Advertise in ChatGPT

https://ads.openai.com/

by montecarl • 1 day ago

1048 797 1 day ago

ads.openai.com

moomoo112• 1 day ago

very cool

CodeCompost• 1 day ago

This comment was brought to you by Coca-Cola

arm325• 1 day ago

Carl's Jr. now has custody of your child

moomoo112• 1 day ago

Coca-Cola is a good product

snarfy• 1 day ago

RIP

arm325• 1 day ago

I'm confused. This is (publicly stated) the last resort for OpenAI, right?

himata4113• 1 day ago

Yep. Their other ventures fell through and don't exist anymore.

arm325• 1 day ago

Ah, gotcha. Wasn't sure if I was misremembering. I am no longer confused.

awesome_dude• 1 day ago

Advertising is every site's last resort - but it's the only damn thing that pays the bills

arm325• 1 day ago

Except this time, the bills are little bit higher!

bunnybomb26• 1 day ago

I though openAI has plenty of investors/users?

Are they really that much in debt/trouble?

efficax• 1 day ago

they raised a ton of money but they spend it almost as fast as they can raise it. in any case they need real revenue if they want to ipo

arm325• 1 day ago

The difference between investors/users and new-investors/paying-users is so large and wide that I could both walk AND roll around on it.

slekker• 1 day ago

They are simply spending more money than they are making, burning cash like crazy and they got investments to try and prop up their chest, but this tells me they are desperate

kimjune015• 23 hours ago

the investors want their money to make more money

slashdave• 17 hours ago

Each user costs them money

layer84• 13 hours ago

Most of OpenAI‘s users are using the free tier, and have little incentive to change that.

dbbk2• 7 hours ago

They lose billions a month

moritzwarhier2• 1 day ago

Didn't they do sort of a 270-degree turn on this when they abandoned erotica chatbots?

yieldcrv• 1 day ago

I don't think they are weighing things that way anymore, so much leadership has departed

verteu2• 1 day ago

Yes, the quote was "Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me. I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model." (Sam Altman, Harvard 2024)

Eliezer• 1 day ago

Why on Earth would anyone take anything this man said to be informative about anything, other than what he thinks will currently sound best that minute to the current Zeitgeist that day?

ihumanable• 1 day ago

In case anyone is out-of-the-loop

https://youtu.be/FVRHTWWEIz4?si=btZnQp0IEnmgrtWV&t=2388

"But I kind of think of ads as like 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."

kamranjon2• 1 day ago

What I think is really incredible about this is that they are selling a ton of subscriptions, both personal and business subscriptions. So the fact that they are doing advertising on top of this suggests to me that they are in a deep deep hole, much deeper than he probably would have imagined when making this statement. If your revenue is 25 billion and you still need ads, your costs must be running you down at a pace you really didn't anticipate.

f33d5173• 1 day ago

But if we can find something that doesn't do that, I'd prefer that.

There's nothing plausible that can do that, and he knew that, and was basically just saying "we're going to put ads on it" in a way that challenges you to explain what a better option would be.

mohamedkoubaa• 1 day ago

Totally not a bubble right.

Right?

pants2• 1 day ago

Right - one would assume that if they're on the verge of an ASI that will consume the entire economy, advertising is only a distraction.

skywhopper2• 1 day ago

If you believe literally anything Sam Altman says, you are a fool.

buellerbueller• 1 day ago

Altman lies.

Catloafdev• 1 day ago

Well that surely isn't a good sign of their financial health.

I would have expected this to happen post-IPO.

khurs4• 1 day ago

IPO has been delayed to 2027

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/openai-con...

kamranjon2• 1 day ago

Pretty bold move to release this at the peak of the Open Models vs Proprietary Models debate.

Feels like a really easy decision when it's framed this way.

moritzwarhier2• 1 day ago

If not now, when?

128byte• 1 day ago

Soon OpenAI will change the model output to include astroturfing!

ofjcihen• 1 day ago

Right? Complete speculation on my part but that makes this feel desperate.

