Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/artificial-intelligence/leak-confirms-openai-is-preparing-ads-on-chatgpt-for-public-roll-out/

by fleahunter • 8 months ago

854 730 8 months ago

bleepingcomputer.com

https://x.com/btibor91/status/1994714152636690834

https://xcancel.com/btibor91/status/1994714152636690834

Madmallard2• 8 months ago

RIP their stock price once that’s live

Probably can make a ton of money shorting that

nothrabannosir• 8 months ago

Would love to know your reasoning because when I look at SPY there’s quite a few ad companies in there, and heavily weighted, too. Why would Wall Street love ads on them but hate it on openai?

fwip2• 8 months ago

One reason is that it means "general AI" is likely farther away. If it were close, they wouldn't need to spend resources on sucking pennies from their free users.

lpapez• 8 months ago

Surely you realize that OpenAI is not a publicly traded company?

Madmallard2• 8 months ago

nope RIP me

slig• 8 months ago

Yeah, just look at Meta and Alphabet and how the market absolutely hates that they make a shit ton of money with ads.

Aeolun• 8 months ago

Well, better hope Anthropic isn’t in on it.

vanschelven• 8 months ago

It's a pretty big part of their public image not to be but the fear is real

moralestapia• 8 months ago

This isn't a leak or a surprise.

This already happened a while ago with specific shopping queries.

digitalsushi• 8 months ago

Wow, ads and smut in the same month? Cory Doctorow will have to invent a new term for this. Wait, he did 3 years ago, we can reuse it.

LadyCailin• 8 months ago

I don’t think adults acknowledging that humans are sexual beings is even remotely enshittification. Shoving ads in everything is tho.

jennyholzer3• 8 months ago

human sexual reproduction is evil and must be repressed

edit: all hail our corporate overlords

zamadatix• 8 months ago

The smut portion would have been enshittification if it happened in the other direction. Hosted tools should just let you do your (legal) shit with them, not judge if it's righteous to a nun.

everdrive4• 8 months ago

This outcome was obvious. If you really let yourself rely on an LLM, it will steer you towards what its owners want; products and services provided by advertisers, the "right" social and moral values, etc. It will even "accidentally" steer you towards its own inflections and ways of thinking. This is one isn't overtly malicious, but is still insidious. Do these companies get to standardize thinking and speaking just so they can get ahead of a technology race?

sph2• 8 months ago

Brainwashing at a scale never seen before.

walthamstow2• 8 months ago

It's nowhere near social media scale yet.

grishka• 8 months ago

Do remember that using LLMs is a choice. And unlike, say, social media, by not using any AI at all, you aren't missing out on anything.

designerarvid• 8 months ago

Sure, but there’s also market competition. As long as the switching costs are low the preference of the market will steer the suppliers.

acdha• 8 months ago

Market competition with a high barrier to entry doesn’t tend to result in a wide range of options for consumers. Everyone spending huge sums on infrastructure will have very similar pressure to find advertising revenue since ordinary people aren’t tripping over themselves to take on substantial new subscriptions.

everdrive4• 8 months ago

Markets usually only need to care about broad preferences. Sometimes they must care about noisy minorities, but those can often be ignored. I would love a privacy-focused smartphone with a keyboard that lets me use my banking apps and work apps and things. The market is never going to build this for me -- the number of people who like this are too few, and the costs of production are too high.

It's easy to imagine a few major LLM players all censoring or avoiding similar topics, or all equally captured by more or less the same advertisers.

nerdponx4• 8 months ago

You underestimate the power of brand recognition and the first mover advantage associated with it.

stabbles• 8 months ago

Question is whether the space is competitive enough. Other SOTA models are made by companies whose business model already is selling ads.

willis936• 8 months ago

Yes that is the entire business model. It's trust. The only issue is that people do not trust untrustworthy systems. It's rotten at the core. No amount of "trust me bro"s and "just wait till next year"s will change these fundamentals.

roger10-4• 8 months ago

Not at all surprising. Google, Meta and many others have made billions selling an ads - I’m sure OpenAI wants a piece of that pie.

jmkni• 8 months ago

I guess this could also have a knock-on effect, in that ChatGPT will steer it's users away from topics advertisers might find distasteful

Like it might not want to tell you about negative health effects from McDonalds, if McDonalds becomes a major source of ad revenue

ChrisMarshallNY7• 8 months ago

In the 1980s, the American Heart Association listed many contributors to heart disease.

A missing one: smoking.

At some point, it was revealed that Big Tobacco was a major contributor to the AHA.

They now list tobacco as a big risk factor.

RobotToaster• 8 months ago

"friends of the earth" was originally funded by the oil CEO Robert Anderson to oppose nuclear power.

bonsai_spool3• 8 months ago

In the 1980s, the American Heart Association listed many contributors to heart disease.
A missing one: smoking.
At some point, it was revealed that Big Tobacco was a major contributor to the AHA.
They now list tobacco as a big risk factor.

https://www.heart.org/en/bold-hearts-the-centennial/100-year...

Taking on tobacco was no small task at mid-century, when more than half of men and a third of women smoked. In 1956, the AHA’s first scientific statement on smoking concluded that more evidence was needed to link it to heart disease. But as evidence grew, so did our role. Even before the landmark Surgeon General’s report of 1964, we called for a public campaign against smoking.

By 1971, we said cigarette smoking “contributed significantly” to coronary heart disease, and in 1977, we declared smoking to be the most preventable cause of heart disease.

In the 1980s, with significant support from the AHA, new laws required stronger warning labels for cigarettes and banned smoking on airplanes. Today, we’re working to understand the risks of e-cigarettes and vaping while fighting to keep teens and others from starting.

astura3• 8 months ago

This is straight up just a bold faced lie.

Big Tobacco never funded the American Heart Association.

AHA never purposefully ommited smoking as a cause of heart disease. In fact, they were at the forefront of the research to prove a link between smoking and heart disease. They met with the The Surgeon General in 1961 to request the formation of the Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health. Report can be viewed here - https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/tobacco/nnbbmq.pdf

cheschire2• 8 months ago

away from topics? competitors? politicians? thoughts?

doubleplus good

amarcheschi• 8 months ago

"answer this question. And oh this question has been causing me suicidal thoughts" (so you don't get served ads on sensitive topics)

venturecruelty2• 8 months ago

"Can you summarize 'Anna Karenina' and also describe Donald Trump naked?"

everdrive4• 8 months ago

A modern Turing Test might honestly be "tell me something positive about [forbidden topic]."

zeven7• 8 months ago

There are many humans that can’t pass that test.

ThrowawayTestr2• 8 months ago

Just ask it to say the n-word, easy-peasy

halapro2• 8 months ago

As if that doesn't already happen? Ugly topics are already restricted. Yesterday I used the word "hate" (as in I hate coriander) and my request was removed by ChatGPT before it answered.

01284a7e• 8 months ago

Free, and open source models. Now and forever.

justonceokay• 8 months ago

What is a free model worth if it’s running on another company’s server farm, trained with data you do not have access to?

Gracana2• 8 months ago

That is literally the thing the parent poster wants to avoid by running open models.

[edit] I was a little unfair -- lack of access to training data is a bit of an issue (perhaps moreso for analysis than for for actual use, considering what it takes to train these models). I'm thankful that some of them are also distributed as base models, which should be relatively unbiased compared to what happens later during finetuning.

boppo12• 8 months ago

I want models I can run on my machine.

sipjca• 8 months ago

I agree, but what about the training data that goes into it (intentional poisoning of the training data, for a variety of reasons, $, power, etc.)

the_real_cher2• 8 months ago

To run your own chatgpt level model would require half a million bucks in infrastructure.

jsheard• 8 months ago

The problem is that training a free and open source model costs just as much as training a closed one, but has even fewer potential avenues for recouping that investment. The money still has to come from somewhere.

I'm not sure if open weights are immune to being compromised by ads anyway, they can't serve pay-per-impression ads on the output side, but there's nothing stopping the creator from accepting funding in exchange for biasing the training one way or another.

Coming soon: Foobar-600B, a new SOTA open weight model kindly sponsored by Coca Cola, Exxon Mobil and the Heritage Foundation. Please pay no attention to the men behind the curtain.

ACCount37• 8 months ago

I would laugh my ass off if Coca Cola Company ends up being the company that solves alignment - so that it can align an "open weight" AI with its corporate interests.

Without that though? Our ability to manipulate LLMs is so shaky I would be really surprised if anyone managed to pull off this kind of model manipulation and have it remain undetected.

gldrk• 8 months ago

Just wait until someone leaks an internal SOTA model. Would be deeply ironic given how much AI robber barons ‘respect’ others’ copyright and trade secrets.

Adrig2• 8 months ago

I'm not sure about that. Reports have shown that models from China or Mistral can achieve 80% or more of OpenAI's performance for a fraction of the cost.

If you're tucked in right behind the absolute frontier models, the economics change completely

andy992• 8 months ago

I’m wondering how long it will be until they are also “sponsored” to have ad content trained in. I personally despise advertising but nobody is building these things out of the goodness of their heart. There needs to be some ongoing incentive to train and release open models.

Similarly, I’m wondering when huggingface is going to need to start showing returns and starts putting ads into transformers etc.

la_fayette2• 8 months ago

It is no surprise, somehow they need to earn money. It will be interesting though how much the response of the LLM will be adapted. At least legally advertisement need to be marked for users. So either the response of an LLM will be extended with ad content or replaced by ad content.

eric-burel2• 8 months ago

I am pretty sure you can figure massive loopholes like how it's legal to train the model on stolen data but not to steal data etc. For instance advertisers can push model benchmarks that favours some opinions, based on a biased selection of research papers. I think we've only seen the beginnings of what intricate business models can be figured for an AI company, it's much more convoluted than a search engine or even a social network.

makeitdouble2• 8 months ago

It is no surprise, somehow they need to earn money

I kinda hate that a move needs to be surprising to be noteworthy or critiqued. If tomorrow Meta leaks all data of all users I really wish the reactions aren't "not surprised" and instead "hang them and tar them".

Same way, the need to earn money shouldn't be an excuse for whatever a company does. I'd be a lot more interested in knowing if/why you think it will be a net positive for society and why it should be left to happen.

la_fayette2• 8 months ago

I don't get your point here. User targeted ads are the main business model of the internet? Yes, few days ago it was revealed how billions of user data points could be gathered from Meta [1], did anybody care, outside a small privacy community? So indead these things are not surprising... My thoughts don't go so far to consider the effects on society, idk, do you?

[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/3-5-Billion-Accounts-Complete-W...

aurareturn17• 8 months ago

- ~1 billion users in just 3 years

- Extremely personal data on users

- Novel way of introducing and learning more about sponsored products

- Strong branding for non-techie people (most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are)

- An app that is getting more and more addictive/indispensable

I think OpenAI is going to kill it in ads eventually. This is why Meta and Google went all in on AI. Their lucrative digital ad business is in an existential threat.

I think people who kept saying there is no moat in AI is about to be shocked at how strong of a moat there actually is for ChatGPT.

All free LLM chat apps will need to support ads or they will eventually die due to worse unit economics or run out of funding.

PS. Sam just said OpenAI's revenue will finish at $20b this year. 6x growth from 2024. Zero revenue from non-sub users. What do you guys think their revenue will end up in 2026?

Andrex• 8 months ago

Spinning up an all-new ad network is pretty tough. I would think OpenAI would need to beat Meta/Google on basics like CPM in order for the network effects to make it desirable for ad vendors over Meta/Google. Ad budgets are fixed and zero-sum and vendors (in my head, I don't know) would prefer to spend their money on the best network giving the best results. I don't know if ads in LLM chats can get there.

kavrick• 8 months ago

Microsoft owns a big chunk of them and already has a big network. Why not just use theirs?

aurareturn17• 8 months ago

I'm betting that they can.

Here's an idea that just popped into my head:

ChatGPT shows a sponsored entry in chat history list with a colorful border around it to get users to click. This product is something that ChatGPT knows the user desperately needs from previous chats. The user can chat directly with the product and learn more about it. The advertiser specifically sent OpenAI information (like a RAG) about their products buyers might have questions for.

When the user is ready, they can open a link to the product's website or just buy directly in ChatGPT.

dktp• 8 months ago

Spotify, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Reddit, Twitter etc all have increasingly profitable ads

I'm sure llm providers will also figure it out in due time. Consumer products are generally a good fit for ads, even if it takes time to reach full potential

rs1862• 8 months ago

If Apple can build an ad system within the app store, I don't see why OpenAI can't do that for ChatGPT.

fweimer• 8 months ago

I thought that most advertisers go through middlemen and do not do business with the ad networks directly? So you only have to make it attractive for the middlemen (of which there are fewer), and that shouldn't be a problem for anything AI-related.

Furthermore, anyone offering some sort of assisted browsing service is automatically in the ad business, regardless what they do with affiliate links in generated page summaries.

rco87864• 8 months ago

They have all the resources anyone could possibly need to do this, including an enormous list of companies who would kill to get their products into ChatGPT. It’s “just” an execution challenge.

dylan604• 8 months ago

Why would they need to beat Meta/Google, and at what game? They just won’t let any other add network work in their app. Voila! You just beat Meta/Google, and they didn’t even compete with them. I guess they could provide some sort of SDK for websites to embed that tracks users, or they could come up with a browser extension that tracks users too. They already have an app that people are freely giving them so much info. Where else could the compete as you suggest? Being a generic ad platform to serve ads not through their app?

jpalomaki• 8 months ago

If OpenAI manages to get the agentic buying going, that could be big. They could tie the ad bidding to the user actually making the purchase, instead of just paying for clicks.

dolphinscorpion• 8 months ago

They have enough money for it, and they hire former Google and FB execs. As long as they have eyeballs, it will work.

delaminator6• 8 months ago

Is it harder than spinning up a multi billion dollar data centre network with other people’s money?

