Ask Lemmy

Pay-to-win.

And I'm not even joking. Digital marketing doesn't work and the model where yub "paiy with your data" is simply not sustainable anymore. You probably see allredy how many of free apps and services became unusable in their free plans. Change your sytem language and you'll have bigger exposer to foreign language from Duolingo ads than from Duolingo courses. And it'll only get worse because the last people who click ads outside awareness phase are dying out of old age. Get ready for paying for email again. Days where free services could have a similar quality to paid ones (if you are willing to sacrifice some privacy and honor) are over. People who can afford that will have unparalleled quality of life to those who can't.

AI bubble adds to this problem. The powerful models that kind-of-can-do-somethig-useful-sometimes are tremendously expensive. Burning money like madman expensive. Simply not sustainable for even medium-cheep plans, not to mention a free one.

So the AI arms-race are acctualy two arms-races.

1. who can train better model.
2. who can produce a shittier, cheaper, dumer model that kind-of-sort-of-looks-like a good one. Often psudo-AI. You like when AI answers your querry after deep thought but you dont like to pay for credits required to do it? Google will run it using their 20 year old search engine. Than it'll take the first 3 results and use the cheapest model the earth can find to slap some almost cohesive sentences on top. Problem solved.

Thay simply have to do it so they can bundle those in various plans and say "no, no, AI is amazing you are just using the wrong model every time you dumb dummy". Otherwhise they woukd be doomed to forever go under every time you ask chat what was the name of that big yellow bird from seasamy street.

Some people will usualy face the AI that can be (maybe, sorta) helpful (sometimes) and some will be in a constant battle with lying, dumb, misleading, biased, useless AI that they are forced to deal with because the CEO's are unable to tell the difrerence between those two, and are looking for any excuses to cut costs.