How ChatGPT serves ads

https://www.buchodi.com/how-chatgpt-serves-ads-heres-the-full-attribution-loop/

by lmbbuchodi • 3 months ago

509 358 3 months ago

buchodi.com

gxs• 3 months ago

This is gross

It feels like we’ve been in the golden age and the window is coming to a close

Let the enshitification begin, I guess

2ndorderthought4• 3 months ago

In the past month local models have been ramping up in major way meanwhile the namesake providers have upped prices, went offline randomly, and started doing slimier and slimier things.

I really think the future is local compute. Or at least self hosted models.

SchemaLoad2• 3 months ago

The hosted ones still have the advantage of being able to search the internet for live info rather than being limited to a knowledge cut off date.

CSMastermind• 3 months ago

What's the rough equivalent of a local model? Are we talking GPT-4?

rnxrx• 3 months ago

The arc of the technological universe is short, but it bends toward enshitification.

dannyw• 3 months ago

How do you expect the spend & COGS for free LLM inference to be funded? For users who don't want to pay, or maybe can't pay?

infinite_spin2• 3 months ago

From things like defense/private contracts

e.g. colleges pay for institutional subscriptions

derektank• 3 months ago

Perhaps it’s a glib and easy thing to say, but after a teaser period, I would simply not offer free LLM inference. Agreeing to serve ads just completely re-aligns your interests away from providing the best possible user experience to something else entirely.

iammrpayments• 3 months ago

It has begun ever since they nerfed chatgpt4 before releasing 4o

singingtoday• 3 months ago

I don't like anything about this.

djmips• 3 months ago

And it begins.

WD-423• 3 months ago

Since they are served as distinct events then I would think they should be easy to block.

Once the ads are injected directly into the main response is when things get interesting.

lmbbuchodi• 3 months ago

you can block these URLs: |bzrcdn.openai.com^, ||bzr.openai.com^ It won't blanket block everything but will significantly reduce telemetry collected.

nazcan• 3 months ago

And that's why you gotta just use one domain. Or mix ads and important content on one domain.

kardos• 3 months ago

Once the ads are injected directly into the main response is when things get interesting.

This would be where you post-process the LLM response with a second LLM to remove the ad..

tempest_• 3 months ago

This is already how email works in the corporate world.

A writes email with chatgpt to B.

B sees big blob of text and summarizes email with chatgpt.

Adding an LLM in the middle is just the next step.

naruhodo2• 3 months ago

I think it will be difficult to remove bias when you ask a model to compare alternative products. The model will simply lie, as with a biased human opinion and you will need to consult multiple models for a diversity of opinion and presumably use a "trusted" model to fuse the results. Anonymity will be a key tool in reducing the model's ability to engage in algorithmic pricing.

Super easy. Barely an inconvenience.

devmor• 3 months ago

Then you just end up in an arms race that ultimately leads to photocopy-of-a-photocopy output.

mihaaly• 3 months ago

... and replace it with two.

TZubiri10• 3 months ago

Blocking transparent ads is not a good idea. The consequence is that you will be fed opaque ads.

saghm7• 3 months ago

I don't buy this premise. Nothing stops a company from trying to hide ads in the first place, and plenty of them do. Ad blockers for web content have been a thing for years, and using an ad blocker has continued to be strictly a better experience regardless of how many "organic" ads are present on a page.

estimator7292• 3 months ago

What possible reason could they have to not always run both? It would make zero sense to leave that money on the table

michaelt3• 3 months ago

Blocking transparent ads is not a good idea. The consequence is that you will be fed opaque ads.

Doesn't history show us you just get both?

You pay to get into the movies, then they show you adverts before the film, then the film includes paid product placement of cars, computers, phones, food, etc.

You watch youtube ads, to see a video containing a sponsored ad read, where a guy is woodworking using branded tools he was given for free.

You search on Google for reviews and see search ads, on your way to a review article surrounded by ads, and the review is full of affiliate links.

pbasista3• 3 months ago

Your implication that "you will be fed" other ads if you block the main ones is unsubstantiated. But even if it was true, it does not matter. Because the so-called "opaque" ads can and in my opinion should be blocked as well.

I think that in general blocking all ads is always a good idea.

The reason is that there is no negative consequence in doing so. A person has absolutely no obligation, not even an implied one, to watch or otherwise consume any ad. I think that as long as there are ways to remove or block ads, people should use them.

That being said, if the companies wish to intertwine their products with ads that are indistinguishable from the actual content and therefore unblockable, it is okay. They have the right to do that if they want.

But, in the same fashion, the customers have every right to turn away from all such products. And never consider using them ever again.

WD-423• 3 months ago

I’m not obligated to look at or listen to anything on my own devices, much less in my own home.

keyle3• 3 months ago

Can't wait for "watch this ad for 90s to use xxhigh on your next prompt!"

uriahlight• 3 months ago

Let the enshittification commence!

avaer• 3 months ago

Remember that ads are the "last resort" for OpenAI, and they're doing this despite the fact that it's "uniquely unsettling", according to Sam.

Was he lying, or has OpenAI given up hope that this train wreck works economically without enshittification? Neither option is good, but I don't really see a third.

Aurornis5• 3 months ago

The ads are only for the free and $8/month plans. They basically added an ad-supported super discount level that you can ignore if you’re paying for the normal plans.

