AI is becoming the new Social Media in that users are NOT the customer they are the product. Instead of generating data for a Social Media company to use to sell ads to companies you are generating data to train their AI, in exchange you get to use their service for free.
The deal keeps getting worse too. In addition to hoovering up your data for whatever products they want, Google has gotten more aggressive about pushing paid services on top of it. The amount of up-sell nags and ads have increased significantly in the past couple years. For a company like Google that kind of monetization creep only gets worse over time.
Not surprising at all. Inferencing against foundation models is very expensive, training them is insanely expensive. Orders of magnitude more so than whatever was needed to run the AdWords business. I guess I should modify my original post to "in exchange you get to use our service at a somewhat subsidized price".
