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Published · transcript-backedSpeaker unverified: belief
1 Feb 2026 Lex Fridman Podcast #490 – State of AI in 2026: LLMs, Coding, Scaling Laws, China, Agents, GPUs, AGI
“I think people are just afraid right now of ruining their reputation or losing users- …because it would make headlines if someone launched these ads.”
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- Speaker
- Speaker unverified
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- Not verified from this transcript
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- belief
- Recorded
- 1 Feb 2026
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
Transcript context
…I think so. Like some Instagram ads—I don’t use Instagram- …but I understand the appeal of paying a platform to find users who will genuinely like your product. That is the best case of things like Instagram ads. But there are also plenty of cases where advertising is very awful for incentives. I think that a world where the power of AI can integrate with that positive view—like, I am a person and I have a small business and I want to make the best damn steak knives in the world and I want to sell them to somebody who needs them. And if AI can make that sort of advertising work even better, that’s very good for the world, especially with digital infrastructure because that’s how the modern web has been built. But that’s not to say that addicting feeds so that you can show people more content is a good thing. So, I think that’s even what OpenAI would say is they want to find a way that can make the monetization upside of ads while still giving their users agency. And I personally would think that Google is probably going to be better at figuring out how to do this because they already have ad supply. If they figure out how to turn this demand in their Gemini app into useful ads, then they can turn it on. I don’t know if I think it’s this year, but there will be experiments with it. I do think what holds companies back right now is really just that the competition is not doing it. It’s more like a reputation thing. I think people are just afraid right now of ruining their reputation or losing users- …because it would make headlines if someone launched these ads. But- Unless they were great, but the first ads won’t be great because it’s a hard problem that we don’t know how to solve.…
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