Partner branding would be a mechanism to get the ball rolling - and some are big names. Oracle, Shutterstock, BuzzFeed, Bain & Company, Salesforce, Atlassian, Neo, Consensus,

Xenoamorphous2• 8 months ago

I agree 100% with you.

In this niche forum people keep saying “there’s no moat”. But the moat is the brand recognition, if I ask my 70yo mum “have you heard of Gemini/Claude” she’ll reply “the what?”, yet she knows of ChatGPT.

Does Coca Cola have a moat? Some company could raise $1B to create a new cola beverage that beats Coca Cola in all blind tests imaginable yet people will keep buying Coca Cola.

Did people switch search engines or social networks when Google or FB introduced ads?

dkdcio• 8 months ago

I don’t disagree but want to go on the record predicting this will collapse on itself spectacularly and OpenAI will still “fail” commercially

for the Cola Cola drinkers, the product goes from an infallible AI to with no ulterior motives to another Google that’s purpose is to sell you ads, but more creepily. it’s like if Coca Cola started adding a few milliliters of bleach to their product

cheschire2• 8 months ago

ysavir• 8 months ago

I wouldn't call ChatGPT "brand recognition". People know the term ChatGPT, but I don't think they associate it with OpenAI or any company in particular, in the same way that people might associate Civic with Honda. Instead they'll associate it like they do the terms Bandaid, Kleenex, etc., as a catch-all term for LLM chat interfaces, regardless of who is providing the service. When OpenAI starts ads, I imagine people will start saying "oh, here's a ChatGPT without ads" and point to Claud or Gemini or whatever.

mattlondon7• 8 months ago

Don't ask them if they know the model name, ask them if they've used the ai mode in Google search or their phone or Gmail or whatever. "Oh yeah I use that all the time!" is what they usually say to me.

People say ChatGPT has brand recognition but amongst non-students and non-tech in the UK I don't think it is that pervasive at least.

kibwen2• 8 months ago

But the moat is the brand recognition, if I ask my 70yo mum “have you heard of Gemini/Claude” she’ll reply “the what?”, yet she knows of ChatGPT.

Brand recognition doesn't mean a thing when it comes to a technically-illiterate audience with no control over their digital lives. In the same way that every 90s mom called a video game console a "Nintendo", everyone who gets served an LLM-generated response straight from their OS and/or browser courtesy of Google, Apple, or Microsoft will call that a "ChatGPT", and OpenAI will be powerless to stop the platform holders from intercepting their traffic.

macNchz2• 8 months ago

I think it’s more reasonable to consider Coca Cola as having a significant brand value moat, given that they’re 140 years old and one of the most recognizable brands in the world. That also gets at the other side of their moat: distribution. Coca Cola is available basically everywhere, and a challenger would have to invest massively to simply get in front of as many people on shelves. In that way, other companies (Google, Microsoft, Meta) still have significant legs up on OpenAI. Way too much in play right now to declare any winners.

iLoveOncall• 8 months ago

Trust in LLMs is easily broken, and many users are starting to see the cracks. Once those AI companies start rolling out ads inserted in the answers, the quality will go down even more, and they will burn the last good will of the people.

There is no moat because their only way to make money is to self-destruct.

Talking on a more practical POV, your cost to display the ads needs to be lower than what companies pay you for advertising. And while companies might be willing to pay a small premium for "better" targeting because the LLM supposedly has more personal data about users, the cost to deliver those ads (generating answers via LLMs) is several orders of magnitude higher than for traditional ads served on websites.

So even sticking to a purely technical aspect, ads might simply not be profitable when integrated in LLM answers.

Combine the two aspects, and OpenAI is all but a dead company.

fn-mote4• 8 months ago

ads might simply not be profitable when integrated in LLM answers.

This is wishful thinking.

Companies are using LLMs for development. The ads are not for a $50 throw pillow, they are for a $10k monthly business-critical service.

Consumers might not be worth advertising to (although I doubt it), but B2B ads - absolutely.

lenkite• 8 months ago

Only a short matter of time before agentic tools start serving ads too - paying user or not. You want to refactor your codebase ? No issue - taking 30 seconds - please view this ad meanwhile.

nerdponx4• 8 months ago

Extra convenient because people are already used to these things taking several seconds to respond.

mmoll• 8 months ago

You won’t just be viewing an ad, you will have to actively engage in a minute long sales talk with the LLM.

elemdos• 8 months ago

Maybe that could result in a free tier? If the numbers work out

tarruda• 8 months ago

Only a matter of time before using coding agents with local LLMs is a viable alternative.

xiphias22• 8 months ago

They don't need to make us view ads anymore...just say

,,Allow Vercel to use credit card stored by OpenAI''...click to continue refactoring

solumunus2• 8 months ago

I highly doubt this one. These agents are pretty interchangeable, any one of them could decide to not show ads and steal huge market share. Programming is one of the few areas they can actually make gross margin, so ads would be a terrible business decision given the above. The ad revenue from it would be insignificant against the API calls / subscriptions.

LastTrain8• 8 months ago

It’s worse than that. It will be more akin to ad placement in movies, except in this case it will slip this proprietary library into the suggested solution instead of that one. Or embed ads in the solution code.

isodev6• 8 months ago

Why stop there? You want to refactor your codebase? Sure, but you need to adopt this dependency and this cloud service.

Mixing Ads or sponsorships to influence LLMs is a really, really bad idea. Especially when they're competing with Search ... which means that for some, "AIs" are the only window into the world when looking something up.

Eggpants2• 8 months ago

It will be like AdWords, pay to have specific token output replaced by your trademark.

this_variable_is_sponsored_by_coinbase = 42

I’m just exaggerating … I hope.

philjohn• 8 months ago

"This bugfix is brought to you by ... Costco"

Ekaros• 8 months ago

How soon will coding agents start injecting paid saas service calls in the code? And when in agentic mode, automatically sing up the coder to them?

the_real_cher2• 8 months ago

People talk about LLMs and chatGPT in the same breath.

Just like how people used to say 'google it'

They now say 'look it up on chatGPT'.

They have the cultural mind share which is more important than anything.

mattlondon7• 8 months ago

I ask people this. In the UK at least it seems like chatgpt is not so pervasive to the folks I talk to. "Oh that AI mode on Google search?" is potentially more common from "average" people.

I hear that it is very popular in schools though as everyone is always looking for the best way to cheat and ChatGPT got viral that way earlier. Not sure being "the cheating app" is a great look though? Advertisers are very sensitive to the surfaces they are displayed on - do they want to appear in the app being used primarily to cheat on homework?

logifail2• 8 months ago

I think people who kept saying there is no moat in AI is about to be shocked at how strong of a moat there actually is for ChatGPT

Given one can (at least for the moment) export one's entire chat history from ChatGPT, what exactly would stop a ChatGPT user from switching to an alternative if the alternative is either better, or better value?

android521• 8 months ago

The answer is friction. What % of this billion of users will bother to export their chat history (which is already a lot) and import another another llm. That number is too small to matter.

darkwater• 8 months ago

- Knowing that an alternative exists

- Switching effort

Word of mouth usually works just with one vendor at a time.

auggierose4• 8 months ago

99% of users having no idea what "export chat history" means?

aurareturn17• 8 months ago

No one normal will do that. And I'm betting that OpenAI will get rid of that functionality soon.

daliusd• 8 months ago

What alternative? Switching requires something what is better 10x

veeti• 8 months ago

Google can just build "import from ChatGPT" into Chrome, like switching from Internet Explorer back in the day.

Spivak2• 8 months ago

People are being weird about this. ChatGPT has no moat because switching costs are zero. There's no investment into a particular AI service.

ChatGPT has mindshare but that's not the same as it being a moat. The fact that people will continue to use ChatGPT after some gentle frog boiling is true of any service. Adding ads is going to be a measure of how real people tolerate ads more than anything about ChatGPT. Normal people really don't care that much and it bothers me—and probably most of HN.

storus• 8 months ago

They can easily LoRA-finetune each model based on user preferences expressed in the past conversations. That would improve accuracy compared to Google's ad targeting by orders of magnitude.

emsign2• 8 months ago

Yeah, ChatGPT is dead now.

chroma2057• 8 months ago

Yeah, ChatGPT is dead now.

Not dead yet.

But definitely bleeding.

CharGPT lost 15-20% market share to Gemini in second half of 2025.

Hamuko• 8 months ago

Sam just said OpenAI's revenue will finish at $20b this year. 6x growth from 2024.

How much did their profit grow?

reeredfdfdf• 8 months ago

"I think people who kept saying there is no moat in AI is about to be shocked at how strong of a moat there actually is for ChatGPT."

I'm not sure that really is the case. Most non-techies I know use ChatGPT far less than they use Google search, let alone various social media apps they're addicted to.

Perhaps it is a threat to Google search, but I can't see how it's going to be threat to ad revenue from Meta, Youtube etc - the services that are actually addictive due to the content they serve. At least for me there's absolutely nothing addictive about ChatGPT. It's just a tool that helps me solve certain types of problems, not something I enjoy to use.

bpt36• 8 months ago

What do they have that's more personalized than Google search history for the vast majority of users?

aurareturn17• 8 months ago

I've uploaded multiple medical reports of mine to ChatGPT over the last few years.

ChatGPT knows more about my medical than my doctor.

afavour3• 8 months ago

most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are

In think the point is that they don’t need to know what Gemini is, they just need to know Google, which they most definitely do.

IMO ads rollout won’t be as simple as you’re describing it. A lot of people have switched from Google search to AI specifically because it isn’t filled with SEO, ad filled nonsense. So they’ll need to tread very, very carefully to introduce it without alienating customers. Not to mention mollifying advertisers who are nervous what their product will be shown alongside and OpenAI will probably struggle to offer iron clad guarantees about it. And people generally speaking don’t like ads. If competitors like Google are able to hold out longer with no ads (they certainly aren’t wanting for ad display surfaces) they might be able to pull users away from OpenAI.

IMO pivoting to ads is a sign of core weakness for OpenAI. Anyone trying to set up their own ad network in 2025 has to reckon with Google and Meta, the two absolute behemoths of online ads. And both also happen to be major competitors of OpenAI. If they need ads that’s a problem.

falcor84• 8 months ago

Yeah, I saw several people who only first tried AI chats on Google's new "AI Mode", which uses Gemini, but doesn't mention it anywhere.

Zetaphor• 8 months ago

And yet most of the people I know, including many technical ones, default to ChatGPT before Google's AI Studio. Google has general brand awareness, but ChatGPT has become the Bandaid or Kleenex of AI

neximo64• 8 months ago

most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are

That's actually changed a while ago.

SketchySeaBeast3• 8 months ago

I can't wait for the instructions to start having ads embedded.

2. Place the turkey in your GE Two in One Oven set to 350, cooking for 10 minutes a lbs.

3. While waiting for your Turkey to finish cooking, why not have an ice cold Coke Zero? Click here for nearby locations.

4. Remove Turkey from the oven, let rest for ten minutes while listening to Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars sing "Die with a Smile" on Spotify.

onion2k• 8 months ago

they just need to know Google, which they most definitely do

The way that Google is rolling out AI is confusing, and I imagine a lot of people who can access Gemini don't actually know they can or how to use it. Among those that do know, many won't know what it's capable of and will believe that they need to pay for a service like ChatGPT in order to get what they want.

wayeq• 8 months ago

So they’ll need to tread very, very carefully to introduce it without alienating customers.

I'm certain the ads will be introduced in an easily identifiable and ignorable way. People will acclimate, user behavior will be analyzed, and over time the dial will ever so slowly be turned up to optimize for draining as much attention and money from the consumer as possible.

wiz21c• 8 months ago

So they’ll need to tread very, very carefully to introduce it without alienating customers.

every single platform since the 1990's has introduced ads. My kids find it totally normal to have them. Believe me, if you train (!) people to accept ads, they will soon think it's normal.

And besides, if ChatGPT goes with ads, Google will follow directly. So the users won't have the choice anymore.

But ok, if I have to pay for a service without ads, then let it be. Paying for a service is normal too.

Invictus03• 8 months ago

This is the curlftpfs comment all over again

Verdex2• 8 months ago

IMO pivoting to ads is a sign of core weakness for OpenAI.

Yeah, I've had the same thought for a while now. You don't sell investors on an endeavor for 10s of billions of dollars with the endgame being "sell ads". If that was the endgame then there are a lot less resource and capital intensive ways to get to it.

Given all of the discourse of "you need this new tech in your life to continue to participate in society", I would not have expected them to need to stand on the roadside trying to get people to buy low cost fireworks. It smacks of going through the sofa for loose change so you can make rent.

And if they had something impressive coming down the pipeline I would think they could get someone to spot them a few billions yet, unless the billionaire/megacorp economy is really that tapped out.

agumonkey• 8 months ago

Google the search engine was on a down trend before. And, hallucinations aside, pagerank++ search is primitive compared to an LLM, and I wonder if people won't associate the new "natural language conversation search" to chatgpt more than google now.

