Nathan Labenz: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah, so there's a few different aspects to it. So again, it goes back to user consent, right? So the user needs to be okay with this because there's shared Wi-Fi at home and all this kind of stuff, and you wanna make sure that you're showing the advertisement to the right household member. So there's different ways. So there's the Wi-Fi signal, but there's the network that you're connected to. There's also if you're logged in on multiple devices and that, for example, on social or on other ways. So that can be used deterministically to say, yes, it is the same person on multiple devices. The probabilistic way can be used for certain things, but only in the kind of very, very untargeted kind of way. Because if somebody has opted out of advertising, if they've gone through that, then you don't want to reshow them advertising even through a different way. So that's something that is something we always kind of keep front of mind. Cool, all right, last big one for me. Zooming out kind of as far as possible, I see, I mean, in general, with this whole AI wave, there's like dramatic uncertainty about what's gonna happen, right? How powerful the AIs are gonna get and how disruptive it's gonna be. And, you know, do we need a whole new social contract, et cetera. Specifically in the advertising space, I feel like I see two trends that kind of counter each other. One is that if all goes well, we should all be a lot richer and the value of time should go up. And that would be really good for the advertising market in the sense that fundamentally you're competing to have some little share of people's time. And the more the richer they are, the more valuable their time is, you know, the more that's going to cost. So that's an advantage, presumably. But then the other thing that people also sort of see is like maybe search costs and matching costs could really drop in a lot of ways if we all have our AIs going out and like vetting us, you know, much broader portions of the world than we previously could. Today, I'm like, I can only evaluate so many shoes, but maybe in the AI era, I could have an AI that goes out and really evaluates in a comprehensive way every possible shoe. Therefore, my product decision-making is less about who was willing to bid on my time and more about how much time was I willing to have my AI invest on my behalf to go out and figure out what to do. I don't know, that's more of a prompt, I guess, than a question. What do you think of those trends? Are there other big trends that you see as kind of being huge factors? And where do you think we are in advertising in, say, five years time or the singularity, whichever comes first? I'm not sure about the singularity. I have my doubts about that one. So for me, where I see this new generation of AI really kind of helping to you know, kind of increase the amount of value to the end user. You mentioned time, Nathan, you know, kind of maybe there's a value as well, is for that kind of product that you're looking for, right? If you're kind of a very specific thing in mind, you know, where you don't know where to get it, you're able to then query these LLMs or whatever interface, you know, whatever LLMs become. and partnering with that really kind of rich commerce data. You say, here's my criteria. I don't care about the price. I just want the best product possible. And you know, you explain what it is you want. And connecting all of these systems has the possibility to give a really, really great result. When you get that great result, then you're quite happy to buy it. I think that's the kind of utility we're helping people discover, and not only just the product they're looking for, but what goes with it, how you can actually enhance it, and so on. And that kind of, when you see the way that they're working today and where they're going and how fast they're improving, I think that's incredibly exciting, right? And it can provide a really, really great consumer experience. the retailers to be able to engage in that, that allows them to get their products in front of the end users in a way that they couldn't do before. Because some of the advertising before, a lot of it was guesswork. Now it becomes really, really focused and you're really making sure that you're getting all the information that the end user needs to be able to buy that product, whether it's the shoes you're looking for or that new piece of tech that you want to invest in. I think it really, really gives a very enhanced way for the the end users to discover products.…

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