Julia Gulia

This Anthropic ad is simply obnoxious. Anthropic generates most of its revenue from its enterprise business, so it can afford not to maximize its consumer revenue opportunity. But the sanctimonious moralizing here presents advertising as a cynical business model choice. It is neither cynical nor a choice; the freemium, digital advertising-supported model is the only repeatedly proven pathway for a consumer technology product to reach humanity scale. OpenAI’s advertising revenue will enable it to offer access to larger models to free tier users. To the extent Anthropic thinks chatbots powered by frontier models are valuable to society, it should aspire to provide access to as many people as possible. Ads allow for that to an extent that no other consumer technology business model, demonstrably, can. This kind of condescending attitude toward digital advertising is economic chauvinism, and it represents a desire for technological gatekeeping. And the idea that ads will necessarily influence chatbot content is overstated, borderline anachronistic. It ignores the functional form of most modern ad platforms, which principally use behavioral history, not context, to personalize advertising. Ads in chatbots shouldn’t be seen as a perfect replacement for Search ads; an entirely new category of display advertising emerged and flourished after Search.