This from @caseynewton brings to the foreground something that’s been eating at me:
What exactly do Google and OpenAI and Microsoft and the rest of the AI bubble think is going to happen here when LLMs disincentivize the creation of the data that feeds them?!
The premise of the ad-supported web is that you profit by driving traffic to your site. The premise of LLMs is in large part to •supplant• traffic to web sites. LLMs need people to keep creating web sites. (More in the article.)
In private, behind closed doors, is the expectation that…well, what? That people will just keep posting useful bot-visible information for free?
Is there an expectation that AI model trainers will end up paying for content, and ad revenue is supplanted by “LLM training data fee” revenue? (I can’t imagine GoogleAISoft’s investors think that’s the high-ROI lucrative future they’ve buying.)
Do they privately know this LLM stuff is a bubble, and expect it to burst before data source die-out kills it?
At a guess, it’s all just FOMO greed-panic and nobody’s thinking that far ahead. But truly, I wonder! What •do• they think will happen?!
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