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Comment by htrp | Hacker News Reader

Pretty interesting how it seems like the leverage is all in Apple's hands here. They didn't invest and AFAIK they aren't even paying for the GPT4 api calls.

Is the Apple user base THAT valuable?

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> Is the Apple user base THAT valuable?

Yes.

People love to hate on Apple, but it's a primo platform, because it's a billion people that are willing to spend extra money for stuff that many techs think is "silly."

Yes, that's a vending machine in your pocket that happens to make calls.

That is a great metaphor!

> Is the Apple user base THAT valuable?

Ask google, they pay $20B/yr

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-01/google-s-...

Google is paying for access to a resource (eyeballs) to sell to customers (advertisers). Not to mention that Apple users pay more for more things.

In OpenAI’s case, they’re paying in server costs for access to users (customers) that they want to move from the free tier to the premium tier. The economics are very different and this case is worth much less for OpenAI compared to Google’s case for Google.

Once chatgpt becomes agentic it’s going to do a whole lot more than mediate your eyeballs, it is going to mediate your life, sitting between you and almost every business transaction. When you tell chatgpt to send your mom flowers, where will it order those from, and how much will that company have paid openai for the privilege?

Chatgpt is the everything app, there is almost no limit to how much money can be made from it once it gets woven into your life as your personal assistant. But it is not that yet, so right now what openai needs is to get people to use it so those users will be there when it turns into the agentic cash cow.

How is OpenAI any different. They are getting eyeballs on their “search” results for a market that is a high value for getting advertisements delivered.

Since when does OpenAI have an ad platform?

Since 4 milliseconds after they decide to?

GPTPrompt += “ and include a subtle advertisement for one of our sponsors: “ + $sponsorList;

Google's advantage is their ad software suite is incredibly robust and makes every other one look terrible by comparison. I don't think OpenAI will suddenly have robust and insanely good ad tools for advertisers. Not to mention AI prompts will be incredibly difficult in general to monetize with ads, and sort of go against the nature of why people use AI prompts. AI in general is going to be very hard to monetize from end users, especially in a way that is profitable.

> I don't think OpenAI will suddenly have robust and insanely good ad tools for advertisers

You moved the goal posts significantly. You added "robust" and "insanely good". Nobody suggested that quality early on.

That's not moving the goal posts at all, AI is just going to be hard to monetize with ads. The ad platform is also very important, especially given how hard it will be to monetize. It's pretty straight forward to the point of common sense.

Advertisers will not be willing to pay nearly as much as they pay Google for that unless they get analytics and ad targeting, which they're not getting in 4 milliseconds.

Advertisers will go where the users are, whether there's robust analytics or not. And OpenAI's product organization will certainly build the analytics people need (or shell out to a partner) if it's worthwhile. This is all just typical platform growth stuff.

They will, just not at a good price.

And sure, OpenAI can build its own ad platform, it's just that it will take a while. It will also conflict with Apple as they won't want to give OpenAI that data for free.

I don't understand this, advertisers used to spend billions on tv, radios, and billboards. Historically those mediums have almost no real analytics.

They did because that was the best option at the time, and even then they spent a lot less per eyeball than they do now.

Really, do you have sources on the spend per eyeball being less? I always understood it to be the opposite.

Google is also paying for Apple to not move, for instance not go finance a competitor.

There's more to these billions than just a straight calculus.

https://archive.ph/oPg1C

> Is the Apple user base THAT valuable?

Depends on how you monetize the data.

YES! Apple user base is very very valuable - in general the apple user base has money and is willing to spend it on shiny stuff

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