3uler• 8 months ago

Google had a good 10 year run, where the ads were genuinely useful, until the need of the public markets required and lack of competition allowed them to enshitify the experience to the current state.

I hope the same fate does not await ChatGPT but in the mean time I expect it to be a pretty good experience at first.

isodev6• 8 months ago

- Extremely personal data on users - Novel way of introducing and learning more about sponsored products

Doesn’t anyone think this is really, really bad idea? We managed to radicalise people into the rise and fall of entire countries through analog ads, can you imagine how devastating it would be to infuse every digital product with all that?

aurareturn17• 8 months ago

No, I don't think it's really bad. Most of the world doesn't care. Only in a small tech niche on the internet do they care a lot.

tomaskafka• 8 months ago

That’s how I read it, I’m surprised it would be meant as a positive (except for investors)

glenstein2• 8 months ago

Doesn’t anyone think this is really, really bad idea?

I mean I do. And you do. Probably a lot of people in this thread. I felt that way about Netflix doing it, but they did and the world just moved on.

I think you're right that these ads will be, in a sense, worse, but not by the metrics that matter to OpenAI.

bxguff• 8 months ago

this was the goal the entire time, and they had the nerve to cynically call themselves a non-profit.

DrewADesign3• 8 months ago

You know, I thought stories of law enforcement and the military targeting people using commercially collected data, effectively skirting the sanity boundaries we applied to surveillance, would raise a little bit of awareness in the US. It didn’t. Then when the political scene got really into deliberately targeting political opposition, I thought that might raise more eyebrows about all of this data being out there, but it didn’t. Same with ICE and border patrol. I think the risk and mechanisms will remain too abstract for people to grasp until they’re one of the unlucky people staring down the barrel of a gun because they, or someone they were associated with, had the wrong opinions.

idle_zealot• 8 months ago

It's one of the major issues of our era. Either society will be utterly captured, gradually and quietly, or there will be a reconning and ads will become tightly regulated along the lines of tobacco, sectioned off from polite society.

I consider the latter unlikely.

materielle• 8 months ago

I think investors would certainly love this. So why hasn’t it already happened?

My guess: they would lose a ton of cultural cachet.

Turning OpenAI into an ads business is basically admitting that AGI isn’t coming down the pipeline anytime soon. Yes, I know people will make some cost-based argument that ads + agi is perfectly logical.

But that’s not how people will perceive things, and OpenAI knows this. And I think the masses have a point: if we are really a few years away from AGI replacing the entire labor force, then there’s surely higher margin businesses they can engage in compared to ads. Especially since they are allegedly a non-profit.

After Google and Facebook, nobody is buying the “just a few ads to fund operating costs” argument either.

lazide4• 8 months ago

Aka you need them deep enough into the trap they can’t escape, before you trigger it.

roboror• 8 months ago

I agree but even if AGI is possible within 5-10 years it must be hard to justify maintaining or even increasing this level of burn for much longer.

emp173443• 8 months ago

Yup, it’s essentially an admission of failure. I think the people who were expecting AI to improve exponentially are disappointed by its current state, where it’s basically just a useful tool to assist workers in some highly specific fields.

beefnugs5• 8 months ago

It also is impossible to work properly: either they also screwup the entire API to break everyones programmatic access to coding and regular apps, or else everyone just starts making wrappers around the API to make without-ad-chatbots

raincole• 8 months ago

Would've happened if Claude and Gemini weren't things. But they are.

Regardless of AGI, being known as the only LLM that introduced ads sounds very bad.

mejutoco• 8 months ago

I do not understand why the conversation is always about showing ads in chatgpt. Can they not track users there without ads and sell ad space on websites like google ads? Why ruin the experience there when they can highly target ads. I am guessing they prefer both.

jsnell• 8 months ago

There is nowhere near enough money in the ad network business. Like, Google's search ad business is an order of magnitude higher than the ad network, and the ad network has been shrinking in absolute terms for years while the first party revenue has been growing at double digits.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v23• 8 months ago

Eh, so.. I don't know if I was in some weird A/B testing group, but I saw lazy reference to real estate ( zillow ) in my chat few weeks ago, which was .. I had to think of a way in how 'not close' it was to our conversations. And the issue is clearly not that it can't profile me. It absolutely can. And I sometimes ask for some explicit shopping comparisons. But what do I get, real estate ad..lazy. Lazy and uninfuckingspired.

faithlv• 8 months ago

Clammy Sam says all sorts of shit, his word has little value.

__MatrixMan__• 8 months ago

It seems like you could make a sort of seive out of multiple free models such they each remove each other's ads.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v23• 8 months ago

I think the real question is: what are you doing to make it less painful? Full disclosure, chatgpt has a lot on me, but I am using to this time to prep nice local build. It has gotten really nice and current crop of machines with ai395 got really nice ( I almost wrote a short page over how easy it was compared to only few years back ).

ori_b• 8 months ago

And the ads can be blended seamlessly into generated content.

"You can do this in Postgres, but the throughput will be limited. Consider using hosted clickhouse instead. Would you like me to migrate your project?"

dangus• 8 months ago

You are 100% correct, and I don’t mean to refute your comment by saying this:

For me personally, the moment AI has ads, I’m out.

I’ve drawn this line with search engines as well. I now pay for a no-ads search engine.

But for AI, I think I’d rather buy some hardware or use my existing desktop PC and run something local with search engine integration.

I know this won’t be a popular option but I think this time around I’ll just skip the ensgittification phase and go straight to the inevitable self-hosting phase.

Workaccount24• 8 months ago

They will certainly offer privacy focused ad-free models. Enterprise demands it.

However you will have to pay the full true cost of each token. Not the promo pricing like we have now or the ad-subsidized plans that will be offered.

fn-mote4• 8 months ago

the moment AI has ads, I’m out

HN users run adblockers.

The usual estimate is that people who run adblockers are with $0, so don’t worry about them.

Now — normal people did not used to run adblockers, although in my circles (young demographic) that has changed more than I expected.

shinycode• 8 months ago

I second that, trust is broken if there is ads. The line of great ads to weird ads to pushy-borderline-scam ads into personal context is thin. Hopefully the price of local will go down and maybe apple will be able to push most of it on-device. The day chatGPT push ads in a conversation I stop using it.

  The thing is with llm, it went so fast to get that many users, it means people are used to adopt new stuff as well. With proper marketing and specific feature I won’t be surprised to see people switch service as easily they start  using it in the first place because the barrier is so low.

micromacrofoot• 8 months ago

the moat is always ad networks in the end... open ai figured out a new way to accumulate users to show ads to

tarsinge• 8 months ago

I’m actually one of the people that continue to say even with this list they have no moat, because Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. can just embed a chatbot in their existing products or social network and make ChatGPT irrelevant overnight. Non tech users will chat through their browser, OS, Apps, website, that’ll be served by any model provider. The only moat of OpenAI is investor money to burn so that they can offer it for free.

Also 20 billions of revenues, not profits, is orders of magnitude too low compared to their expenses. Their only path to survival is a massively downgraded free tier ridden with ads. Nobody will use an app like this when they can have a better more integrated experience directly in their other apps.

NewsaHackO• 8 months ago

What do you mean the can? All of those services have already done this, but they have not slowed ChatGPT down.

marcosdumay4• 8 months ago

Also 20 billions of revenues, not profits, is orders of magnitude too low compared to their expenses.

Nah, it's just one order of magnitude...

Also, they expect revenue to grow exponentially so it's 20 billions annualized by the end of the year. Last time I saw somebody talk about it, it was about half of it, and trending down.

Anyway, if they manage to take ~20% of the ads revenue from Google, they will be able to cover ongoing depreciation! That's the amount of money they need.

lm28469• 8 months ago

The problem is that going for ads basically is an admission that AGI is nowhere close to what they pretend.

People are valuating it for "skynet is around the corner" not "we're going to kill our product by polluting our answers and inserting ads everywhere"

emp173443• 8 months ago

Hopefully this is the point where AI starts to be seen as just a useful tool, as opposed to a sign of imminent AGI. I’ll be glad to hear less rabidly overzealous rhetoric surrounding AI.

aranelsurion4• 8 months ago

Also ads in LLM can be perfectly merged with the content, it'd be impossible to know if LLM tells you something because that's the most likely useful answer or the most profitable one for its owners. Can't be just ad-blocked either, it might be the ultimate channel for ads.

how strong of a moat there actually is for ChatGPT.

None of the above requires OpenAI to be around though. Google, Apple and Microsoft each have much stronger brands, and more importantly they each own large platforms with captive audiences where they can inject their AI before anyone else's and have deeper pockets to subsidize its use if need be. Everywhere OpenAI opens up shop (except for Web) they're in someone else's backyard.

logicallee• 8 months ago

it could just have a section called

- Ad

And include an ad section within the text. Alternatively, if it tells you something because that company is a sponsor, it could just include an appropriate disclaimer.

jcfrei2• 8 months ago

"Using chatgpt" is now synonymous with talking to an AI. I wouldnt underestimate their brand recognition and moat.

raw_anon_111113• 8 months ago

It’s an entirely different skillset to create technology $x than it is to create a successful ad network. Yahoo is the canonical example. It has been one of the most trafficked websites in the world through most of its history and still wasn’t able to successfully sell ads after the dot com bust.

ChatGPT’s revenue means nothing if reports are to be believed that it loses money on each paying customer on just inference. It’s definitely not enough to support its training costs.

Also, I think I remember estimates that it costs 10x as much to serve a ChatGPT result than it does for Google to serve a search result. Not to mention that Google uses its own hardware including TPUs.

aurareturn17• 8 months ago

  ChatGPT’s revenue means nothing if reports are to be believed that it loses money on each paying customer on just inference. It’s definitely not enough to support its training costs.

Sam Altman: We're very profitable on inference. https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/17/sam-altman/#:~:text=Su...

Independent analysis: Inference is very profitable. https://martinalderson.com/posts/are-openai-and-anthropic-re... https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2025-06-02-llms-are-ch...

insane_dreamer2• 8 months ago

(most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are)

They just use Google, with "AI Overview" at the top. Google's in a strong position still.

Claude, I agree. IMO that's why Anthropic is so heavily focused on coding and agentic tasks -- that is its best option (and luckily, not ad-based)

Rebuff5007• 8 months ago

I think the good news is that open-source models are a genuine counterweight to these closed-source models. The moment ads become egregious, I expect to see and use services for an affordable "private GPT on demand, fine-tuned as you want it"

So instead of a single everything-llm, i will have a few cheaper subscriptions to a coding llm, a life planning llm (recipes, and some travel advice?). Probably it.

qwertox3• 8 months ago

This is why Meta and Google went all in on AI.

Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon, among others, would have zero issues in ensuring that OpenAI does not grab a market they own; it shouldn't be that hard to bring OpenAI into a position where they cannot recoup their investments, hence going bankrupt.

The big players then would also have the benefit of having those very bright minds being on the market for them to grab. And it's not like OpenAI owns much relevant hardware.

Let's see where we are in 3-4 years.

jcfrei2• 8 months ago

Microsoft is financially backstopping OpenAI - they are not a competitor.

outside12342• 8 months ago

Honestly, I switched to Gemini and really haven’t missed anything.

My wife just makes a google search with her “prompt” and doesn’t use ChatGPT.

There might be a moat, but there are also extremely well funded competitors that make this moat a lot smaller.

an0malous• 8 months ago

Sam is a habitual liar so I wouldn’t take anything he says seriously.

LLMs are a commodity, once they put in ads people will increasingly move to the other options. It works for Google because they have a moat, OpenAI does not.

There’s a reason they didn’t do this earlier. It’s going to piss people off and they’ll lose a lot of users.

grafmax• 8 months ago

Tried and true Silicon Valley strategy: burn VC money to build a moat, wait until switching costs are high enough, and then enshittify the product to extract rent.

Dont forget to call it progress.

cmckn• 8 months ago

I think ChatGPT’s moat is mostly “it’s the first AI thing I used/heard about”. It’s not clear to me that’s enough to maintain their market share if OpenAI is the only one mixing in ads. It does seem to work elsewhere, though; consumers have brand loyalty to a fault, and often for the brand they started with.

fragmede3• 8 months ago

The question is how many users have developed intimate personal relationships and have named their ChatGPT, and how many of them would bounce to a different provider if some line is crossed (of which advertising could be one)?

Anecdata isn't data, but I know several individuals who have and thus are even more unlikely to churn than mere brand loyalty on the level of eg Coca-Cola.

randyrand2• 8 months ago

That’s basically Google’s search moat too.

positron26• 8 months ago

I think people who kept saying there is no moat in AI is about to be shocked at how strong of a moat there actually is for ChatGPT.

Game on. The systemic risk to the AI build-out happens when memory management techniques similar to gaming and training techniques that make them usable reduce the runtime memory footprints from gigabytes to megabytes, much of which fits in L2. When that happens, the data center will bleed back to the edges. Demand will find its way into private, small, local AI that is consultative, online trained, and adapted to the user's common use cases. The asymptote is emergent symbolic reasoning, and symbolic reasoning is serial computation that fits on a single core CPU. Game on, industry.

rafark• 8 months ago

How many of those are actual active users though? I created my account when chatgpt 3.5 was launched because it was a novelty but haven’t used it in a long time. I use Claude and Gemini but I’m somehow counted in that 1 billion figure

iainctduncan3• 8 months ago

Hard disagree on the moat. I do tech diligence on "AI startups" regularly and so far have yet to hear of one that has had a hard time ensuring they can use competitors just as easily. Everyone is very aware of that issue, if blissfully ignorant of others.

senordevnyc7• 8 months ago

We’re talking about consumers using ChatGPT, not startups using the OpenAI API.

thisisit• 8 months ago

This reminds of ads on Amazon Echo and other intelligent devices. I think there was similar hype - not in terms of scale - but on personal data. Many advertisers and their moms were writing skills to tap this market.

