the three biggest trees that are fighting over the same bit of sunlight.

I am not 100% sure this is wrong?

I frequently ask chatgpt about researching products or looking at reviews, etc and it is pretty obvious that I want to buy something, and the bridge right now from 'researching products' to 'buying stuff' is basically non-existent on ChatGPT. ChatGPT having some affiliate relationships with merchants might actually be quite useful for a lot of people and would probably generate a ton of revenue.

"Better product" here means "monetizes harder". You just have a different concept of product quality than hardline-capitalist finance bros.