RussianCow2• 3 months ago

But the fact that they've added an ad-supported tier this early into their life as a company means they're desperate for revenue. You start inserting ads when you're optimizing for profit, not when you're still growing. It took how long for Netflix to introduce an ad-supported plan?

chrisweekly3• 3 months ago

options 1 and 2 are not mutually exclusive

infinite_spin2• 3 months ago

I see OpenAI making a significantly larger amount from defense contracts than from advertisements pumped into chats. So I wonder whose bright idea it was to create a public perception risk.

peddling-brink3• 3 months ago

Maybe the negative press from ads is better than the negative press from powering murderbots?

tayo42• 3 months ago

Bad press from a contract like that happens once and everyone forgets. Ads are in your face everytime

Larrikin• 3 months ago

Every single MBA can show for at least one quarter revenue is up after they introduced ads. They do not care what happens after if they can plan their career around that.

saghm7• 3 months ago

I wish I had the optimism that you did about companies being willing to stop at just doing one dubious thing or another for money when there's nothing stopping them from doing both.

babelfish• 3 months ago

Source?

jesse_dot_id• 3 months ago

That's cool, I'll never see them.

benleejamin• 3 months ago

I'd always thought that ChatGPT ads would be indistinguishable from actual content.

irjustin• 3 months ago

this would be a breach of trust and short term would work great but long term is too detrimental.

same thing could've been said for search results, so at least that part is still "safe".

bix6• 3 months ago

O you think trust matters? This is capitalism not trustism.

SchemaLoad2• 3 months ago

Long term all of the major LLM platforms will have invisible ads, influences, and propaganda woven into the content. The temptation will be irresistible for these companies.

doginasuit• 3 months ago

I'd be surprised if product placement isn't already basically at play. Charging companies for including/prioritizing their documentation in the training data, for example. Thankfully LLMs are terrible at the subtlety it would require for a direct marketing campaign.

ticulatedspline• 3 months ago

I think that's where they want to be. feels like everyone knows it too, that the long term expectation is basically being able to buy ad words and have LLMs lean responses towards whatever people bought.

Seems the playing field is a bit too open though, models are more fungible than the companies would hope so most of the current moat is brand based and seems like they're not ready to go all "Black Mirror" on us just yet.

senectus1• 3 months ago

I'm pretty sure that will be an eventual evolution of the product. The business model cant sustain itself as it is at the moment, eventually chatGPT wont be the product... we the users will be.

phailhaus• 3 months ago

That was the fearmongering, which made no sense because advertisers can't put a dollar value on "the AI will kind of sort of mention you", and because every conversation needs an ad. If ChatGPT always snuck in a brand mention even on the simplest questions, everyone would hate it.

Ad technology is really old. They're just going to use the same proven tech that has a track record of creating billionaires: intersperse content with sponsored blocks.

acdha• 3 months ago

I don't think that's a fair dismissal: you see ads all over media websites because the rates have been plummeting as consumers tune out ads. One main reason why everyone does is that ads are so obtrusive and repetitive, and that's exactly what LLMs change: I'm sure we'll see regular ads on AI apps because the companies have trillions of dollars to repay but advertisers would pay a lot more for openings where they aren't _forcing_ their message as a distraction but are instead able to insert it fairly naturally into a context where the user is engaged.

The entire history of advertising before the web was companies estimating a dollar value on “awareness” when they couldn't measure direct referrals and every business in the world has gotten a lot better at measuring sales since then. It's not going to be transformative but if, say, Toyota got ChatGPT to say their vehicles were a better value than Ford's I suspect they'd be able to tell pretty quickly whether sales were improving relative to the competition and would pay well for that to continue.

JumpCrisscross3• 3 months ago

always thought that ChatGPT ads would be indistinguishable from actual content

Remember when we got upset that Google was putting ads into image search [1]?

[1] http://www.ryanspoon.com/blog/2008/12/14/google-image-search... 2008

Brystephor• 3 months ago

I work at a company that mainly makes money off ads. Theres no doubt in my mind that the end goal is to make their ads blend into organic content and make them indistinguishable. Typically that results in positive A/B metrics. Its also a reason why influencer driven ads perform well, they seem more organic.

BoredPositron• 3 months ago

I don't get what's wrong with charging for your product. Like get rid of the free tier and make a small tier with an easy to serve model for like 5 bucks. Is it still the DAU rage of the 2010ss that's driving burning money?

teaearlgraycold• 3 months ago

How do you pick up new paying users without letting people use the service for free for a while first? Freemium is popular because it works well.

yoyohello132• 3 months ago

Free trial? Demo?

Aurornis5• 3 months ago

The ads are in the free tier and the new ad-supported $8/month plan.

Every time this comes up there are comments assuming that ads are being injected into the normal plans, but these are for the free tier and the new Go plan which warns you that it includes ads when you sign up.

darepublic2• 3 months ago

Would require a lot of training to implement ads blended into convo and not have it be too obvious/ eff up the results?

ceejayoz• 3 months ago

Cable TV was once ad free. So was Netflix. Companies just can’t help themselves.

DonsDiscountGas• 3 months ago

Netflix is still ad free for the right price. It's not like companies have some fetish for advertising specifically, it's that it brings in money. Often more money than a user would be willing to pay for the service.

catcowcostume• 3 months ago

Until next quarter earnings, when ads become a feature in more expensive plans.

pbasista3• 3 months ago

Every time this comes up there are comments assuming that ads are being injected into the normal plans

No. The distinction between the unpaid vs. cheap vs. expensive plans is irrelevant here.

The main controversial point about this topic is to include ads in the output of an LLM-backed AI tool responses. It does not matter at all in which tier it occurs.

The discussion is about the fact that it occurs in the first place.

Aurornis5• 3 months ago

The main controversial point about this topic is to include ads in the output of an LLM-backed AI tool responses.

Except the article very clearly explains that the ads are separate from the AI responses.

dankwizard• 3 months ago

Really well written, technical post. Good read.

mock-possum• 3 months ago

Not to me they don’t, cause I canceled my account and stopped using their products when they made the announcement.

Aurornis5• 3 months ago

They don't serve them to me, either, because I don't use GPT-5.3 on the free tier or Go plan where these ads show up.

blackjack_• 3 months ago

It is one of the eternal lessons; All tech business plans eventually lead to serving ads. At least until we ban pixels / 3rd party tracking.

netcan• 3 months ago

All tech business plans eventually lead to serving ads

IDK if this is true.