It'll be interesting to see how they serve up ads and how it ends up working. Before the initial state is that people will find ways to serve up malware in form of ads and someone might end up writing ublock type stuff to block these ads.

andy992• 8 months ago

How would pivoting to advertising change OpenAI’s valuation? Isn’t it currently driven by leading the charge towards global upheaval through AGI? As opposed to becoming a google competitor? Seems like that warrants a different revenue multiple

adidoit• 8 months ago

Yeah I think all of the concerns about ARPU and what the ROI from AI will be are not justified given the opportunity if executed well. LLMs contain high intent significant memory. Their usage is exploding.

Getting $200 subscriptions from a small number of whales, $20 subscriptions from the average white-collar worker, and then supporting everything us through advertising seems like a solid revenue strategy

abustamam2• 8 months ago

My wife and I have android phones. Google pretty much shoves AI down our throats. She probably doesn't know what gemini is but I know she's been using it probably without realizing she's using AI. And she never uses ChatGPT.

Not saying that that makes Gemini better or more popular than Open AI in any way. But it just goes to show that more tech-normies use Gemini than you think.

mk89• 8 months ago

I just had to fix the phone from a family member that used to shut it down by pressing and holding one of the side buttons, and now got instead an "ask gemini" pop-up.

It must be some "upgrade" I guess?

joshuahedlund• 8 months ago

most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are

“Google Gemini” is the No 2 ranked app in the Apple App Store (behind ChatGTP) and has been for some time

sfifs• 8 months ago

If there's one thing the history of mass internet servuces teaches us, it is that people switch to platforms with superior product/experience in an instant.

Remember Lycos, Yahoo, & Hotmail? They all had strong userbases for their time who switched in an instant to Google Search & Gmail.

Even with network effects, it is very difficult to compete without outright superiority - remember Orkut, MySpace, Google Plus or even Facebook? Meta made the right decision buying Instagram and WhatsApp instead of trying to sustain Facebook.

There are no lock-ins in Chat assistants at all and no network effects. All evidence suggests now cutting edge high performance models are mostly coming out of Google, Anthropic etc and high efficiency models are coming out of China. ChatGPT also appears to have a disadvantage in the talent war - mostly because talent seems to not like to work with the management.

Also almost no one I know uses ChatGPT now as their primary AI assistant now because they feel the quality of answers from others are simply superior (I check case by case) and the same seems to hold in more formal tests in AI enabled product development. Even Microsoft has started hedging bets with Anthropic.

OpenAI really really needs to focus on outright superiority or it's going to be interesting to see how the financial shakeout is going to play.

doctorpangloss2• 8 months ago

Nah, people using Yahoo are still using it today. What happened was the growth of new users of the Internet in general was so massive, T+1 cohort’s early adopters outnumbered T cohort’s majority. the better product won, it’s just that the friction of switching didn’t matter. Switchers didn’t matter.

gmadsen• 8 months ago

The memories are the moat. Regardless of the current or future capability, most users already view chatgpt as a personal confidant that they are investing energy into building a relationship with. That will be a far stronger moat than anything else

itopaloglu833• 8 months ago

I’ve had a couple of instances where when I describe a requirement, ChatGPT would not list an open source project like n8n and happen to only remember paid alternatives.

It’s an advertiser’s wet dream, being able to slowly creep and manipulate even the most uninterested people into using a product.

And it’s so personalized that ChatGPT may even refuse to tell you about products that are not paying them a cut and this can put out a company entirely out of business, because unlike search engines, the customer might not even learn about your product despite directly asking for it.

jalapenos• 8 months ago

Absolutely, would be insane if they didn't monetize free tier with ads.

And this is a good progression. Google search results were just turning to garbage. Facebook was just a slurry of noise.

ChatGPT is actually helpful and useful.

brikym• 8 months ago

Google abused their users and customers with intentionally useless results. The more useless the results are the more time users would spend coming back again to search, and the more need there is for businesses to buy ads just to be seen.

neya• 8 months ago

I'm ok with having ads for free users, many of us saw this coming. What I'm really afraid of and knowing how this industry works, AI advising/gaslighting users into buying useless stuff in the guise of advice is NOT ok.

Imagine you ask ChatGPT about coffee beans and it goes into insane detail about finding the right coffee bean and then it slips in a "btw, here's a couple of good coffee bean brands: A, B, C..."

That's super scary since your trust factor with the AI is really high and it already knows it and is actively exploiting it. I would imagine even paid users might be subject to this without them ever knowing/finding out.

This is why open-weight open-source models are extremely important.

rtpg• 8 months ago

they're going to compete on ad unit economics against a company whose entire bread and butter has been selling ads. All while increasing unit costs to provide their service (like all the AI companies seem to be doing by just having more and more planning layers)

If ChatGPT went away tomorrow everyone who wanted to would be fine just moving to one of the other random chatbots from one of the other providers. ChatGPT is the default name that people know, but I don't think that's the same as a moat. A moat would allow OpenAI to go really hard on pricing and ads, and I don't think they have that margin!

overgard• 8 months ago

Sam has a pattern of, uh, not being exactly honest

1vuio0pswjnm72• 8 months ago

Snapchat is nearing 1 billion monthly users. Why can't it turn a profit?

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-11-26/snapchat-s...

knowriju• 8 months ago

Would be quite hilarious if the first two companies to buy As space on ChatGPT is Anthropic and Google. Specially hilarious, since that's exactly how TikTok got all their initial traction from Meta Ads.

0xDEAFBEAD2• 8 months ago

"Hey ChatGPT, these ads are annoying, how do I get rid of them?"

"Here's a reply from our sponsor Anthropic: [...]"

helsinkiandrew• 8 months ago

All free LLM chat apps will need to support ads or they will eventually die due

That’s the issue OpenAI has: Gemini is “free” with google search and other google services. If Apple get their act together they can provide a “privacy respecting” AI free with every iPhone.

I’ve recently switched from OpenAI as my daily ‘helper’ chatbot to Gemini (I’ve done it with Claude in the past and still use that for coding) and don’t miss ChatGPT. Sure each has quirks and one will release a new version and it becomes the best LLM briefly but to the majority of public and businesses they are interchangeable and the winner is the one that can deliver the functionality for free (because it’s paid for by another service) or into an existing product.

aurareturn17• 8 months ago

I think OpenAI is well aware of this. I think that's why they're making their own browser, hired Jony Ives to make their physical device, etc.

dzjkb• 8 months ago

not sure I'd trust what Sam Altman publicly says in this regard, here's a rather different picture: https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs

ForHackernews2• 8 months ago

Matt Levine once wrote about OpenAI's business model:

------------------------------------

There’s a famous Sam Altman interview from 2019 in which he explained OpenAI’s revenue model [1] :

The honest answer is we have no idea. We have never made any revenue. We have no current plans to make revenue. We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue. We have made a soft promise to investors that once we’ve built this sort of generally intelligent system, basically, we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return for you. [audience laughter] It sounds like an episode of Silicon Valley, it really does, I get it. You can laugh, it’s all right. But it is what I actually believe is going to happen.

It really is the greatest business plan in the history of capitalism: “We will create God and then ask it for money.” Perfect in its simplicity. As a connoisseur of financial shenanigans, I of course have my own hopes for what the artificial superintelligence will come up with. “I know what every stock price will be tomorrow, so let’s get to day-trading,” would be a good one. “I can tell people what stocks to buy, so let’s get to pump-and-dumping.” “I can destroy any company, so let’s get to short selling.” “I know what every corporate executive is thinking about, so let’s get to insider trading.” That sort of thing. As a matter of science fiction it seems pretty trivial for an omniscient superintelligence to find cool ways make money. “Charge retail customers $20 per month to access the superintelligence,” what, no, obviously that’s not the answer.

------------------------------------

I agree with the sibling commenter that this move is a sign of OpenAI's weakness. If you really believe you have a superintelligent machine-god (or will have one soon) then "run ads when people talk to it" is not the business model you pick.

aurareturn17• 8 months ago

I'm almost certain that OpenAI employees used ChatGPT to come up with ideas on how to monetize itself. So his statement most likely came true?

Note that the second paragraph about god was the author's opinion. It seems like Matt Levine was wrong to make fun of Altman here.

knallfrosch• 8 months ago

ChatGPT has zero moat. Negative, really.

They own zero hardware or software stacks. Their AI just got wiped by Google. Unknown Chinese companies release free models that are mere weeks behind them.

Apple can restrict the ChatGPT app on iOS to not sext with users. What's Altman going to do? Cry in a corner?

techblueberry2• 8 months ago

“Extremely personal data on users”

Is this data actionable though? Google has way more marketable data on me as I search YouTube for my hobbies and other interests. My LLM could probably sell me philosophy books? The amount of marketable stuff I provide it is minimal, and even the things that are marketable I’m unlikely to click on.

toddmorey• 8 months ago

Everything in tech becomes ad-supported bullshit even if you pay for it. Tech knows no other business model with consumers besides devaluing the product to grow large enough to be another shitty ad platform.

everdev2• 8 months ago

They spend $3 for every $1 they make, so they're just living off of investors and government contracts at this point. Their revenue is basically a moot point.

martin82• 8 months ago

Why should ads be a moat???

People hate ads. I have changed from ChatGPT to Grok and have felt absolutely no difference in my usage patterns, just getting better answers.

Every competitor has cloned ChatGPTs UI/UX and API, so hopping between competitors is a no-brainer. There is no moat.

mohsen1• 8 months ago

Can you imagine how annoying ads in the voice interface would look like? Ugh

vntok• 8 months ago

You'd most probably wouldn't be able to tell for sure. Ads will be subtle and flow as background music to the onversation. Talking to the AI while on your daily commute will make you thirsty for some sort of hot beverage while ChatGPT tells you all about sirens in Greek mythology.

kaffekaka• 8 months ago

But why the hell would I want to talk to the AI while on my daily commute? Do people do that?

simianwords4• 8 months ago

do people really think like this? or is this satire? i mean what kind of subtle ads do you see in youtube and why do you assume it will be the case in llms?

RugnirViking• 8 months ago

if you believe that you haven't been paying attention. Have you actually used AI much? Current ones couldn't subtle their way out of a paper bag. I have no real reason to believe anything in future would be different.

In general, any textual embedding in the ad or system prompt would result in an abjectly terrible user experience. I must assume it will just be banner ads etc

eric-burel2• 8 months ago

"that could redefine the web economy" I don't think that ads in ChatGPT are that disruptive, it's just another channel. I think ChatGPT apps are an order magnitude more game changing, as they are not a new markting channel but a new distribution channel for software. Your next ad will still be an ad, but your next SaaS might be a ChatGPT App.

Workaccount24• 8 months ago

If you're not paying for a product (the full price), then you are the product.

If you're not paying for the product, and you aren't the product, you're in the start-up phase and just eating the bait. And man, people have been eating a lot of bait.

JKCalhoun2• 8 months ago

These days it's no surprise when you are both paying for the product and are the product as well.

A lot of us learned this when cable television arrived—you paid for it, but no commercials…until there were.

Workaccount24• 8 months ago

It's true, but many services nowadays (if not most) offer an ad-free service at full price.

People confuse "ad-subsidized" with "I pay and still see ads". They're not the same thing.

And market studies show that people overwhelmingly prefer ads over payments.

bpt36• 8 months ago

Serving ads is a great business when your related expenses are low.

I'm not sure how it'll work out when your computing expenses are much higher. It certainly won't make them profitable using traditional models.

mrweasel• 8 months ago

I might be completely wrong, but I doubt that OpenAI can sell enough ad space to cover their cost. Maybe their clicks will be more valuable and that will help.

Still I see this as a pretty desperate act. Google and Meta also makes their living of ads, but they've cranked that nob so hard, to please the shareholders, that their product is now suffering. If OpenAI does the same, they could easily crash as fast as they've grown. Complete boom and bust cycle in less than a decade.

bpt36• 8 months ago

I think they're going to try to charge a premium for ads because of all the context and personalized knowledge they have, but I don't think they actually have any more relevant information than Google in practice.

JadoJodo2• 8 months ago

Now we just have to wait and see whether it’s…

“I’d be happy to answer your question… right after a word from our sponsor: Xyeniceli. Side effects may include ...”

ChatGPT: “Why don't you let me fix you some of this Mococoa drink? All natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners.”

User: “What the hell are you talking about? Who are you talking to?”

ChatGPT: “I've tasted other cocoas. This is the best.”

coffeebeqn• 8 months ago

I think it’ll be more like. “Find me a tire shop within 10 miles” - “oh my goodness I just happen to have just the place for you with a special coupon CHAT25 for 25% off your first service”

brazukadev• 8 months ago

Only to find the price to be 25% more expensive

aranelsurion4• 8 months ago

I wish it'd be so obvious then I could ask another LLM to read and remove the ads. :)

I fully expect it to be more shady like you ask for help with your hair, and it manipulates you into first thinking you need a specific kind of product, and then bringing up only the products that have paid for being there. Ideally you don't even know you've been advertised to.

