The $3T AI Opportunity Everyone Missed (opens in new tab)

I’d very much like to see some citations for those numbers, but my intuition is that the premise is likely valid, and that AI based personalization will likely lead to increased conversion rates for ads while decreasing production costs.

That’s not to say it would make the internet better. What’s good for the internet and what makes a lot of money are often at odds, and the latter usually wins.

There isn't any evidence that surveillance-based advertising performs any better than context-based advertising. Remember, vendors didn't choose this method of selling -- platforms did. It's become a collar on all of commerce, a tax that everyone must pay to reach the eyeballs they want.

The winner here is the platforms who push surveillance advertising models. It's not better for advertisers and definitely not for users and LLM-based content will not help one bit.

> The real opportunity isn't in API fees or enterprise AI. It's in something far bigger: AI-generated, personalized audio and video advertising. Think programmatic advertising, but orders of magnitude larger.

It’s hard to embrace the hype of this “opportunity” when the end goal seems downright horrific for society

Advertising cost is added to the product price. In order to generate one trillion dollars in advertising revenue, there would have to be about 20 trillion more in product spend. Civilization does not have another 20 trillion sitting around to spend.

Currently, consumers are totally bombarded with ads, on TV, on streaming, on social media, on websites. There are multiple copies of the same ad during an hour time slot. Consumers go from slight interest, to irritation, to disgust, to nauseated.

Currently, the algorithms that target ads are complete failure. At least, they could get my gender right.

The next big advance in AI is going to be ad blockers for social media, streaming video, live television. Then the next step will be bots that respond to ads, with total click through rate and messages directly to the CEO of the company. Imagine an App that calls the CEO and replays the audio of their video ad. Or an App that DM's the CEO for every social media ad. The CEO bothered a million people, let the million respond directly to the CEO.

two thoughts:

1. "trust me bro" numbers are meaningless 2. nothing would push me off the internet faster than AI marketers that act like they know me

No one is missing the chance to further ruin our lives with more marketing, trust me.