> Don't underestimate advertising.

OpenAI is talking out of their ass with their advertising plans. Meta and Google are an advertising duopoly, extremely anti-competitive, and basically defrauding their own customers. OpenAI can't just replicate that.

Worse still is that OpenAI has no competitive edge. All the hype around their advertising plans is based on the idea that they can blend the ads right into the response, a turbocharged version of Native Advertising.

This is explicitly illegal. Very explicitly.

The US' FTC may have been declawed by the current US government, but the rest of the west will nuke them from orbit over it. Doubtless OpenAI will try some stunt alike marking the entire LLM response as "this is an ad", but that won't satisfy the regulators.

This only gets worse with further problems. An LLM hallucinating product features is going to invoke regulator wrath as well, and an LLM deciding to cut off the adcopy early will invoke the wrath of the advertiser.

> Yet the ad business with a couple billion users seems profitable enough to fund frontier LLM research and inference infrastructure as a side-gig in these companies

Also important: Not anymore. The tech giants are now issuing quite a lot of debt to pay for the AI plans.