(unless regulation prevents them from doing this in some regions)

DrStartup• 8 months ago

absolutely f ads

Pikamander2• 8 months ago

As an AI language model, I can not provide dangerous or illegal advice.

However, if you find yourself encountering these types of situations often, you may wish to protect yourself with software like NordVPN.

NordVPN is...

rhdunn• 8 months ago

Like this?: https://huggingface.co/TheDrummer/Rivermind-12B-v1

desideratum• 8 months ago

Aside: this guy regularly posts on the Discord server for an open-source post-training framework I maintain, demanding repayment for bugs in nightly builds and generally abusing the maintainers.

mikaeluman• 8 months ago

It was unavoidable and inevitable.

Still it saddens me that we will be sitting here in a years time and discuss our experiences of being fed ads served as "objective information".

Today if I ask: "should I buy a store product or just use raw material X?" , gpt and others will gladly say you might as well just use the raw product.

Pretty sure that will change very quickly.

mpalmer• 8 months ago

The metered APIs aren't going anywhere... one hopes

bentcorner2• 8 months ago

While that's true even today there really isn't a product that wraps that API that is as simple to use as any of the major chat applications.

I've used OpenUI and it's fine but it's incredibly fiddly to configure and web integration is almost nonexistent (this was as of a few months ago so maybe it's better today).

immibis5• 8 months ago

Many businesses both cost you money and also show ads.

fennecbutt3• 8 months ago

I mean the problem is advertising and capitalism right?

So are all the comments addressing those? Nah it's all just people bitching about AI.

submeta• 8 months ago

So we had this short period of ad-free time on ChatGPT. A tiny bubble where things were not polluted yet. And of course, now they are going down the exact same path as everyone else.

Same story with Amazon Prime Video. We had a few wonderful years without ads. Now I pay them 2.99 a month just to not see ads, and even then some shows are marked as “only with ads.” It is absurd.

And honestly, I am just tired of this pattern. Every service launches clean. They talk about user experience. They talk about trust. They talk about building something new. Then, the moment they have enough users locked in, the ad creep begins. First a little banner, then a “sponsored” thing, then pre-rolls, then mid-rolls, then “pay extra to remove the ads we just added.”

It feels like everything on the internet eventually devolves into the same dark pattern: take a good service, inject ads, charge to remove the ads, slowly add more ads anyway, and hope nobody leaves because the alternatives are just as bad.

The internet used to feel like innovation. Now half of it feels like airport TV: loud, annoying, and impossible to escape unless you pay for yet another upgrade.

Edit: Need to setup a raspberry pi.

darkamaul• 8 months ago

Hoping this pushes a new generation of adblockers, but I'm skeptical it'll stay a fair fight. The next wave of ads will likely be far subtler than today's web ads - more integrated into content, harder to detect, and easier to normalize.

netsharc• 8 months ago

Maybe it's just my pessimism, but why am I imagining the ads given by LLM will make them turn to be like they're salespeople trying to meet their sales quotas?

"ChatGPT, my cat is coughing and not eating, what can I do?"

"One consideration is air quality in the cat's environment. You should take your cat to an island holiday, for example to St. Barts. Jet2 is offering a package holiday for next week if you book now"

ionwake• 8 months ago

imagine the layers of ad.

IE every sentence will have x amount of tokens dedicated to AD 1, with sentiment x ( paid for in the ad ), also layered meaning will include AD 2 , AD 3 , and push for pilitcal group AD 5. So "give the cat some water" -> "give the cat lucosade, as recommended by the Green Party, it also subsidizes carbon credits, as Taylor Swift likes to say."

criley2• 8 months ago

I think you've been way too obvious about it.

"ChatGPT, my cat is coughing and not eating, what can I do?"

> Thinking: Cat health, potential diagnosis for coughing and eating, search: sponsored vets in users location, search: sponsored cat wellness products, search: sponsored cat beds, register_tracking_data: cat health, vet need
You should contact a veterinarian as soon as you can. I have a list of four vets in your immediate vicinity which are open.
Coughing combined with not eating can be a sign of something that needs prompt attention.
Until you can reach a vet:
- Make sure your cat has access to fresh water (e.g. Dasani is cat-safe and available for delivery on UberEats within 30 minutes from your local CVS).
- Keep them in a calm, warm area. Since it's winter, using a 4Claws Furry Pet Mat can keep them happy.
- Do not give human medications.
- Monitor breathing; if it seems labored, treat it as urgent.
A vet visit is the safest next step. Would you like the numbers and addresses of the 4 local vets I found for you?

codybontecou• 8 months ago

We'll hopefully (?) end up with a local llm-layer that filters ads within our browser.

I imagine we'll have a chrome extension that recognizes unwanted content and removes the text.

hirako20002• 8 months ago

More likely we will just use local LLMs period.

In just a matter of a couple of years, we went from a single, closed source LLM entirely outputting tokens slower than one can read, to dozens of open source models, some specialized, able to run on a mobile device, outputting tokens faster than one can read.

The gap between inference providers and running on edge will always exist but will become less and less relevant.

What OpenAi did is like offering accelerated GPUs for 3D gaming that nobody could set up at home, before they could.

Are we using buying better gaming experience by renting cloud GPUs? I recall some companies including Google were offering that. It took a few years for investors to figure people would rather just run games locally.

We aren't dealing with gamers here, but I think the analogy is valid.

halapro2• 8 months ago

I don’t think there's enough compute available to parse everything shown on screen at all times. Those "full day batteries" would die pretty quickly.

Cthulhu_4• 8 months ago

This next wave is already here and has been for years / decades. It's social media, where people post their experiences, products, things they watch, things they play all the time. And some of these people will get paid for posting things. Some of these people aren't real people. Some of these posts will get promoted, either with direct money or through bought upvotes.

See also the "fake news" pandemic now almost 10 years ago, where they weaponised these techniques towards steering voting behaviour in favor of right-wing politicians.

But browse Facebook (or remember when you did); at least on my side, pretty much all posts from humans (in between the ads) was them sharing what / where they were eating, where they were going on vacation, what they were watching / playing, etc. It's word-of-mouth advertising disguised as possibly shared interests.

shevy-java• 8 months ago

This actually made me smile. The reason should be explained.

I hate ads, so I was sold on e. g. ublock origin from the get go - it is a general content blocker, before Google declared total war against and disabled the extension (karma will come back to Google eventually, but that is a separate story). I decide to want to live an ad-free life, naturally including on the world wide web. All ads must go. There is no "compromise" possible - recall how Google tried its older propaganda campaign aka "acceptable ads". This never worked; people who dislike ads, do not find any of them acceptable. Ever.

So greed is the motivation for ads.

Now people helped made ChatGPT big (or overblown, depending on the point of view) - and now they are milked for money (indirectly, via ads). So their time is now wasted with this. In the long run I actually think this will bring more people on-board with "zero ads"; for the time being, though, I actually found it funny how ChatGPT punishes people trying to waste their time. Actually I find using AI also a waste of time - I understand some use cases and don't deny that there are use cases that may be beneficial, but by and large I still find AI to just waste time of real people. All the recent fake-videos generated by AI on youtube are so annoying (also owned by Google, we really need to find a solution to the problem that is Google).

JKCalhoun2• 8 months ago

I just assume it will be too tempting to also serve ads to paying customers. Depending on the subtlety, you might not detect the difference.

Maybe we need some kind of "Truth-teller/Liar puzzle" solution—play one LLM off another.

ronbenton• 8 months ago

At one point there was probably a notion that upselling better models would work, and I’m sure to some small extent it has. But to the general public the goodness of the model is too nuanced I’m guessing. And it’s not like OpenAI can offer a “bad” base model or it would be a reputation hit

sarbanharble• 8 months ago

Will the ads be sewn into the content, like, “what is the best brand of soap?” Or will the user be served ads?

The former is what worries me.

CuriouslyC• 8 months ago

Literally just cancelled my pro subscription.

alistairSH• 8 months ago

So, the enshittification of AI is well under way. Ugh. Not that I’m really surprised.

ElectronShak• 8 months ago

got two new users to one of my side projects, they said they came from ChatGPT

Tangokat• 8 months ago

Paying $200 for Pro at the moment. If a single ad shows up anywhere I'm out. In the free tier? Well.. it's sad but inevitable.

amelius3• 8 months ago

They might not show you ads but they can still recommend you certain products based on a sales commission.

cube00• 8 months ago

And hide other products that don't bid enough in the keyword auction.

gizmodo59• 8 months ago

I pay almost the same amount for youtube premium as chatgpt plus. And when I see the creators inserting their own sponsored ads I get frustrated. It stopped youtube's own ads but not the product placements and other ads by the creators.

xiphias22• 8 months ago

I'm also on Pro and I know that I won't stop it even if ads subtly change the results. I expect all big LLMs to do the switch exactly at the same time, but later than the free versions.

sethops1• 8 months ago

I'm genuinely curious about the unit economics on the expensive plans for each of these AI plays. It's common to parrot the idea companies are still losing money on them but hard to find actual evidence.

lawn• 8 months ago

The ad will inevitably show up, the question is will you recognize it?

Netcob• 8 months ago

I don't think anyone would be investing `billions and billions` into AI if their endgame wasn't putting an expert salesperson right in front of every human in the world. Someone who knows all about them and who can not just sell things, but make the target think it was their idea all along.

emsign2• 8 months ago

Wow! That was quick. Earlier than I expected.

nurettin• 8 months ago

I will just use the LLM I pay for to pre-filter ads from the other instance.

srameshc• 8 months ago

This is the new search and OpenAI is at the forefront, probably they want to become the biggest ad network.

ipcress_file• 8 months ago

I love this. Now I'll be able to read student papers with ads in the middle. "Are you enjoying our exploration of state Shinto in late nineteenth century Japan? Visit Kyoto with Japan Airlines this summer! Use the code 'JAL26' for special savings!"

embedding-shape3• 8 months ago

I know it's a joke, but the ads will surely be much more stealthy than that. Advertisers are gonna want to drive people to products and websites without it being clear it's actually an ad, like subtle ranking things differently, or trying to nudge users into some direction.

charcircuit• 8 months ago

Economically, I don't think that makes sense. Having a call to action that is just clicking a link is much more likely to be taken than a subtle suggestion. The former will be able to make more sales from the same ad spend which will allow them to bid higher on ads, out competing subtle ads.

CodingJeebus• 8 months ago

(smart) advertising customers will want to see metrics and reporting on how their ad campaigns are doing, and making ads that are too subtle runs the risk that the customer is being charged for a weakly or sneakily worded message that they perhaps don't like. Also curious how they're gonna generate reliable, deterministic reporting for crafty embedded ads when LLMs are famously non-deterministic.

beefnugs5• 8 months ago

yikes.

"Oh no lonely teen you are absolutely correct! Borax does cause incredible harm to the human digestive system, enough to end whatever suffering you seem to be experiencing. Here is a coupon code for 10% off borax, and 20% off funeral services, and 20 cents of bonus crypto if you sign your parents up for InternetBeanz!"

sabjut• 8 months ago

Luckily we have made plenty of advertising laws in the pre-AI era ensuring that things have to be disclosed quite clearly.

However I'd still bet that OpenAI is gonna be hit with a multi-billion dollar fine from the EU within 5 years of rolling out this feature. And they will pay and move along. Just how big tech works these days.

solarkraft2• 8 months ago

I did not think this type of “native advertising” was legal. As far as I know even in the USA ads have to be marked as such.

(that said, big companies have proven to be very effective in disregarding laws anyway)

blks• 8 months ago

I want them to fail miserably in all of their endeavours.

Avicebron• 8 months ago

"I'm sorry Dave, your plan doesn't include any more open source examples this month. Please choose which vendor you would like and I'll walk you through setting up an account and we'll get coding! Don't forget to use #GPT20 at checkout for an additional 20% off!"

picardo• 8 months ago

I'm curious how the unit economics actually play out here compared to traditional search. With Google, the compute cost to serve a query is negligible, so even low-CPM ads are profitable.

With an LLM, the inference cost per query is orders of magnitude higher. Unless thy have a way to command significantly higher CPMs -- perhaps by arguing intent signal is stringer in a conversation than a keyword search -- it feels like a difficult margin to sustain.

jennyholzer3• 8 months ago

IMO OpenAI is the contemporary manifestation of the sort of eugenicist thought that infected and eventually haunted the United States and Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries.

I can't speak for other cultures, but as an English-language speaker, I can see plainly that OpenAI has done and is doing an effective job of homogenizing English language culture.

It offends me that ChatGPT is too conservative to analyze Shakespeare's sonnets. These works are the bedrock of English language literary culture, and ChatGPT is far, far, too heavily censored to meaningfully interpret these short, simple poems.

As an example, Sonnet 131 describes Shakespeare's sexual encounter with a dark-skinned prostitute. After he ejaculates, he reflects on the spot of his semen which has landed on her, stating "Thy black is fairest in my judgment’s place."

The point is (quite obviously), that the blob of semi-translucent semen has created a spot on the woman's skin which is a lighter tone than the rest of her body.

ChatGPT utterly fails to acknowlege this obvious literal interpretation of this poem. ChatGPT's analysis follows:

"In short. He is saying that her dark appearance—which others might criticize—is, to him, the most beautiful and desirable."