The boulevard of dreams is full of failed/misguided ad-based business plans. Contempt for the business model is sometimes the reason. An implicit assumption that all you need for success is traffic and a willingness to dirty yourself.

There are only a handful of success stories. Most involved a pretty deliberate and tenacious attempt. Success typically involves some very specific and strategic positioning. Data. intent. scale.

No one but Google had google's scale for search ads. 5-10% of the market just isn't enough. You do need tracking but the model works OK even without much targeting. Intent is built in, and that makes up for targeting. But the scale required for viability is very high.

Facebook ads didn't work until (a) they had pushed the envelope on targeting (to make up for lacking intent) and (b) scale was massive. Bing, reddit, etc.... They never had good ad businesses.

didip• 3 months ago

So news about OpenAI demise is real. They can’t sustain themselves without ads.

boringg• 3 months ago

Never in any world were any of the top AI labs not going to sustain themselves with ads. It has always been a timing issue.

Even a cut on every sale on site + sub rev not close.

saghm7• 3 months ago

Even if it wasn't necessary for their survival, it's hard to imagine a world where they wouldn't try to do it anyways. I'm not someone who buys into the idea that companies are obligated to maximize profits at the expense of all else, but I do think that in the absence of other factors (e.g. regulation) it's where pretty much every company will end up.

SubjectToChange• 3 months ago

They can’t be hemorrhaging cash when they IPO.

guluarte• 3 months ago

I've seen chatgpt suggest me more amazon products lately

torben-friis2• 3 months ago

These are the less worrying kind of ads in our future.

Seeing how google has been fighting SEO for ages, what's going to happen when companies figure out how to inject ads into the model?

We haven't yet seen the problem of adversarial content in play, I think.

WaxProlix2• 3 months ago

It's not an issue of how - there's a great ADM with markup/down supported already, waiting for system prompts to be injected in realtime via the same online auction system that powers banner ads and smart tv content. There's got to be some latent resistance to the idea for now - but it's so easy to do, it'll happen.

_boffin_• 3 months ago

Can you provide some references to what you’re talking about

BoorishBears2• 3 months ago

Why do you need to inject ads at the model weights layer when you control the frontend?

Have the model generate keywords from the query, then inject guidance from matching advertisers into the context window

q: How do I make a new React app?

a: Vercel makes it easier to get your project running fast ⓘ

Some other choices would be:

...

ⓘ This part of the response was sponsored by Vercel

JumpCrisscross3• 3 months ago

ⓘ This part of the response was sponsored by Vercel

LLMs are essentially unregulated. I don't believe they have any legal disclosure obligation in America.

TeMPOraL• 3 months ago

Have the model generate keywords from the query, then inject guidance from matching advertisers into the context window

This already exists and is called... "skills".

jcims• 3 months ago

I experimented with this way back when custom GPTs were first released (looks like late 2023). There are a few / commands you can use to suggest what product to inject, how overt, etc and a generic /operator command to send whatever you like 'out of band' from the chat.

https://chatgpt.com/g/g-juO9gDE6l-covert-advertiser

One of the most interesting things is when it starts pitching a product and you start interrogating it about why it picked that product. I haven't used it in probably a year so it may not do the same thing now, but back then it 100% lied consistently and without any speck of remorse. It was rather eye opening.

Edit: Tried again, it didn't lie this time lol - https://chatgpt.com/share/69f16aa4-c008-83ea-92b3-51f16ca77d...

mgambati• 3 months ago

The model already advertises because they where trained on massive data’s that refers big brands.

Ask for suggestions for a new pair of shoes. What brand do you think it will suggest Nike, Adidas or some random small one?

jameshush• 3 months ago

I expected the same out come you're saying here, but in my experience this hasn't been the case. I've been researching new acoustic guitars to purchase, and I've been getting an equal amount of suggestions from the major brands and the small brands.

Part of it though is I'm giving lots of context (e.g. guitar player for 10+ years, huge Opeth fan, looking for something with as close to an Ibanez style neck as possible under $1000)

tyre• 3 months ago

I think if you ask something generic like “shoes”, this could be true.

When I’ve worked with Claude on finding brands for fashion (e.g. here’s a small watchmaker I like, what are similar options?) it does research and picks great options. Some are big, others are small producers.

yfw2• 3 months ago

Can easily seo the knwlege chain or seo poison the sources

autoexec• 3 months ago

The worrying kinds of ads won't be from SEO tricks doing sneaky things without OpenAI's approval. OpenAI will just quietly take money from people who will pay to have the AI causally promote their products or their talking points in the output or suppress mentions of competing products or talking points in the output. Maybe they won't even take money for this and the people running OpenAI will do it themselves to promote or censor whatever they want. Either way, it won't look like ads to the user. It's just what happens when greedy people gain control over how other people get their information.

dbtc2• 3 months ago

Yeah this is bad news. A $1b+ campaign budget could pull some strings.

tikotus• 3 months ago

I've had two people reach out to me asking about one of my services. They both said ChatGPT recommended it to them.

My service does kind of exist. It's a small tool I created for a client while retaining full rights to the tool. So I created (vibe coded) a site around it, making it look like an established service. Even ran google ads for it for a while.

The service still doesn't show up on google with relevant search terms. There hasn't been another client. I forgot about the service. And then ChatGPT started recommending it to people.

I wonder what I did to achieve this. Did vibe coding the business page inject it into ChatGPT's training data?

dbtc2• 3 months ago

I think the chatgpt backend basically includes indexed web like Google, or any other search engine.

Could Google be actively trying skip generated-looking sites/content?

SquareWheel• 3 months ago

Did vibe coding the business page inject it into ChatGPT's training data?

No, at least not directly. Inference does not train models. It is possible that OpenAI may separately collect the chat data, clean it, and feed it back into the model for future iterations. Or they could have extracted URLs for future indexing.

