alt Hacker News(In)famously, Google's motto used to be "Don't be evil"
Scary to think about, if moving away from "Don't be evil" is the precedent for an "AGI company"
Replies
Are you defining "evil" as "has an ad-supported product"?
In every tech generation, for good or bad, mainstream consumers choose the ad-based product over the paid product.
So every company that wants scale in the long-term ends up adopting an ad-based free tier to avoid becoming niche, it seems. Even the majority of HN users now appear to use gmail despite paid email hosts being incredibly cheap.
Edit: Not sure why the downvotes. Would you prefer that OpenAI leaves Google (who is ad-supported) to win the general public? I'm saying the above as someone who does purchase the ad-free plan when available, and uses paid email.
In a way, it's honest that they left it. Other companies wouldn't find issue in being blatantly evil while keeping the motto.