alt Hacker NewsThis will be an amusing post to revisit in the internet archives when or if they do introduce ads in the future but dressed up in a different presentation and naming. Ultimately the investors will come calling.
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History is littered with challenger companies chest thumping that they’re never going to do the bad thing, then doing the bad thing like a year later.
History shows that software companies with large chunk of their platform being Free to Use mainly survive thanks to Ads.
You really think the giant ad company would put ads into their product after saying they won't? You should strive to be less cynical.
Won't all the ad revenue come from commerce use cases ... and they seem to be excluding that from this announcement:
> AI will increasingly interact with commerce, and we look forward to supporting this in ways that help our users. We’re particularly interested in the potential of agentic commerce
My thoughts exactly. They are using the Google playbook of "don't be evil" until it becomes extremely profitable to be evil.
I believe Perplexity is doing this already, but specifically for looking up products, which is how I use AI sometimes. I am wondering how long before eBay, Amazon etc partner with AI companies to give them more direct API access so they can show suggested products and what not. I like how AI can summarize things for me when looking up products, then I open up the page and confirm for myself.