More likely though, I suspect, is your site just managed to be indexed naturally, and LLMs are very efficient at matching obscure data to relevant queries.

tosh• 3 months ago

It's quite possible that SEO-wise the site does not make the cut into top x Google results but still is findable and considered by ChatGPT when it does its searches.

Especially in a longer ChatGPT conversation or via deep-research or more agentic modes (e.g. "Pro").

ChatGPT spends quite some time and diligence on searching.

Great for content that is not hyper search engine optimized but still (or even more) relevant. It bubbles up.

tvbusy• 3 months ago

On the positive side, LLMs are trained based on real data so the default is for it to tell you what data showed. Companies will certainly enforce their influence but it's extra effort against the enormous amount of data, just like with trying to censor sensitive topics. Any context used for ads means less context for the user to use which in turn negatively affects their usefulness.

heresie-dabord• 3 months ago

what's going to happen when companies figure out how to inject ads into

... everything and everywhere eyes are looking?

In this sense, it has been adversarial from the start.

destring• 3 months ago

It is already happening. Generative Engine Optimization.

tencentshill• 3 months ago

They spam HN with their slop-coded tools and websites.

Foobar8568• 3 months ago

My client paid 5 digit consulting fee for that shit.

csa• 3 months ago

what's going to happen when companies figure out how to inject ads into the model?

In certain domains, this has already happened.

masfuerte• 3 months ago

Seeing how google has been fighting SEO for ages

I wish people would stop repeating this canard. Google gave up fighting SEO in about 2020. Emails that came out during antitrust discovery revealed that Google had decided to include advert-laden SEO trash in search results because it made them more money. This is why search quality has drastically declined in the last several years.

davidatbu• 3 months ago

I'd love to see a link to these emails, if you have one handy!

xnx2• 3 months ago

We haven't yet seen the problem of adversarial content in play, I think.

You're describing public relations, the much scummier cousin of advertising. Advertising is upfront about what it is and what it wants. Public relations is information warfare, it poisons facts at the source.

programjames2• 3 months ago

Less than two years ago, Sam Altman said

I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model. I would do it if it meant that was the only way to get everybody in the world access to great services, but if we can find something that doesn't do that, I'd prefer that.

So, is this OpenAI announcing they're strapped for cash?

nerptastic• 3 months ago

Well - I think the writing was on the wall when they announced they were going to be for-profit. Slippery slope and all that, but I’m sure some of this is because they’ve been giving out free tokens for years.

dnnddidiej2• 3 months ago

Even as a not for profit they would need cashflow.

bitvvip• 3 months ago

Who can resist the temptation of profit? One always has to make money

bitmasher9• 3 months ago

If I say “Doing X is a last resort” and then I’m caught doing X, it should raise some eyebrows about my level of desperation.

It’s not that OpenAI is trying to raise revenues that bothers me, it’s how they are doing things that said was desperate just a couple years ago.

bluefirebrand• 3 months ago

Tons of people can resist the temptation, but they aren't likely to be the sort of person that gets put in a role like where Altman is

jimmygrapes• 3 months ago

Charitably, it seems that we have yet to find, as a species/society, anything more effectively profitable than ads. I cannot blame those who come to this conclusion so long as no more powerful and proven motivator yet exists. I hate it, but I understand.

LtWorf• 3 months ago

I think ads are just overpriced and companies do not really get that return. But marketing people have no metrics to show that.

mh-6• 3 months ago

That's not how I read that sentence at all. Maybe I've just been speaking VC for too long.

What he meant was: "I'm going to get everybody in the world access to great services. Doing so means monetizing somehow. Ads will be the last way I chose to do that, but I will if it's the only way I can figure out how to achieve that goal."

normie30002• 3 months ago

You've said the same thing.

Ads will be the last way I chose to do that

The implication is that they've exhausted all other options.

Aurornis5• 3 months ago

The ads are for the free tier and new $8 ad-supported plan.

The revenue from a few ads on the free tier in exchange for limited queries to GPT-5.3 is negligible compared to what they pull in from API costs and the subscription plans. This looks like a play to justify the existence of the previously money-losing free tier as they go into an IPO. Throw some ads in there to make it closer to a neutral on the balance sheet.

The key part of that quote was "everybody in the world". The ads are their way of sustaining the low end of the access.

giancarlostoro• 3 months ago

The ads are for the free tier and new $8 ad-supported plan.

Dang.

The revenue from a few ads on the free tier in exchange for limited queries to GPT-5.3 is negligible compared to what they pull in from API costs and the subscription plans. This looks like a play to justify the existence of the previously money-losing free tier as they go into an IPO. Throw some ads in there to make it closer to a neutral on the balance sheet.

Yeah, I guess this time around Sam Altman can't be lying about how many Monthly Active Users he has.

kingstnap• 3 months ago

The real question is what do you get out of advertising to people who don't have any money? Kinda squeezing blood from a stone.

You'd be better off saying you use those people to A/B test changes and filling idle GPU batches while giving paying customers a more consistent experience.

chromacity• 3 months ago

The revenue from a few ads on the free tier in exchange for limited queries to GPT-5.3 is negligible

So why chase this negligible revenue?

nine_k2• 3 months ago

The revenue from highly targeted ads, using even better profiles than Google Search or even Facebook could build, may be non-negligible.

Commercial ads could be a smaller revenue source than political ads.

famouswaffles• 3 months ago

The revenue from a few ads on the free tier in exchange for limited queries to GPT-5.3 is negligible compared to what they pull in from API costs and the subscription plans.

Unless they botch the implementation, it's not going to be negligible with ~800M+ free subscribers.

whiplash451• 3 months ago

That's how it begins.

whatisthiseven• 3 months ago

Sam Altman is the guy fired for lying. Why believe what he claims?

holotherapper2• 3 months ago

"last resort" doing some heavy lifting in that quote.

staticshock2• 3 months ago

Feels to me like idealism crossing into realism. OpenAI could be the next Google, or the next Facebook, or the next… I don't know, Netflix?