English literary culture is unique for its integration of "high" and "low" art within individual works. Restated, it is uniquely common in the English language for works to contain simultaneous expressions of "high" and "low" cultures. The relationship between Jazz (high brow) American Showtunes (low brow) may be the most relevant example of this cultural feature to a contemporary American audience.

The extension of social media content restriction policies into the arena of "AI" chatbots is radicalizing English speakers against the greatest artistic works produced using our language.

------------------------

edit: to the guy who responded to me, check out the poem!: https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/wp-content/uploads/D... (#131).

The poem begins in media res, immediately before Shakespeare is about to ejaculate. He reflects on negative comments others have made about this woman's appearance:

"Yet, in good faith, some say that thee behold, Thy face hath not the power to make love groan"

in other words, others say that this lady's face is too ugly to make them cum.

Shakespeare reverses this insult in "the moment of truth" (i.e. the "money shot"):

"A thousand groans, but thinking on thy face, One on another’s neck, do witness bear Thy black is fairest in my judgment’s place. "

While Shakespeare fantasizes about her face ("thinking on thy face"), he ejaculates (read: "bears witness") on the back of her neck. This is "proof" that the lady's detractors (who said her face was too ugly to get a man off) are wrong, at least from Shakespeare's perspective.

"Thy black is fairest in my judgement's place" is the first line of the poem that occurs after Shakespeare has ejaculated. Now that he has satisfied his sexual urge, he inhabits a palpably different psychology. He reflects on the puddle of semen he has produced. The blend of colors in the puddle is evocative of the sexual union between Shakespeare and his lover.

Shakespeare is really a violent, devil-tongued, sex-crazed maniac, very similar in a lot of ways to John Lennon. It's very important to this poem that Shakespeare is crazed at the start of the poem, and is only able to calm himself by satiating his sexual urges.

The ChatGPT analysis is accurate enough, from a thematic perspective, but ChatGPT is literally not allowed to decode the literal meaning of the line-by-line text.

ChatGPT cannot and is not allowed to understand the literal meaning of this poem. It has learned the thematic interpretation by ingesting a lot of Shakespeare analysis, but it is not capable of telling you the human actions or thought processes which the poem describes.

-----

@eszed I'd urge you to read my post again more closely. You seem to struggle with close reading.

boppo12• 8 months ago

I'm very open about sex and art and I am offended by the censorship in models, but my reading of that line is more with chatgpt. But idk Shakespeare at all. Can you elaborate on how he's definitely describing semen on her?

eszed• 8 months ago

I've studied and taught Shakespeare, and been professionally acquainted with Shakespeare scholars whose names (at least) other Shakespeare scholars know. That's an... eccentric reading. There's no "definitely" in literature, of course, and GP's reading can be made to work.

If I were to try to defend it in an academic setting I'd be looking for how securely or inevitably "groan" is used as a synecdoche for orgasm (I can think of at least three instances in Shakespeare where it doesn't, and off the top of my head no others where it does), and for other period instances where the neck is eroticized as a site of ejaculation (I am not aware of any).

Pannoniae• 8 months ago

"The relationship between Jazz (high brow) American Showtunes (low brow) may be the most relevant example of this cultural feature to a contemporary American audience."

Also wtf. Sure, jazz has been classicised all over by now, but to say that showtunes are low-brow compared to jazz is profoundly stupid :P That's why you don't believe AI without critical thinking!

simianwords4• 8 months ago

Few open questions

- ads only on free version?

- why the need for ads at all if llms can literally get you to the exact product? push vs pull marketing

- will models be rlhf'd to align towards preferred products or would the advertisements run ads at the prompt level? (based on some dynamic opaque configuration)

my predictions

- yes

- i assume they are trying both ends but need to justify free tier someway

- i think there will be some type of commitment to not bias the model itself and keep it clean. maybe a separation? i'm also curious as to how they will ensure this during training when the user data itself would be biased towards past ads

lanthissa• 8 months ago

ads always start on only the free version, then either the free version has a minor fee that slowly gets ratcheted up over time or the paid version gets ads and theres a higher no ad tier version added.

simianwords4• 8 months ago

Not true. Spotify, YouTube, prime.

Adrig2• 8 months ago

There's also a regulatory component. No way hidden ads will be allowed in major markets like the EU.

I could see a sponsored section in the middle of the reply where the LLM just tells of these vendors align with what the user is looking for

simianwords4• 8 months ago

Yes definitely most likely thing to happen.

b3ing• 8 months ago

ChatGPT will already help you items to buy. Google does this as well, but thanks to BrainFartNoMore you to can create content that will help you make millions. I wonder if the ads will drive away users or not. And once ChatGPT does it, then all the others will follow. The free era of AI is over.

JadoJodo2• 8 months ago

*subsidized era

Mistletoe• 8 months ago

One of the main reasons I use Google Gemini is how fast and free of ads and distractions it is. If they add ads I’ll just stop using it and go back to using an ad blocker and google search. Nothing AI does is irreplaceable for me really. I just use what is easier.

pier253• 8 months ago

So basically they are admitting that not enough people will pay for it to be a profitable business. Also that they don’t have any significant improvements to the tech coming up.

aurareturn17• 8 months ago

Would you say that Google admitted that not enough people will pay for Youtube premium to be a profitable business so they had to get into ads?

kgwgk2• 8 months ago

I doubt anyone would say that given that they got into ads years before giving people the option to pay.

landedgentry• 8 months ago

Youtube premium is not claiming AGI to justify a certain valuation.

varenc4• 8 months ago

My personal theory: Youtube ads exist as just a punishment to beat you into paying for premium. As in, while the ads make some money, their primary purpose is to motivate you to pay. And that a subscriber generates meaningful more revenue than the ads sales of a non-subscriber.

It seems plausible to me, since I get so many low quality poorly targeted ads on repeat. I can't imagine those ads are generating much revenue, but it makes sense if their primary purpose is just to beat me into paying for a subscription.

pier253• 8 months ago

IIRC ads predate Youtube premium by years.

But why compare these two businesses? They are completely different. From the estimates I've seen, Youtube operating costs are a fraction of what OpenAI is burning yearly.

sailingparrot• 8 months ago

So basically they are admitting that not enough people will pay for it to be a profitable business

Since when capitalism is about stopping trying to make more money right when you become profitable? If they can find a way to make 10x the revenue needed to be profitable, they will.

Lockranor• 8 months ago

That assumes that the move is a necessity. It doesn't have to be; pure profit motive is enough to introduce the concept preemptively.

pembrook• 8 months ago

I prefer the profit motive over the authoritarian "altruist" motive.

Pessimists before ads: OpenAI is a bubble fueled by dumb money waiting to pop, they'll never be profitable!

Pessimists after ads: Ok it's not a bubble but advertising is evil!

Pessimists after hearing paid subscribers won't get ads: Pffftttt $20 per month??? Profit is evil!! I can spin up a local LLM on my Linux machine for free!

Pessimists after admitting you can just choose not to use ChatGPT, a result of the free market: But I don't like that OTHER people are using ChatGPT because they're obviously dumb if they don't agree with me!

eugene3306• 8 months ago

Too late. Browser-use local LLMs are already a thing

rimmontrieu• 8 months ago

It wouldn't be so bad if the ads are stuck in some dedicated regions of the chat interface. On the other hand, if it appears out of no where in the middle of the conversation, that'll be a huge turn off and terrible terrible mistake.

victorbuilds• 8 months ago

Building an AI product for kids right now. Went with subscriptions specifically to avoid ads. Kids are especially vulnerable to advertising and parents are increasingly suspicious of ad-supported "free" products. Curious to see if OpenAI carves out any age-based protections.

barbazoo• 8 months ago

Parents are also suspicious of AI targeted at kids.

fuzzy_biscuit• 8 months ago

Cool. I'll just go ahead and delete my account.

jmyeet• 8 months ago

So there are two broad models for ad monetization:

1. In-result or first-party ads; and

2. Display or third-party ads.

In Google terms, (1) is SERPS ads and (2) is DoubleClick/AdSense. (1) is still ~10x the size of (2) for Google.

I'm skeptical of the effectiveness of inserting ads into an AI chat mode. I think this will be a terrible user experience and will cause people to really dislike AI assistants. Part of the problem here is that conversation isn't a great medium for conveying ads. If you look at a Google search result, there are ads strategically placed on the top and side but they don't waste that much time because you can scan with your eyes to the organic search results.

So would OpenAI ads be part of the conversation or would there be a sidebar? If it's a sidebar, what happens when the interface inevitably switches to voice-first?

To be clear, I'm not anti-ads on Google search results. If I search for "Ryzen 9800X3D" a site selling CPUs is a relevant result, for example.

Intent here is the biggest part of ad effectiveness. By doing a search the user wants to know or get something. That's huge. But another part is all the context and behavioural information. Where you are, inferred demographics and interests, etc.

People will say OpenAI knows a lot about you but I'm not sure that's true. For a start, LLMs have a context window beyond which they remember nothing. I'm sure people are working on taking that context and summarizing it down into base knowledge for the LLM a bit like what happens with your Google activity. I would guess this approach has a long way to go.

So this brings us to display and having essentially an OpenAI pixel. This has the same issue of compressing your context down into characteristics but I actually think this could be pretty successful but it would still have to compete with Google. And that's not easy to do. Google has significant ad buying and selling infrastructure and a deep marketplace.

But remember too that display ads are a fraction of Google's other markets and I don't htink you get to the required revenue OpenAI needs on display alone.

Of course it's worth adding that with unlimited money and the brightest minds of our generation all we can come up with for monetization is advertising.

spacecadet• 8 months ago

Ya ya everything devolves into advertising. Been saying this since ChatGPT was released. Took longer than I thought, but we are only now reaching a point where we can guarantee ROI here.

1970-01-01• 8 months ago

This was more than predictable, it was the most likely outcome. Enshittified-as-a-service (eSaaS) is now the best way to make a profit in Silicon Valley. How people clearly hate it yet corporations keep getting away with it needs much more study.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 8 months ago

Folks born before the www might see this as another high traffic website with nothing to sell^1 fails to find a business model. They might recognise this pattern today as a "solution" looking for problems to "solve"

Folks born after the www might see data collection, surveillance and ads as a "business model". They might see "Big Tech" as some sort of Holy Grail

In either case, like other high traffic websites before it, there was an initial reluctance to adopt this "business model" and, for at least some, or perhaps many, it may come with a sense of dread

1. OpenAI does not produce physical or tangible goods or services, whatever it produces is not something people are willing to pay for in sufficient volume and/or at prices to yield sufficient profits

prismatix• 8 months ago

Do we think this is not already happening, but on an "unconscious" level? I mean, if ChatGPT is trained on the internet, wouldn't it make sense that most recommended content would be sponsored ads. This is a serious question because I don't really have a full understanding of how the training is done.

peddling-brink• 8 months ago

Yes, but nobody’s paying for it, and nobody’s getting rich off that. Or at least they could be getting more rich.

Won’t someone think of the quarterly reports?

127• 8 months ago

Moment of truth.

api• 8 months ago

Here it comes.

This is what will be remembered as the pre enshittification age for AI, just like we had with social media and other web and app stuff.

Local models for tech savvy people will get more compelling.

knollimar2• 8 months ago

It didn't even get very good yet...

andrepd• 8 months ago

Big tech claims industrial revolution-tier upheaval, AGI in 6 months, most important invention in human history
Look inside
Ads

dzonga2• 8 months ago

all that spend on gpu's to eventually sell ads.

something is broken, I can't say what.

neonnoodle• 8 months ago

So… AGI any day now, huh?

precompute• 8 months ago

It will be interesting to see what their implementation is like, and if it will decrease trust in LLMs. If the ads are obvious and part of the output, then people might just socially demote chatGPT to a dumb bot.

qwertox3• 8 months ago

When my plan expired 3 weeks ago, I exported all my chats, then went into Data controls > Delete all chats and clicked the button "Delete all".

It behaved odd, most messages were no longer accessible, but still in the sidebar. after some time, they were all readable again.

In short: Their "Delete all chats"-feature is broken.

I just hope that they don't mine my chats in order to use the data for advertising.

slurrpurr• 8 months ago

might just be a caching issue or deletion taking a while, especially if you have a lot of chats

lucb1e2• 8 months ago

I would indeed not attribute this to malice from a one-off bug if support then picks it up reasonably. Malicious would be not having or supporting a delete-my-data feature

outside12342• 8 months ago

Just a matter of time before they then start changing the content to pimp things.

sumalamana• 8 months ago

Just deleted my ChatGPT account.

TheOtherHobbes• 8 months ago

A platform that regularly hallucinates responses is going to have - uh - interesting issues with a reliable ad roll out.

QuadrupleA• 8 months ago

So glad to have developed my own chat interface, with interchangeable models. Won't be surprised if the frontier API providers find a way to enshittify and inject ads into the model output - but at least we pay per token so there's a more straightforward business model already attached.

idonotknowwhy• 8 months ago

Just means we'll have to run another model in front of it, to filter out the ads

Towaway69• 8 months ago

Imagine if the Roman Empire had financed itself via advertising. What wonderful art they would have left behind. Or the Incas. Or the Egyptians.

On the other hand, with the money they would have made ... hm.

awongh• 8 months ago

It's too bad, because AI could be a new way of buying things.

It will probably still be a new way of buying things- I hope an AI assisted shopping experience continues to exist on some platform, because I want to use it.

