AI ads need a hard boundary from answers

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 20:15

   What do you think changes when the advertising platform is also this assistant that you're supposed to trust and use to make really important decisions in your life? So a couple of things. One is I do think that there will be some paid non-advertising things. And if you have a particular worry about that, you'll be able to do that, whether it's from OpenAI or from others. And so I think there's a range of choice that gets there. The second thing is, you know, I think one of the reasons why, you know, Google so far has created the best, you know, call it business model yet invented in human history, or at least the best medium, so forth, is the part of what it did with AdWords was it said, this is where, this is the advertising thing. This is the non-advertising thing, right? And so, and then made the advertising thing quality enough

2. 21:09

   that people would also treat it most often as an alternative class of search result. Like I actually know people who on certain kinds of searches specifically do the search and then look at AdWords thinking that this is the, I'm looking for a commercial answer to this particular query and the intersection of the dollars and the click-through ads actually makes that a good search result. So I think that the key principle here will be to keep that like this is advertising, this is not advertising, and that it's not the non-advertising isn't being influenced the way that you see in other things. Like, for example, you know, when you're searching for stuff on Amazon and you see it's sponsored, then surprisingly that sponsored is also very high in the search results. And so you wonder what the blend is. You have to keep them, you know,

3. 22:02

   quite distinct in terms of how this is playing. And then the third, I think, is not just the kind of the transparency, which is the second point, but also kind of making a kind of contractually binding commitment that you could be held accountable to. Like, you know, for example, you know, the search quality team at Google is completely distinct and says, we don't have anything like that ad space and everything else. We don't look at that at all in how we're making our search results. And I think you need to have some kind of commitment like that within it.

4. 22:45

   Because when you hold those things, exactly what OpenAI, and it's part of the reason why people strongly prefer to have a free search with Google and Bing and then navigate the ads because they'd like the free opens it up to lots more people by the universality. It also creates a, like, it's just kind of like, you know, these kinds of technology projects are best when at massive volume. So as opposed to all the nuances, and this is, you know, like in a separate context, They've made this argument of, you know, the CEO of Apple and the Uber driver have the same iPhone broadly, right?

5. 23:28

   Because it's kind of like it's made for a broad mass market audience. And sure, maybe the Uber driver's got the $800 version and the CEO has the $1,600 version, but they're largely the same thing. And so I think that that's one of the things about having a very universal product. And it's one of the reasons why having a pre-AI product with advertising as the economic model creates that universality that's very important. But, of course, you need to keep to these principles of integrity, which is the reason why I started there.