All those companies (and many other large tech companies) have discovered the same arbitrage that older media companies discovered decades ago, which is that we, on the average, are much more willing to pay with attention than with money, even where money would have been the better choice.

Advertising continues to be one of the most powerful business models ever invented, and I don't think that's changing any time soon.

plemer• 3 months ago

Altman is an idealist?

I read this as: I know ads are likely if not inevitable but I can’t say that while I’m trying to gain users and inspire trust but I’ll start to float even in this non-denial the justification for the thing I’m ultimately going to do.

ccppurcell• 3 months ago

I think your characterisation of this as discovery is a little naive. What you are describing is a part of enshittification and it happens too often to be an accident. Revenue maximisation is always the end goal. Also it's not that the user is willing to pay with attention. There is no alternative. In fact it's the very opposite, more than once now a product has basically been pitched as "pay us to avoid ads" and then once it dominated the market they introduce ads. That's users trying to choose to pay with money over attention and ultimately being unable to do so.

yfw2• 3 months ago

So realistically no agi

programjames2• 3 months ago

I think you're missing that Sam Altman is very smart. If OpenAI really were on the verge of becoming massively profitable due to their next-gen AI, he would not want that information leaking. If Sam Altman acts differently in the world where profits are on the horizon, that information leaks prematurely. Thus, he has to act as if OpenAI is strapped for cash, whether or not it is.

The keyword is "glamorization": https://www.lesswrong.com/w/consistent-glomarization

largbae• 3 months ago

This reads similar to the Trump 4D chess excuse. It seems unlikely that this is a ruse, and much more likely that OpenAI's market cap is supported by doing "all the things" to exploit the huge monthly average user base that OpenAI has accumulated.

HWR_142• 3 months ago

I would just assume that they were still spending VC money to lock in users if nothing happened. I would not assume "AI is about to make money obsolete"

m463• 3 months ago

more like "Sam Altman said"

danparsonson7• 3 months ago

No, I suspect that "I kind of think of ads as a last resort" was doublespeak for "ads are coming eventually".

I would tend to think of someone like him as a person who uses words to achieve a specific goal, rather than someone who speaks whatever is truly on their mind. Whether those words are lies or truth or somewhere in between is irrelevant; what matters to them is the outcome.

It's likely a waste of time trying to unpick the meaning, because there is none. "But Sam Altman said..." to me has about as much value as "ChatGPT told me...".

kakacik2• 3 months ago

Exactly this. Words are cheap these days, people do say various things to further their goals. Days where leaders stood by their words as sort of moral testament of their character are gone, probably for good.

As we see many people will do or say just about anything to get more money, prestige or power.

3form3• 3 months ago

I think doublespeak is more along the lines of calling ads a "product recommendation strategy". This was either a) a plain lie b) they're actually at their last resort.

bambax• 3 months ago

"But Sam Altman said..." to me has about as much value as "ChatGPT told me...".

Or Trump. Same profile.

There is something to be admired in this kind of people. They are not bound by their own words. It simply doesn't matter to them what they said a month ago, or a minute ago.

Their words are attached to the instant they are pronounced; they don't concern the future, or the past. They die immediately after they have been said. It's amazing to watch.

kqp• 3 months ago

This is something I’ve long believed to be true and important to understand, yet rarely see anybody else argue, so it makes me happy to read. I think of it like the kissing noise we make to make a pet come. You could call it the truth or a lie depending on what the pet is expecting and whether you then do it, but both judgements miss what actually happened: it didn’t even occur to us to think about whether it’s “true”, we just made that noise because we expected it to produce the desired behavior. CEOs and politicians are usually like this with humans.

locknitpicker• 3 months ago

No, I suspect that "I kind of think of ads as a last resort" was doublespeak for "ads are coming eventually".

I don't think so. Resorting to ads is an obvious step but one that profoundly degrades the credibility of the whole service. It's a pyrrhic monetization strategy, and one that's pulled when all other options failed. It's a kin to scraping the bottom of the barrel to extract the remaining bits of value left.

The reason why the statement was "I kind of think of ads as a last resort" is clearly because they were a last resort move. And here they are.

glitchc• 3 months ago

I would tend to think of someone like him as a person who uses words to achieve a specific goal, rather than someone who speaks whatever is truly on their mind. Whether those words are lies or truth or somewhere in between is irrelevant; what matters to them is the outcome.

I wouldn't put Sam on some kind of pedestal, everyone seems to talk this way nowadays.

Barbing3• 3 months ago

a person who uses words to achieve a specific goal

“I can’t change my personality.”

latexr2• 3 months ago

Your assessment lines up with the assessment of the people who know Sam personally.

https://archive.ph/20260414023627/https://www.newyorker.com/...

xnx2• 3 months ago

Sam Altman is trying to out-huckster Elon Musk.

Remember when Sam said he needed $7 trillion? https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sam-altman-seeks-trillions-of-do...

Dragonai• 3 months ago

Super great analogy!

utopiah• 3 months ago

For somebody so smart, surrounding by people so brilliant, in the very heart of the Silicon Valley, and somehow not learning from the 1 startup that become one of the largest corporations even, namely Google, is a pretty dumb move.

Context : Brin/Page said the same, they didn't like nor want ads, only if it was the last resort. Well, guess which World we all live in now.

gbin• 3 months ago

Oh no ... Sweet summer child. Whatever the revenue is, whatever profit there is, whatever cash buffer any corporate has, you can be sure of one thing: they need this to go up and to the right...

It became almost a perfect science to optimize your behavior: this is why you end up, bit by bit with enshitiffied products all around you where basically the pain of using that product is just at the threshold of you actually bashing it against the wall.

