Thread

1. Traster · 1790680094 · focus · HN ↗

   I'd be kind of surprised if OpenAI were really doing this deliberately because a whole bunch of their execs come from Meta, and all those guys learned the hard way.

   First: You don't want to leak information about your users to advertising networks because it's going to leak, get back to your customers, they're going to figure out you're doing it and get really angry.

   But second and more importantly - it's a much better business model to collect that data for yourself, keep it in house and then you control how you use that data to target ads which gives you a massive competitive advantage in selling ads because you have unique targeting data.

   The way meta does this now is the model, they don't give the advertiser a list of the people you're going to show the advert to, the advertiser gives you a list of characteristics they want to hit and meta decides who those people are.

   1. jeltz · 1790680976 · focus · HN ↗

      > a whole bunch of their execs come from Meta, and all those guys learned the hard way.

      Apparently they have not learned, or they learned the wrong lesson. I do not think they leak it intentionally as hoarding is typically more profitable than selling but anyone who has been in the industry for some time knows that the move fast and break things attitude has caused enormous amounts of data leaks.

   2. delis-thumbs-7e · 1790683916 · focus · HN ↗

      > First: You don't want to leak information about your users to advertising networks because it's going to leak, get back to your customers, they're going to figure out you're doing it and get really angry.

      And then they will keep using your digital drugs like nothing happened and forget about the whole thing. So watch out, executive!

      > But second and more importantly - it's a much better business model to collect that data for yourself, keep it in house and then you control how you use that data to target ads which gives you a massive competitive advantage in selling ads because you have unique targeting data.

      Perhaps, but getting to the saturated market on this might be something LLM labs simply don’t have time for. They are haemorrhaging money, no path to profitability and OpenAI especially has made ridiculous promises on data centre -spending for the coming year. They need money now.

      1. sodapopcan · 1790690701 · focus · HN ↗

         > And then they will keep using your digital drugs like nothing happened and forget about the whole thing. So watch out, executive!

         Not only this, many will continue to help the company by bullying anyone who decides to stop using the drugs.

   3. gorbachev · 1790689755 · focus · HN ↗

      > I'd be kind of surprised if OpenAI were really doing this deliberately because a whole bunch of their execs come from Meta, and all those guys learned the hard way.

      The lesson they've learned is that if the profit from an activity is X, and the sanctions/reputational hit costs less than X, it's full steam forward.

   4. coliveira · 1790692870 · focus · HN ↗

      The only thing they learned from Meta is that this does work!

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