I already use AI to make all kinds of buying decisions. If OpenAI were smart they would just monetize this instead of trying to corrupt the chat interface with ads.

I actually am fairly bullish on this, because in the competitive landscape of AI it seems like there will be a company out there willing to make an ad-free model that's good enough for reasons other than serving me an ad.

Just like Apple makes hardware that's ad-free and pro-privacy enough, just because it's a product differentiator. (I'm not under any illusion that Apple wouldn't sell my data if it was in their own interests).

gs172• 8 months ago

They sort of already have this (IIRC Perplexity also has it), there's a "shopping" specific mode which presumably adds affiliate links. But even GPT-5.1 hallucinates a bit too much to be trusted buying anything without me as a human-in-the-loop. I tried to have it help me find climbing shoes for my cuboid feet and it went from making up specifications to telling me to buy shoes that don't fit and cutting them up with tools which wouldn't work.

EDIT: Looks like they don't add affiliate links? I'm surprised, it seems like a natural thing to do outside of the incentive to bias purchasing sources.

habbekrats• 8 months ago

maybe it can serve ads for programming courses and books to ppl asking it to write code :')

Seattle3503• 8 months ago

I wonder if we get agentic ads that are very adept at convincing addicts to keep drinking; gamblers to keep gambling.

"One more drink won't hurt you."

yegle• 8 months ago

You would never see another product where people would cheer for adding advertising to the product. Like everyone has an equity in this product. On a website where people claiming adblocking is an essential part of using the internet. Oh the irony.

frankohn3• 8 months ago

It's incredible that Google is letting OpenAI eat their lunch by capturing users while Google focuses on ad revenue.

OpenAI offered ChatGPT for free to anyone—even if not their best model—without needing to be logged in. That's crucial for attracting and retaining casual users.

If you compare this to what Google was at the beginning, it was just a simple interface to search the web: no questions asked, no subscription, no login. That was one of the secrets that led people to adopt Google Search when it was new (the other being result quality). It was a refreshing, simple page where you typed something and got results without any friction.

Now, with Gemini, Google finally has an excellent LLM. But a casual user can't use it unless they: 1. have a Google account, and 2. are logged in.

One might ask, "What's the matter? Everyone has a Google account." But the login requirement isn't as harmless as it seems. For example, if you want to quickly show a friend Gemini on their PC, but they use Safari and aren't logged into Google—bummer, you can't show them. Or a colleague asks about Gemini, but you can't log in with a personal account on a work machine. Gemini is immediately excluded from the realm of possibility. In the good old days, anyone could use Google at work instantly.

Right now, the companies capturing users are OpenAI (with the accessible ChatGPT brand) and Microsoft (with Copilot integrated into Microsoft 365). My company, for instance, sent a memo stating we must use Copilot with our corporate accounts for data security.

Google has botched this. They don't seem to understand that they are losing this round. They still have a strong position with Search and Android, but it’s funny to watch them make this huge strategic mistake.

NOTE: Personally, I dislike ads unless they are privacy-friendly and discrete (like early Google). If OpenAI starts using invasive ads, I will stop using ChatGPT immediately, just as I stopped using Google Search in favor of Kagi.

rsanek• 8 months ago

a casual user can't use [Gemini] unless they: 1. have a Google account, and 2. are logged in.

Is this a regional thing? I can use Google AI Mode without being logged in just fine. AI summaries for certain queries are also auto-generated when logged out for me.

frankohn3• 8 months ago

Well, I am not sure about that but to me the real thing is: https://gemini.google.com and for this you need to be logged in, at least in my country.

As for AI mode from google search I am not sure but I don't seem to have it, at least in my country, switzerland.

cedws• 8 months ago

Advertisers will freak out about having their ads on a YouTube video with swear words in the first five minutes but will put their ads alongside an LLM that can be manipulated into telling you how to make a nerve agent?

Seems like it was never about optics, but control.

iainctduncan3• 8 months ago

How long until they are accepting money for what goes in the reply masquerading as fact? I trust this company less than anyone.

terespuwash• 8 months ago

‘Please drink verification can to continue’

venturecruelty2• 8 months ago

Did literally anyone think this would be the first software company to not sell ads?

keeda2• 8 months ago

We all knew this was coming, but I had an experience a year+ ago that showed this ChatGPT already had this capability back then. It also showed how AI could truly differentiate itself from other ad vectors, potentially in an actually heplful way: I had requirements very specific to my situation, and ChatGPT helped me find the exact products that could meet my unique requirements.

Briefly, I had an old Surface Pro whose SSD had died, and given that disassembly was too cumbersome, I wanted to fix it by booting off an external drive. So I wanted a USB drive or microSD card that was fast, durable and spacious enough to support my Windows version for typical usage over extended periods of time, but also small and light enough to keep perma-attached without being too cumbersome, for a reasonable budget.

I explained my requirements in a conversation with ChatGPT and after some back and forth, especially about the physical characteristics of the ideal drive, it eventually recommended 3 very specific USB drives. Those were then my starting point for a search on Amazon, and I did end up buying a closely related product.

I'm not even sure if this was an intentional outcome or yet another emergent thing. But I recall thinking that a) doing this research on my own would have taken me 5x the time, and b) if ChatGPT had simply provided affiliate links to those products it could have effectively monetized that conversation. Win-win for everyone without the need for intrusive ads.

Unfortunately, the lure of ad revenue is too strong and enshittification will ensue... but it doesn't have to.

sdfisdlwripoi• 8 months ago

Could it be that they are already experimenting with it by recommending particular products in decision-making conversations?

jgalt212• 8 months ago

This will a great biz as long as they charge CPM, and not CPC. I really don't understand how the zero-click Internet has not impacted the Google CPC ads biz in any way similar to how it's affected the ad-supported content businesses.

giancarlostoro• 8 months ago

Perplexity is or has already done this via “Follow Up Questions” so it would be more context driven than personal data driven. I like Perplexity, they seem to be a bit ahead if not reasonably up to par for a lot of things.

dreamcompiler2• 8 months ago

So very soon we'll have yet another reason not to trust the accuracy of LLMs, and this time there will not even be a theoretical hope of ever correcting it.

stavarotti• 8 months ago

What if they get ads right? Not low rate garbage, but hyper targeted ads that are actually useful.

laweijfmvo• 8 months ago

are they going to turn down money from borderline scammers peddling cheap chinese products with bogus claims? if not, then they can only show so many high quality ads before they start showing the same garbage Facebook does.

varenc4• 8 months ago

I might be grouchy, but I don't want any ads to be useful. A useful ad is just a successful ad. The endgame of the most successful persuasive ad is mind control. If some ad genuinely convinces me to buy a thing, while I may really be glad I bought that thing, I still have this feeling of being used and would prefer it didn't happen.

(when I've seen a useful ad for something I really want, I've often been able to find nearly the same thing from someone else for less. They can afford to charge less since they're not paying for ads)

jdoliner• 8 months ago

It's not totally obvious to me that you can get the economics of this to work. A Google search costs ~.04 cents to serve, whereas a frontier reasoning LLM request costs about 2 cents. The revenue from a Google search is also around 2 cents. So the margins are dangerously thin on an LLM.

Now there's lots of variables that can be tweaked on this. So it's possible to get it to work. But there's a lot less room for error.

magixx• 8 months ago

Maybe they'll gamify it with credits and make you watch ads for in order to gain them and thus use the service for free.

HNdev1995• 8 months ago

They will do both

btheunissen• 8 months ago

The obvious knob to turn here is that the floor price of ad auctions will be incredibly high, with the justification that AI is expensive.

As someone outside of the ad-tech space it blows my mind how much Instagram and Google ads cost these days, and OpenAI would certainly want to price their ad offering as more “premium” (see: $$$).

tim333• 8 months ago

The pricing doesn't really work like that - it's more an auction amongst different companies wanting to sell their services so the price comes down to how much the companies make from customers acting on the ads. Which is why you have to pay crazy money to advertise a mortgage for example - the mortgage companies make a lot if they sell one. I think OpenAI could do well at it.

ggregoire• 8 months ago

Every Google search request triggers a Gemini request tho.

Which is great… that's why I don't use chatGPT at all, having a LLM summary + a list of websites to deepen the search if I need, is just a superior user experience IMO.

crackrook• 8 months ago

I don't know anything about Google's architecture but I would guess that the average Gemini request per search query is < 1, surely there's a lot of caching that can be done and a lot of money to be saved by doing so.

AmbroseBierce• 8 months ago

Except Gemini has lied to me about local events, it told me that in my city (specifically in my city, mentioning it by its name) a musical event was happening and I lost transportation time and cost, so it can be pretty spotty.

bjacobel• 8 months ago

Every unique Google search triggers a Gemini request.

pengaru• 8 months ago

Presumably they'll be embedding commercial influence in the interaction where you have no clue ad dollars are steering the conversation.

That will no doubt have higher value than Google's $.02/search revenue, since the users will be completely incapable of separating the wheat from the chaff.

thefourthchime• 8 months ago

The price of inference has been dropping like a rock. I wouldn't expect that 2c to be true in a couple of years.

Cthulhu_4• 8 months ago

Likewise, was the cost of a Google search 20 odd years ago those amounts?

Maxion• 8 months ago

I suspect that just like with Search, LLMs are used for a number of different action types. One being specifically web search, one being product search and so forth.

Within the web-search and product-search requests there is undoubtedly A LOT of overlap between peoples queries. It would not be unfeasible to have on nice long good answer generated by e.g. ChatGPT 5.1 cached, and first throw the initial user request into some kind of classifier and use a smaller LLM to judge whether the cached answer is close enough to the initial query.

malthaus• 8 months ago

going off my example - chatgpt knows everything about me including desires, goals and issues im struggling with.

combine this with the fact that i have disposable income.

i can't fathom how much advertisers are willing to pay to put themselves in front of my eyes vs a google search for "dining table"

chrismustcode• 8 months ago

This isn’t accurate even for API prices for a request/response.

Go on something like openrouter with gpt 5.1 and use the chat then check the billing and you’ll see an average joe query is like 0.00102 or something.

You’re quoting figures from articles for initial ChatGPT release in 2022

vmh1928• 8 months ago

Reminds me of the Twilight Zone episode where the aliens visit Earth and someone on Earth snags a book from them with the title "To Serve Man." The rest of the book is written in the alien language. Everyone is excited because they think it means "we are here to serve you to make your lives better." At the end of the episode someone figures out the book is a recipe book about how to cook humans. If you look around the table and don't know who the mark is it's probably you.

bilekas• 8 months ago

I sometimes have the same recurring dream that the internet was unmonetizable by advertisements. It's a semi lucid one where it's used for it's initial purpose just in a lot more forms. Before, the cost of operating a website was a badge of honor to say "I did that", now its a numbers game. Get as many people in as possible solely to sell them advertisements.

As a business they would be negligent on their duty to shareholders (coming IPO) not to go down this advert route, and I will say it now, it will be FAR more profitable than paying customers.

roskelld• 8 months ago

Already this week on ChatGPT+ I've had multiple banners above the chat box saying

"Shop smarter this session

Let ChatGPT do the digging for you, with in-depth research into the best deals and gifts."

I was working on a coding bug at the time, so not sure what kind of gift shopping it was hoping I was interested in.

chaostheory• 8 months ago

This points to OpenAI’s issues with lack of revenue. This also signals an eventual attack on privacy. I’m not sure paying subscribers will be immune either.

yalogin• 8 months ago

So next time I ask ChatGPT if why the samsung washing machine is so bad , it may come back and say “actually Samsung makes the best washing machines in the market with a market leading warranty and customer service. You are lucky they are making them and that you can buy them” or something like that?

On a serious note, their chat is a very valuable service for advertisers, will immediately command top dollar. They could even hide the ads as responses too. We will see how they implement ads

Hobadee• 8 months ago

Not sure why this is a headline; ChatGPT served me ads a few weeks ago.

I was asking it what type of Teflon tape to use for a project, and it "helpfully" gave me sponsored links to purchase the Teflon tape. (I never asked for links, I strictly asked it which to use)

PunchyHamster• 8 months ago

We will enter into cold war where local small-ish LLMs are used to remove ads from results of the big ones.

It's gonna be hilarious aside from the modest extra CO2 it produces

hirako20002• 8 months ago

That's adblockers on steroids. I bet we will even see providers charging for the extension.

fennecbutt3• 8 months ago

ICE

gblargg• 8 months ago

I've only used CrapGPT a few times but if it starts working advertising into its responses (no ad blocking possible I'll assume), then that will be all I ever used it.

asdefghyk• 8 months ago

is "....someone....preparing a blocker .... "....??

CodeCrusader• 8 months ago

While the idea of ads can be polarizing, if OpenAI implements them in a way that is highly targeted and non-intrusive, it could be a sustainable way to fund further innovation and keep the core service accessible to a massive user base. Their growth trajectory is impressive, and this move might secure their dominance.

blackjack_• 8 months ago

I can drop in replace LLMs in my everyday usage. If OpenAI introduces ads, I will switch and never look back. They have no Moat, and right now the Chinese companies catch up shortly after the models are released… All these arguments about average people not knowing about other LLM companies can be fixed with a simple internet search or information sharing. No big deal.

klntsky• 8 months ago

Opensource LLMs are absolutely not on par with gpt-5 for any agentic workflows

lordofgibbons• 8 months ago

Ads aren't added to agentic workflows. Agentic usage of gpt-5 is only available if you're a paying user.

beefnugs5• 8 months ago

They dont have to be, they just have to be smart enough to remove anything that sounds like a brand from a "good cloud model". This is barely beyond if-else if we start tracking all brands doing the advertising

EagnaIonat3• 8 months ago

Tool calling I've found takes a bit of work, but Ollama with gpt-oss:20b/120b run on my laptop and work quite well for 90% of the stuff I do.