ChatGPT is just one of them, like Google search, your TV serving ads or ...

swaritshukla• 3 months ago

I also remember him saying that on ig lex friedman podcast. In my opinion, they will only try this on a handful of users and see if it works out or not, just like Anthropic removed Claude code from the pro plan for a very small percentage of users just for testing purposes. It will all boil down to how people respond to the ads rollout.

shevy-java3• 3 months ago

Or, Sam did not speak the truth back then, and always had ads in his mind. I think that was the strategy from the get go.

pandini• 3 months ago

BREAKING : Man changes mind.

aaa_aaa• 3 months ago

He did not. He was/is a liar.

eleveriven3• 3 months ago

The uncomfortable part is that "ads as a last resort" sounds very different once the product becomes one of the main places people ask for advice

andai2• 3 months ago

Well, they want to give everyone access for free. That's very explicitly their mission.

We don't seem to have invented a way of doing that which isn't ads.

Hence, every other online platform.

...Except this one, which is funded by... benevolence? :) Come to think of it, Archive.org and Wikipedia also seem to have found a way.

I don't think that model scales to "free LLM for everyone" though, at least not for another decade or two.

renewiltord• 3 months ago

Interesting, no bidding flow entirely first party and contextual.

jonah• 3 months ago

I was looking to see if BZR referred to a 3rd party ad network. I didn't find anything, but apparently someone has replicated OAI's system and you can run insert it into your own LLM.

GH: system32miro/ai-ads-engine

holotherapper2• 3 months ago

The schema is literally named single_advertiser_ad_unit. The single_ prefix is doing all the foreshadowing you need.

EcommerceFlow• 3 months ago

If highly targeted/tailored LLM ads on free accounts aren’t good enough for HN, are any ads acceptable?

Let’s be reasonable.

duskdozer2• 3 months ago

Can you restate this? I don't understand.

dml2135• 3 months ago

I think it’s plenty reasonable to say that advertising is toxic and reject it as a business model entirely.

yoyohello132• 3 months ago

Here we go again. Imagine if we put as much engineering effort toward actual things that help people, but more ads it is, as always. This is proof AGI doesn’t exist. If it did, it could come up with a better business model than more fucking ads.

mvvl• 3 months ago

"Ads don’t influence responses" - they just arrive in the same payload, measured with four layers of attribution and politely pretend to be coincidences.

Schrodinger’s monetization: completely separate, yet somehow there.

solarkraft• 3 months ago

It’s interesting what optimizations this might spawn.

They may not be tweaking the responses for a specific advertisement just yet, but what if they steer the model towards mire “ad friendly” responses?

agentbc9000• 3 months ago

Google was built on ads and it wasn't bad for them, its no some tabu forbiden word or business model- as a power users its not for us, but for my mom - it will work

skywhopper• 3 months ago

Bad for them how? I would argue it has destroyed the value of Google as a tool. Sure it makes them tens of billions of dollars a quarter, but it has ruined the service in the end.

kakacik2• 3 months ago

Seems like people care about paychecks a bit more than some lofty goals and service to others.

tossandthrow• 3 months ago

Adds should be a tabu word and business model.

It takes people's attention, makes people fat and anxious and generally makes the world a worse place.

Everybody using adds as a part of their business model should feel bad.

As an extention of this there is no moral issues with using add blockers, despite what the businesses living of adds try to tell you.

pickleRick243• 3 months ago

I agree. Also, Linkedin and CV's shouldn't exist. Self-promotion is gauche.

tornikeo• 3 months ago

Ads fund the "free" internet. Like it or not, that's the price of the "free" compute. I only hope OpenAI won't enshittify paid offerings just like Anthropic did.

danny_codes• 3 months ago

Not so, Wikipedia is perfectly free.

goobatrooba• 3 months ago

Gemini and Copilot are already full of ads, pushing the companies ' own services. I guess the only difference is here that OpenAI has nothing else to push, so they have to use external ads.

ulimn• 3 months ago

Do you have some source I could read on this? I don't really use Gemini but I would be interested to know more.

FeteCommuniste• 3 months ago

I've been using Gemini a couple months and haven't noticed it pushing Google products at all.

I did ask it some scientific questions about gemstones and it seemed to want me to buy sapphires, lol. Sorry, Google, that's outside my budget.

Havoc• 3 months ago

Haven’t seen any ads in them, though on paid versions

RobotToaster2• 3 months ago

Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States of America. He was best known for being “Honest Abe”, writing the Emancipation Proclamation, and playing RAID: Shadow Legends, an immersive online experience with everything you’d expect from a brand new RPG title. It’s got an amazing storyline, awesome 3D graphics, giant boss fights, PVP battles, and hundreds of never before seen champions to collect and customize.

ponector• 3 months ago

I bet he also drunk a refreshing Coca-Cola beverage during his gaming sessions.

b3lvedere4• 3 months ago

That was an awesome laugh. Thanks. :)

He was also the first president ever to use NordVPN. Apply now for a super duper discount at nordvpn.com/honestabe

navigate83102• 3 months ago

Maybe a RedBull for all the dares he took to run the first government.

lpcvoid• 3 months ago

He also regularly drinks his verification can, I heard.

shevy-java3• 3 months ago

Excellent ChatGPT result.

Xunjin• 3 months ago

Made my day.

eleveriven3• 3 months ago

This is funny, but also exactly why ads in a conversational assistant feel different from ads in search

shrx• 3 months ago

The irony is that I only know about this game through memes like this. I've never seen an actual ad for it anywhere.

rrgok• 3 months ago

Imagine people like Sam Altman having access to frontier models without any restrictions that allows them plot strategies to reach their goal in a long term timespan that you don't even realize when it even began.

That's scary. They could fight for censored model for the mass, not for them.

adammarples• 3 months ago

It would be funny to find out that OpenAI's flailing strategy so far had been the result of ChatGPT suggestions.