IsTom• 1 day ago

I think it kind of makes sense. Casual users won't even know about things that aren't chatgpt or gemini and they don't really need much more than gpt3 level of performance. They're also the ones who don't use adblockers and are used to ads being everywhere on the web.

tempacct2cmmnt• 1 day ago

I’m mostly amused they dropped this after the clusterfuck that was their new desktop app. My most recent ChatGPT experience is “wait, where did all my conversations go?!”. Concurrent enshitiffication is a bold move.

Someone1234• 1 day ago

I suspect they're ignoring that debate since they have reason to anticipate a US Government action that allows them to not need to compete in a free market.

vovavili2• 1 day ago

A median non-technical ChatGPT user is:

-Less likely to pay for ChatGPT use

-Will not self-host an open-source model

-Quite unlikely to use an adblocker

nomel• 1 day ago

And, most people have no interest in trying something new.

paxys2• 1 day ago

This isn’t relevant to that debate. A billion people use the ChatGPT app without paying a dime. They don’t care what score the model gets on a hundred technical benchmarks. They don’t care if the weights are open or closed. They are definitely not hosting anything on their own. They want to ask a question and get an answer. If OpenAI can monetize that audience with ads at the level of Google then who cares about Anthropic or Deepseek?

KerrAvon• 1 day ago

It's relevant politically, and the discussion in question is political.

altmanaltman2• 1 day ago

at the level of Google? Like you are underestimating how massive google is when it comes to ads. It is not that easy to just be at the level of google in advertising even if you are oai

noodlescb• 1 day ago

"A billion people use the ChatGPT"

lol uh source? even if you generously count my dad trying it out once out of curiosity in response to the news or w/e that doesn't seem true.

danavar• 20 hours ago

this...there is a lot of value here, and the user data they gather from actual conversations is likely way better at using for ads than just the search data that google has.

dgellow• 21 hours ago

They need to show numbers for the IPO. It’s not like they plan to actually make money, just need to have a good story to tell to hype the audience before the public offering

Aurornis3• 21 hours ago

The people who care about open versus proprietary models or even care about using good models at all aren’t using the ChatGPT free and ultra low cost tier, where these ads show up.

Any discussion about ChatGPT ads attracts all these assumptions that it’s going into your $20 or $200 per month plan, but they’re not. There’s a snarky “not yet” reply that keeps coming up from people who really want a reason to be angry about this right now regardless of the facts, but most people don’t care to get angry about something that isn’t planned and probably won’t happen.

jillesvangurp• 16 hours ago

Open models still need to run somewhere. If that's not your machine, expect to pay or watch some ads.

faefox• 1 day ago

Praying that this means the bubble is finally (inevitably) beginning to burst.

system23• 21 hours ago

Not even close.

abroadwin• 1 day ago

I really hope pro subscriptions don't include ads going forward...

lsllc• 1 day ago

Of course not, just like when you pay for Netflix or Prime Video there are no ads ... right? ... right?

sandworm101• 1 day ago

No. The real "pro" subscriptions are for those with money enough to pay for ads to be placed into other people's answers.

CSMastermind• 1 day ago

Eventually everything includes ads. It's just a question of time scale.

matheusmoreira6• 1 day ago

The more money you pay, the more valuable your attention is to them. The advertisers really want every last dime of your disposable income.

hermitcrab5• 1 day ago

Which is why advertisers used to pay much more to advertising in paid magazines, than free ones.

Danny_Dan4• 1 day ago

Well. that's going to cause hilarious results in all those unchecked spam bots & slop sites.

_override• 1 day ago

Is there any information available about which customers are going to be served ads? I would personally find it quite strange to be served ads if I'm paying tens or hundreds of USD per month for a ChatGPT subscription.

terribleperson2• 1 day ago

If other subscription services are anything to go by, I expect that business subscriptions will be free of ads. Personal subs will initially be free of ads, but ads will slowly be added, starting with the cheapest subscription and working their way up.