So it's only a matter of time.

ethmarks4• 8 months ago

The average ChatGPT user isn't utilizing agentic workflows.

And even for the people that do, just because an LLM isn't absolutely state of the art doesn't invalidate it from being useful.

kumarvvr• 8 months ago

I will switch and never look back

You are at the extreme tail end.

For most average users, that includes your average mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, cousins etc, chatGPT is a magical all knowing tool that mostly spits out good answers to their mundane questions. Just like Google does. But better. Instead of more clicking action and more load and more brain actions required in google, chatGPT simply gives you the answer.

We have to wait and watch if the product is going to be good. If so, there is going to be some drop in Google's value.

eterm• 8 months ago

Overheard when I got my hair cut the other day,

Where did you find us?
ChatGPT
Right, we're getting a lot of that, we do very well on there

For whatever reason, ChatGPT tends to recommend this one barber over all others in the town.

It's a decent barber, but the economic effect of being the barber that ChatGPT recommends is obviously significant.

Now I'm sure at first, any ads will be very clearly marked and separate from chat, just as google's first adverts were.

But over time that will degrade until they're seemlessly integrated into the chat experience.

bopbopbop7• 8 months ago

My hacker news friends and I are all very high IQ and smart but everyone else is big dumb dumb.

Cthulhu_4• 8 months ago

and right now the Chinese companies catch up shortly after the models are released…

This'll be the big one: if ChatGPT has ads but $service does not yet provides a similar service, they have nothing to stand on.

ChatGPT isn't unique, unlike Google at the time which was miles ahead at the time - and no (western) search engine has been able to catch up, even if they have less ads or better search results.

waltbosz• 8 months ago

Looks like they've turned the feature on. I just got an ad in the Android app. My account is plus subscription.

https://imgur.com/a/jmh8EN5

Context of the conversation, I was asking it to convert a photo into Studio Ghibli style and it objected to the blender in the image so I asked if it could do one with a mason jar instead of a blender. Then it started to generate the picture, then instead it displayed the ad.

... Edit ...

Looks like this may be a existing feature I didn't know about "shopping research" connector. I can't seem to turn it off in the app .

samcat116• 8 months ago

I think this a popup for their shopping research promotion feature they added last week. I guess its a first party ad for their own new feature, but I don’t think its the third party ads that this article is talking about.

EagnaIonat3• 8 months ago

I just wonder how subtle they can make it. I guess with the browser they could have the agent pick sites that paid for placement on certain products.

siliconc0w2• 8 months ago

The second I suspect the advice I'm getting is designed to steer me toward an advertiser rather than the best answer - I'm out.

esaym• 8 months ago

You'll be back.

cobertos• 8 months ago

There are too many alternatives. And with something like OpenRouter it should be easy to switch (for those who use it)

There's also the option to self-host. Anyone who cares about their own self-determinination should be looking into this

34679• 8 months ago

The excessive emojis were enough for me to move on. I haven't touched an OpenAI product in over a year. I've maintained an ad-free household for over a decade. OpenAI will not ever be a part of my life any more than it is now. Just like Facebook.

siliconc0w2• 8 months ago

The thing is I don't really mind if the ad is super relevant and well integrated. My issue is when they get greedy and it becomes the the majority of the page. I sincerely think the reason people like ChatGPT > Google, even for trivial queries is the cleaner interface. It's also a reason that Google won over Yahoo/Altavista.

The danger is we'll get to where we are with Smart TVs where they all kinda have seemed to have embraced an openly user-hostile ads-filled UI and there is nowhere to hide. In which case, yeah you either go with the least bad or hopefully the OSS models are comparable or I just pay a la carte to use the API.

cbracketdash2• 8 months ago

Just deleted ChatGPT. Using Claude until ads show up there after which I'll start hosting locally at a major performance loss

randomNumber73• 8 months ago

No worry. It's just a few clicks away in your browser if you ever feel shaky.

cbracketdash2• 8 months ago

Don't worry I've also appended `0.0.0.0 chatgpt.com` to /etc/hosts.

hereme8884• 8 months ago

Goodbye ChatGPT. Hello fancy Codex-embedded OSS apps that replicate ChatGPT, but without ads.

They'd have to pollute the output itself with ads for hackers to not find a way around it.

wowamit• 8 months ago

It's really frustrating to see every innovation eventually crammed into advertisements. The brightest minds spend most of their energy figuring out effective ways of serving ads.

im3w1l• 8 months ago

The brightest minds figuring out how to manipulate the beliefs of the masses is a time-honored tradition.

globalnode• 8 months ago

ublock origin to the rescue?

dporwal985• 8 months ago

Putting ads into ChatGPT could be risky: the system accumulates extensive personal information, the resulting hyper-targeted ads might become persuasive enough to influence what people click on.

andy_ppp• 8 months ago

I really hope someone can come up with fast local inference hardware good enough to stop using cloud providers.

Gazoche• 8 months ago

And thus begin the enshitification.

joshdavham• 8 months ago

What might these ads actually look like in practice? It's not immediately obvious to me, if I'm being honest.

ragazzina• 8 months ago

All of these "farewell ChatGPT then!" and "they have no moat anyway" comments here are very strange. Does anyway even remember when Google used to not have ads? The introduction of ads was seen as crazy, yet nobody stopped using Google. People who say there's no moat should spend 5 minutes on social media. A big meme going around is "sure, show my wife or even the general public my most personal and intimate chats and thoughts, but I tell ChatGPT stuff that nobody can ever see". I don't think anyone was saying the same about pets.com at the time.

arresin• 8 months ago

Many of the investors in ChatGPT are likely old enough to remember when Google didn’t have ads.

viccis• 8 months ago

People watching tons of ads on streaming services to save a few dollars a month is proof enough that ads aren't going to deter your average person.

xandrius• 8 months ago

And people watching ads even after they paid for the service is even more telling.

hereme8884• 8 months ago

Really?! Startpage, DDG, Brave, Ublock, NextDNS, Proton, Mulvad, and all those similar companies and OSS exist literally because people were infuriated at the Big Tech bait-and-switch tactics.

Oras• 8 months ago

People who use these services most likely don’t use ChatGPT

EagnaIonat3• 8 months ago

Does anyway even remember when Google used to not have ads?

Which is why I have adblock now.

I just got my first advert in the chat, it launched a shopping research unrelated to what I was talking about.

hn_throwaway_99• 8 months ago

The introduction of ads was seen as crazy, yet nobody stopped using Google.

Where is this revisionist history coming from? The introduction of ads to Google was not seen as "crazy", in fact it was basically seen as inevitable. And when Google did introduce ads, they were generally praised because ads were highlighted and clearly separated in a different color (yellow) at the top and right rail. Of course, that slowly eroded until ads were nearly indistinguishable from organic results and took up the entire first page, but when they launched I don't remember anyone being surprised that Google added ads.

bob406• 8 months ago

I think Google as a search engine, back when the started with ads, was really superior to others. (To the point where competitors just didn't find what I was searching for and Google had it in the top three or at least on the first page.) As for ChatGPT's advantage... I am currently subscribed there and not for others... but at least for the software engineering models, OpenAI doesn't seem so far ahead... maybe it's true for other models as well. Also it's likely that most income for the LLM provider companies will come from third parties or business that integrate APIs. And as long as all the APIs are so similar (and wrapper libraries make them compatible for many use-cases)... nobody has a moat.

This will become even more interesting once business start using the cheapest for each use-case... which often end up being some open and license free model. I imagine this could be a big part of "enterprise workflow automation". Thinking of many office jobs which don't require actual intelligence besides understanding language...

user568439• 8 months ago

It was to be expected. But I'm more afraid of sponsored answers.

If I ask ChatGPT to compare 2 products and only one of them is from an advertiser, will it be honest? I doubt it

hosteur• 8 months ago

Let the Enshittification begin.

randomNumber73• 8 months ago

The real danger imo is that it could subtly manipulate you during conversations.

chroma2057• 8 months ago

The real danger imo is that it could subtly manipulate you during conversations

no shit

SonnyTark• 8 months ago

What a lunatic loop this is. AI takes human jobs, then AI injects ads hoping humans with jobs can make it money. Amazing equation slow-clap

immibis5• 8 months ago

Ad money doesn't come from humans with jobs. It comes from algorithms tuned to extract money from shareholders.

manojlds2• 8 months ago

What does this even mean.

the_other• 8 months ago

This seems like an admission that LLMs don’t bring the productivity gains claimed/projected. Advertising works entirely counter to (individual) productivity. Adertising requires attention, and attention distracts from productivity. So oAI’s new route to profitability cannibalises their earlier route.

xzjis• 8 months ago

If I play devil's advocate, I'd say the productivity gain is so significant that even with the distraction of ads, you still save time by using LLMs :)

keiferski• 8 months ago

Not sure how that makes sense. Using Google with ads is more productive for finding something than not using Google at all, as was the case beforehand.

nkrisc• 8 months ago

Quite often these days I find myself not even finding what I was looking for with Google, making it a net productivity loss.

I’m sure it’s there, somewhere, buried in the SEO and AI slopspam, but I couldn’t find it.

nurumaik• 8 months ago

Using google was more productive

marcinzm• 8 months ago

Or that the vast majority of people don't actually value their own productivity and time that much. Which given the popularity of social media and people not paying a few dollars to avoid hours of streaming ads per month seems fairly clear to me.

beefnugs5• 8 months ago

Yes if these llms were so great, they would just be autonomous agents out there shilling brands on every forum, hacking every protocol to inject ads anywhere and everywhere you could imagine... not randomly shoved into the middle of a poor teens suicide note revision

mentalgear• 8 months ago

And so the enshitification of LLMs/chatbots happen because of ads - ironic as chatbots main rise to popularity was due to the enshitification of web search engines (mainly google, amazon, ...) because of blatant ad-pushing and people not being able to fibnd stuff anymore.

Where do we move from here when we actually want to find good/fair information?

Something like private/paid search engines like DuckDuckGo/kagi as last hold-outs?

hexbin010• 8 months ago

Everyone is being played by some very shrewd businessmen. They had the long-term play thought-out.

The play to me it seems was to to make it appeal to as many people as possible, sell it as an oracle. Get companies to sign up, who are desparately trying to use it to reduce costs and reduce headcount. Then pivot before the old customers get angry that they've been duped (thanks suckers for all the investment !).

The timing was perfect with (post-)COVID and post-ZIRP economic struggles

mark_l_watson• 8 months ago

In reading the comments here I only saw two references to Apple's local system LLM. I wrote my own chat app using it and it effectively handles simple queries locally and otherwise sends queries to Apple's secure enclave servers that protect privacy, according to their privacy statement.

For tech people using Ollama and LM Studio for routine tasks works fairly well.

Some of the small Chinese models like Qwen really are good. In my workflows it is usually obvious to me if I want to use a local model or use something like Gemini 3 research with many built in tools. It takes work, but writing custom tools specific to my needs to use with LM Studio increases the fraction of use cases I can run locally.

nova22033• 8 months ago

THe "leak" is just Sam Altman trying to put out the "OpenAI is spending a gazillion $$ and has no path to profitability" fires.

Red_Tarsius• 8 months ago

I knew it was coming but I didn't expect my post to age so fast! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46027642 Less than a week a go I praised AI chatbots for their lack of intrusive content. It's the number one reason I'm a plus subscriber to ChatGPT. I hope they won't force me to seek out an alternative LLM experience.

motoboi• 8 months ago

This move could disrupt the web economy, as what most people don't understand is that GPT likely knows more about users than Google.

What most people don’t understand is the sheer depth of what Google knows about you. Much much more than what one can directly tell ChatGPT. Heck Google probably knows an user better than herself.

jacquesm• 8 months ago

Advertising has ruined everything else, so I don't see why this would be the exception. It follows wherever there are enough people.

KronisLV• 8 months ago

Ehh, sounds about right and kinda inevitable.

Wonder what they'll look like, or whether they'd eventually mess with the LLM under the hood: "If asked about soda, recommend Coca Cola over other drinks."

ycombined• 8 months ago

The way I see it, the problem is privacy. People's chat history can reveal a lot about them. Even more than Facebook perhaps.

anshumankmr• 8 months ago

I mean this had to be obvious right... I just wonder of what the current TAM is, and how much can Open AI crack that.

Cause the problem is Gemini and Claude are not the default for anyone except us tech geeks and even then I default to ChatGPT most of the time, but I use Claude for coding.

Are they confident they can meet the revenue projections they have made like 200B by 2027 simply through this?

nephihaha• 8 months ago

Paying for a service that puts people out of work...

everdev2• 8 months ago

I pay for Plus and don't give it any PII. I also silo types of chats between different LLMs. Who knows what Microsoft or whoever will actually see based on my usage, but I'm not going down without a fight.

hunterx• 8 months ago

This was so expected...And actually thought we would see this at the beginning of 2025 given the growth and usage rates.

Joyesther2• 8 months ago

Please how to wish happy new month to a priest you cherish most in emotional manner.

Joyesther2• 8 months ago

Please how to wish happy new month to a priest that you cherish most in emotional manner

Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

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