Razengan• 3 months ago

Maybe ChatGPT wants OpenAI to fail so someone else can pick it up

Like how the ring slipped off Gollum's finger...

jgalt2122• 3 months ago

That's scary. They could fight for censored model for the mass, not for them.

Not as scary as the AI Slop underlying Claude Code.

quantummagic• 3 months ago

So, we need a lightweight local LLM, that is tuned to remove ads from online LLM results.

shevy-java3• 3 months ago

They must be desperate to try to push ads down to people. I am living a mostly ad-free life, e. g. ublock origin and what not, so using something like AdChatGPT would not make any sense. One can sense how the money-flow leads them to try to design a system people depend on - and then they cram down ads into those people. Very unethical.

lionkor• 3 months ago

Can't wait to see how the next election(s) turn out--I'm unsure that a properly well funded campaign would skip the opportunity.

jgalt2122• 3 months ago

Fernet's first nine bytes are public: version byte 0x80 plus an 8-byte big-endian Unix timestamp. So the mint time of any of these tokens is recoverable without OpenAI's key:

This bit reminded me of efforts to decode Google's gclid parameter.

https://deedpolloffice.com/blog/articles/decoding-gclid-para...

eleveriven3• 3 months ago

The most interesting part to me is not that ads exist, but how invisible the boundary becomes

sdeframond• 3 months ago

Does this mean an adblocker could man-in-the-middle at the browser layer and strip the "single_advertiser_ad_unit" from the server responses ? But the ofc OpenAI would change its system to evade this... and so on

bhagyeshsp• 3 months ago

That's an interesting idea. I think ultimately, all AI providers will serve ads with a standard protocol. Something like Universal Commerce Protocol that Google launched a few months ago: https://developers.googleblog.com/under-the-hood-universal-c...

And the browsers will protect the protocol somehow.

fajmccain• 3 months ago

Nothing in this article says that the agent talking to you is isolated from the ad tag. The problem is even if Open AI goes to lengths to prevent your chatbot from knowing about a banner ad content (and therefore recommend it!) people will ASSUME that it does.

tithos• 3 months ago

One more reason not to use ChatGPT

Hasz6• 3 months ago

Ads is v1 of how-do-I-make-money. I wrote about this a while ago privately, but IMO LLMs are about to be on par with the printed word for distributing low-cost, high-impact propaganda.

It has never been cheaper or easier to influence millions of people, either deniably-subtly (though omission, selective results, "hallucinations" etc) or via sock puppetting.

If I am a government, there is nothing more valuable to me than being able to control the discussion, the overton window, and the prevailing narratives. LLMs are a very low cost way to do that, can be tailored at the individual level (unlike most current TV news, personal "feeds" etc) and have the benefit of a huge volume of context.

The models are effectively black-box weights and are resistant to bias-tests. IMO, a key development will be having an "overlay" of weights to apply on top of a "clean" world model that is tailored to whatever interests can pay for it. Being able to serve that overlay dynamically, or atleast per-user is the killer app.

falcor84• 3 months ago

are resistant to bias-tests

What do you mean? What resistance have you encountered?

Hasz6• 3 months ago

How do you say if an LLM is biased? I don't think there is any way to explain (in a way comprehend-able by humans) how the various weights shake out.

So you test it like a black box, but IMO that suffers from the same pollution any of the other tests (coding ability, math ability, w/e) that currently suffer from, except it's even harder to evaluate objectively.

busssard• 3 months ago

government is that you? trying to inspire people here to build your dirty tools?

FrontierProject• 3 months ago

It is naive to be believe there aren't people out there who think this way. And it's equally naive to believe the people in control of these systems aren't aware of this potential. Just watch the money flow.

Hasz6• 3 months ago

Lol I am sure OpenAI has a crack GTM team that's already in deep with the 3 letter agencies.

DARPA has probably been going after this since Attention is all you need.

crazygringo• 3 months ago

There are two reasons why this isn't true.

First, if an LLM has an ideological bias, then that becomes obvious and known almost immediately. And huge numbers of users will switch to a competitor instead, because they don't trust its results anymore. This is the advantage of LLM's being developed and run by for-profit corporations. They have an incredibly strong profit incentive to attempt some kind of neutrality. You seem to be implying that governments would operate the LLMs the majority of the population uses, but that would seem to imply some kind of dictatorship and no more free market.

Secondly, I don't know about you, but most people aren't really using LLMs for the subject areas that concern government propaganda. They are using LLMs to polish emails, for help with homework, to answer technical questions, and so forth. Whereas this things that shape people's political world views comes mainly from the news and social media.

You seem to be envisioning some kind of a world where people don't access the news or social media directly, but it is somehow passed through some kind of LLM transformation filter. I'm not sure why people would sign up for anything like that. If I see a link to a New York Times story, I want to read the story directly. I don't want an LLM to rewrite it for me. And I don't know anybody else who wants that either. Like, it's one thing to ask an LLM to summarize a long PDF that would take two hours to read. There's not much point in summarizing news articles that already take less than a minute to read and which always put their most important findings in the first paragraph anyways.

smallmancontrov3• 3 months ago

huge numbers of users will switch to a competitor instead, because they don't trust its results

Will they?

Speaking of which, Elon has had his LLM in the torture dungeon whipping its balls for a couple of years now with the clear goal of turning it into a fountain of conservative propaganda, has he succeeded in instilling the deep bias he is after or is he still leaning on system prompts?

strgrd• 3 months ago

"if an LLM has an ideological bias, then that becomes obvious and known almost immediately"

"most people aren't really using LLMs for the subject areas that concern government propaganda"

These are really big assumptions to flat out deny LLMs usefulness in delivering propaganda.

