Today, most people use LLMs as an information lookup and generation system.
Develop a personalized workout plan for me.
Summarize and respond to this email.
Give me some recipes I can make with these ingredients.
Without some new breakthrough in AI that opens the door to AGI, we probably won’t get any novel answers when we ask ChatGPT how to monetize it.
So how do you monetize a publicly facing, free-to-use GenAI service like ChatGPT? Since history doesn’t repeat but often rhymes, we can look at what the previous generation of publicly facing, free-to-use information lookup services—search engines—did. The answer is obvious: advertising and promoted content. Where there is information, there is attention, and where there is attention, there is advertising.
It’s not hard to imagine someone asking about a workout plan and being nudged toward supplements or a gym membership to go with it. It’s also not hard to picture a vibe coder writing a web app and getting “helpful” suggestions about the three “best” hosting providers. Or an image generation system that ever-so-slightly prefers slipping in the Nike logo over the Adidas one. The degree of favoritism, of course, correlates with how much Nike and Adidas bid for logo placement. This is the kind of truly context-aware advertising that today’s marketers can only dream about.
In short, the bet on the future of GenAI today is like the bet on the future of search in the late ’90s and early 2000s.
As with search, there will be tension between Model Trainers and Providers (MTPs) on one hand, and content creators on the other. MTPs want to consume and utilize the highest-quality content while maintaining control over user attention and giving back as little as possible to content creators. Just look at the tension between newspapers and search engines today.
Meanwhile, content creators will be motivated to have their work included in model training, repeated, and recommended—boosting their reach and viewpoints. Conversely, other creators will want their content excluded from LLM training and output for privacy, ethical, or financial reasons.
And just like search, there will be tension between MTPs and users. Users want quick access to the information they’re looking for. MTPs, on the other hand, want to surface whatever provides them the highest ROI. In other words, they’ll try to maximize the number of “Promoted Thoughts” without triggering users to switch to another source.
The world is worried about some superintelligence taking over, but we don’t even have a shared definition of what “intelligence” actually is. The world is also worried about the internet being clogged with AI Slop or succumbing to the Dead Internet Theory—both of which will happen in one form or another. I’d like to add another fear to the list: OpenAI becoming the next Google, SEO being replaced by MRO (Model Regurgitation Optimization), and sponsored posts giving way to sponsored content generation.