MC.36: OpenAI’s New Model Goes Free – What It Means For the World

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Hello everyone,

The beginning of the week brought many announcements, but the most impactful was the business decision to open the new OpenAI model for free.

This means free education and faster adoption. Will this spark a worldwide productivity boost? Will competitors like Google follow the same path and offer similar benefits?

First, they need to roll out the new model features to everyone, which hasn't happened yet.

Another big topic: the threat to the future of media publishers.

Facebook deprioritizes news in people's feeds, Perplexity gains users, and Google rolls out its AI Overview feature. Overall, this means fewer visits to news websites.

The value for end users is clear: you ask your questions and get answers backed by links. Even if the links are cited, you're less likely to visit the websites because you got your answer.

This is a direct loss of revenue for media.

More over, businesses may lose the incentive to create content to drive traffic through search engines, potentially killing low-quality websites, spammers, and affiliate sites.

This is a positive development, as people have criticized Google for years about the drop in search result quality. However, it might harm media. Big publishers may secure deals, but these may not cover their revenue loss, making them even more dependent on these gatekeepers. Small publishers and content creators might not survive.

For commercial websites, ad costs will increase unless they can capture an audience. Email lists and newsletters will become highly valuable, as will app user bases. Owning your audience has always been good advice; now it might be a matter of survival.

Could this signal a return to the old internet, where most free content is created by people willing to share their knowledge and passions without monetization in mind?

Cheers,

Sam

In this issue:

🔍 Ethan Mollick: What OpenAI did
🖼️ Simon Willison: ChatGPT in “4o” mode is not running the new features yet
📊 Adweek: Leaked Deck Reveals OpenAI's Pitch on Publisher Partnerships
🐦 Sam Altman: Tweet on Ilya Sutskever's Departure from OpenAI
📱 Google I/O 2024: Sundar Pichai on Gemini, AI progress and more
💻 Google for Developers: Gemini API Developer Competition
🌐 Google: As AI Overview rolls out to more people, websites brace for carnage
🏢 IBM: Granite AI models for business
🇫🇷 Microsoft: $4 billion investment in France to accelerate AI
📉 Similarweb: Stack Overflow is ChatGPT Casualty
📰 Facebook: Referrals to news down 50% in 12 months
💰 Intercom: Investing $100 million of its own cash in AI technology

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