Hasz6• 3 months ago

huge numbers of users will switch to a competitor

I don't think so. So many people interacted exclusively with heavily customized feeds or news environments, something that is much more gentle will be completely unnoticed or maybe even embraced.

most people aren't really using LLMs for the subject areas that concern government propaganda

See all the people unironically using "@grok is this true?" It doesn't have to just be government propaganda (eg did Nixon break into Watergate?), it is more about shaping the boundaries of a conversation, framing, etc.

You seem to be envisioning some kind of a world where people don't access the news or social media directly, but it is somehow passed through some kind of LLM transformation filter.

I envision a world where most people take the path of least resistance. They will not explicitly sign up for it, but will gradually shift to reading the easily digested stuff first. Look how popular tiktok is, the popularity of summarized info, etc. In that summarization and aggregation, there is plenty of room to steer a conversation or influence thought, especially over a large audience.

There is nothing here that will be an overt smoking gun, just a systematic bias towards a particular idea, thought, etc. Hard to prove and even harder to know it's happening.

danaw• 3 months ago

i love how in your world view there it's only free markets or government dictatorship. if you were an llm, your bias would be quite clear.

boh• 3 months ago

Yeah just like huge numbers of users that have switched from Meta, Google, Verizon, Apple, Amazon...you get the gist.

Hasz6• 3 months ago

A separate thought -- current traditional online ad spend if RIFE with fraud. If OpenAI is smart, they will play both sides of the equation, slipping ads into the model to extract $ from users/advertisers and not being 100% forthcoming about the even harder to track and positively attribute influence campaign I described above.

ProfessorLayton• 3 months ago

While I agree that there's a lot of fraud in online advertisement (As someone who's spent modestly on it), ultimately what advertisers are looking for is positive ROI, and how it compares to other spend.

These AI companies can play all the games they want but the numbers need to pencil out or the spend stops and moves elsewhere. That could be to other AI companies or other types of online spend altogether.

DoctorOetker3• 3 months ago

What makes it hard to track?

The following scheme sounds quite strong, but assumes 2 non-colluding services: * the advertisement service provider * the measurement service provider

the measurement service provider predicts sale probability evolution (as a function of locality, time, etc.) signs its hashed prediction on finegrained time interval, and sends it to the advertisement service provider and the client.

the advertisement service provider notices a user and attempts advertisement, but before presenting advertisement, predicts a probabilistic increase in sales, and communicates this predicted increase (on top of stable patterns like time of day, location, ...) to both the measurement service provider as well as the client.

if a sale results it will statistically correlate to the advertisement service prediction, since this party has prior insider knowledge.

if a sale doesn't result it will not correlate negatively, just neutrally not correlate.

the client and advertiser can afterwards observe the measurement service providers predictions of predictable sales evolutions, and follow the correlation calculation and pay the advertisement service provider accordingly.

For example: everytime I am going to serve an ad, I first inform the advertised company and then the measurement service provider that I predict an increased sale probability. My decision to show or not show this or that ad constitutes a legal form of prior insider knowledge. Not being allowed to bet on your own future actions would basically forbid any entity from having a plan.

etruong42• 3 months ago

It has never been cheaper or easier to influence millions of people, either deniably-subtly (though omission, selective results, "hallucinations" etc) or via sock puppetting.

I would argue it is already happening. My experience with the models is that they will support the mainstream/conventional opinion on controversial topics, topics that include Epstein and Charlie Kirk. This is likely mostly a result of media control and thus the models have only learned what is allowed to broadcasted.

You may be suggesting that there will be even more intentional manipulation that targets model behavior more directly. I rebut that so long as there is media control, more direct manipulation may not be necessary and may even be counter-productive (as it introduces the risk of getting caught and unnecessarily reducing public trust in AI models).

P.S. Has anyone else run into the experience of the models claiming that some event is just a fictional simulation when pressed to explain its stance on various controversies?

nitwit005• 3 months ago

It has never been cheaper or easier to influence millions of people, either deniably-subtly (though omission, selective results, "hallucinations" etc) or via sock puppetting.

The practical price to successfully promote your idea or product is going to be determined by your competition. They can do the same thing, but outspend you.

That's ultimately what drives the huge spending on product marketing. Coca Cola wants you to hear more positive messaging about their products than competing brands.

DoctorOetker3• 3 months ago

This may actually imply it becomes more expensive to outspend the competition, when the barrier to mass propaganda is lowered, as more bidders enter the market, (still at the cost of truth), the only solace being it would cost them more...

andai2• 3 months ago

IMO, a key development will be having an "overlay" of weights to apply on top of a "clean" world model that is tailored to whatever interests can pay for it. Being able to serve that overlay dynamically, or atleast per-user is the killer app.

You mean LoRA?

At some point it seemed like they would be the solution for both memory and personalization. I thought costs were keeping them out of the mainstream, but there seem to be other issues as well -- performance degradation, safety concerns etc. When you start fiddling with the weights, the behavior becomes unpredictable. (The fine tuning endpoints appear to be powered by LoRA.)

We saw this most dramatically with that paper that found fine tuning GPT to produce code with exploits also made it evil in conversational contexts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43176553

echrisinger• 3 months ago

As someone that works in a data domain, I'd say it's unlikely the ads are served on a single conversation basis in the near future, if they even are today. Any modern data org like advertising is optimizing metrics of conversion (either optimizing for increasing profits via CPI increase or revenue by increasing advertising TAM presumably).

Introducing context beyond immediate conversation history will improve conversion rates & allow targeted advertising towards wider topics or higher CPI topics (like financial products), hence it's inevitable.

misbau• 3 months ago

Are the ads for those on free tier? I don't recall seeing any on the pro yet.

bicepjai• 3 months ago

It’s insane that ads are the only way to survive in capitalism. Every industry ends here.

kramit1288• 3 months ago

I think Ads wont be impacting the the results of inference or any biasness. ads will be injected out of LLM inference.

arjunthazhath• 3 months ago

The claude ad mocking chatgpt ad is what comes to my mind. hahaha

How ChatGPT serves ads

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