alt Hacker NewsOnce LLMs get fast enough at processing real-time images Apple (or anybody really) can just roll out a browser rendering engine that just masks all ads. It will take a few years but the browser ad-business is in it's terminal phase.
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The race of ending personal computing is there. I am sure big players want to control entire stack and users just sitting in front of dumb monitors consuming their ads.
Safari was the first to cripple adblockers and went further than ManifestV3, but it seems their reputation will never catch up to that.
If we're just talking about image based ads it would be easier to simply denylist every image on a page and only render alt-text until the user clicks to reveal it.
Worth noting though that Apple injects ads into the News app, which is just a webview, so it's certainly not them that will do this.
Yes, it's a near-universal legal requirement that humans be able to tell if something is an ad or not. So once they sabotage that, they're in hot water.
Apple sells ads too; increasingly across its surfaces.
This is the first and only use-case for LLMs that I am genuinely excited about.
You anticipate a large language model to understand visual queues for an advertisement?
Given that Safari doesn't even have a built-in ad-blocker, I doubt Apple will be leading the charge on this.
Such a move would also presumably be incompatible with Apple's highly lucrative search engine deal with Google.