Short
I’ve been wondering for a while why scrolling through LinkedIn has felt so icky lately. It wasn’t always that way for me.
Today, it finally hit me: it’s because everything looks like an ad. Even the organic posts, often from people I know, are made to look and feel like ads. It used to be that ads attempted to look like organic content, but somehow, LinkedIn managed to reverse this.
LLMs are great for replacing typing, but bad for replacing thinking.
I wonder how the business model of LLMs will evolve. Currently, they are costly to run, and most (all?) operators are losing money on them.
Some apps (like Notion) are charging extra for LLM features, which makes it much less appealing for B2C customers. Cost won’t be as much of an issue for enterprises, but that’s where data confidentiality becomes an issue.
That leaves small-ish businesses as the target market, but the scaling ambitions of LLM providers won’t be fulfilled just within that segment.
So, outside of an order-of-magnitude improvement in efficiency, what does the profitability story look like here?
Prediction of the day: in 2030, we will talk aboutt LLMs in the same way in which we talk about cloud computing today: as a foundational technology for new products and services.