Companies have official discords to respond to requests or questions. They attempted to call out a company (presumably US based) for this concern and got the specified response
increasing friction for ad blockers will increase ad views will increase revenue.
It is pretty easy for a company whose existence depends on ads to see people that use ad blockers as leeches or freeloaders or other derogatory terms to justify making their lives more difficult.
Youtube premium is around $15, and depending on people's video usage, it pays for itself
This is the reflex/instinct approach though. Sure, they increase friction for people with adblock, and then 5 minutes later, uBlock Origin does an update to undo Youtube's friction, and we're back to square one. No gain for anyone, no thought of what happens long term, just busywork.
I'll pay for Youtube Premium the day they bring back a pre-2015-ish Youtube web layout, tone down the ads accordingly for those who can't pay, community subtitles, dislikes and annotations. I have no intentions of paying for a service that grows worse year over year, which I constantly have to counteract with either browser add-ons, or separate programs like yt-dlp and Freetube. I'll pay for the content if need be, but that's what Patreon is for in most cases. Youtube's a middleman I'd rather not have to deal with, but which we're stuck with.
If Youtube's services (streaming/storage) are not paid for, they can't pay content creators.
When people do not pay for services directly with a credit card, they pay for it indirectly with ads and data collection. The internet would be a better place if companies didn't have to worry so much about monetizing indirectly. Plus, the only companies that can give out free services often have monopolistic intent.
This whole debate embodies why the internet has become what it has.
What AI? ML with gradient descent? Neural nets with deep learning? LLMs? Or the abstract concept of AGI that may or may not possible, but definitely isn't here yet?
Hedge funds and investment banks are already using these tools to the max, and the markets are plenty profitable for everyone
I think its about sapping as much user data from competitors. A company seeking to use an LLM has a choice between OpenAI, LLaMA, and others. If they choose LLaMA because it's free and host it themselves, OpenAI misses out on training data and other data like that
Well is the loss of training data from customers using self-hosted Llama that big a deal for OpenAI or any of the big labs at this point? Maybe in late-2022/early-2023 during the early stages of RLHF'd mass models but not today I don't think. Offerings from the big labs have pretty much settled into specific niches and people have started using them in certain ways across the board. The early land grab is over and consolidation has started.
I think they are stupid for broadcasting the program and threatening Israel with it.
Believe people when they tell you what they are going to do. Even if Iran wouldn’t use it if they had it, threatening to use it shifts the probability for them using it.
I really think the incoherence of modern reform movements (Occupy, BLM, Defund Police, etc) is the result of modern political suppression groups having enough tools in their toolbox to eliminate leaders of these movements.
Without a strong voice, the movement devolves into contradictory platforms, which results in no action.
AI chatbots are not humans, they don't have ethics, they can't be held responsible, they are the product of complex mathematics.
It really takes the bad parts from social media to the next level.