I worked on Google’s ads serving infrastructure as a software engineer at their Mountain View, California HQ from 2007-2009. The system was complex, and included two AI clusters involved in predicting the best ads to show against a given search result.

Google also had a very innovative market for ads, where advertisers could bid for words that folks searching on Google had used in their search terms. AI actually works really well in tandem with search.

One thing advertisers want to know is what their products are appearing in response to: its called targeting. But generative AI is driven by effectively random numerical models, and affected by large context windows - what if someone mentions “rope” in a chat? It might not be appropriate to show them an advertisement for a hardware store that can ship them rope. It could be incredibly bad.

Plus Google built their framework on their own servers, with their own market, and owned everything about it. OpenAI is going to be a customer - they’ll have to outsource, maybe to Shopify or even to Google. So there’s a chunk of their revenue gone already. I honestly don’t think they have any idea what they’re doing here.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit totallyathing.substack.com/subscribe