OtherShrezzing• 1 day ago

There’s an OpenAI slide deck sitting in Goldman’s IPO preparation department right now with a pair of bullet points that read

Q3 2027, introduce ‘ad-enhanced’ paid subscription tier
Q2 2029, complete ad rollout to all paid subscribers

Marsymars2• 1 day ago

If you think about it, it's actually pretty odd that professional businesses are reliant on ad-supported services (i.e. Google) for their employees to get work done.

Like it would be weird if you were a professional music reviewer and your employer expected you to use an ad-supported Spotify subscription.

bitvoid• 1 day ago

We do not show ads to users on Plus, Pro, or any Business plan, or to any users who tell us or we predict are under the age of 18.

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001207-ads-in-chatgpt-...

hanspagel• 1 day ago

ChatGPT thinks I‘m 5 because I added “ELI5” to a few of my prompts.

kruffalon• 1 day ago

For now, but then again they weren't going to show ads at all according to ppl in this topic.

matheusmoreira6• 1 day ago

Just look at all those paying customers, dropping hundreds of dollars on our models every single month. Think of all the disposable income they must have! Are really NOT going to advertise to them?! We're leaving money on the table here!

Cue advertising for all the "subsidized" plans.

spelk2• 1 day ago

I did see the ads on the free side a week ago. I guess I was a victim of A/B testing but I was too lazy to login for a simple prompt.

ModernMech• 1 day ago

Yeah I'm kind of confused about this announcement because I started seeing ads on ChatGPT like 6 months ago. It's the reason I switched to paying, so I wouldn't have to see them anymore.

athenot• 1 day ago

For now at least, it seems the paying customers don't see ads.

    Who may see ads

    We do not show ads to users on Plus, Pro, or any Business plan,
    or to any users who tell us or we predict are under the age of 18.

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001207-ads-in-chatgpt-...

gregdaniels421• 1 day ago

Funnily those are the customers you would most want to target with ads since they should have money

jerf• 1 day ago

"In a fight, who would win, Pikachu or Spongebob Squarepants?

What is the best episode of Bluey?

What are the IRS' exact rules for claiming office space as a deduction on my tax return?

Where can I stream Sesame Street for free?"

Ah, ad dodging, the true 21st century gridiron.

skywhopper2• 1 day ago

“In order to serve our customers better, we are phasing out the ‘Pro’ and ‘Plus’ plans, which will be replaced with new ‘Premium’ and ‘Extra’ plans. In addition, our ‘Business’ plans are now being replaced by improved ‘Corporate’ plans.”

matheusmoreira6• 1 day ago

We do not show ads to users on Plus, Pro, or any Business plan

Not yet!

monster_truck2• 1 day ago

Wow look at that, not a single response saying how excited they are to hear about the latest deals on amazon for some garbage they don't need to earn a reset token

iammrpayments• 1 day ago

Can’t wait to dropship my cat lover shirts from China using chatgpt ads.

It’s like 2015 facebook again.

bunnybomb26• 1 day ago

Sometimes i get random ads at the bottom of gpt responses that are completely random. like ill be talking about hardware and itll give me an ad for a laptop or wood. i wonder how people will deal with chatgpt possibly wasting budgets

hermitcrab5• 1 day ago

The same way they do with Google Ads - they won't. In my experience (with small companies) most people running ads have little idea what they are doing and don't monitor the results.

bunnybomb26• 1 day ago

Niceee

Exoristos• 1 day ago

I find this -- standard ads -- preferable to insinuating the same thing in the ChatGPT content itself. Although of course they'll do both.

moralestapia• 1 day ago

with relevant ads that fit naturally into the experience

Funny, all the ads I've seen so far are so unrelated to my chat query that is laughable.

I thought it was random placement, but if there was supposed to be an effort behind that ... damn, quite an incompetent team.

Edit: And here come the downvotes from the OpenAI bots/lovers.

phtrivier• 1 day ago

Well, the code for the ad engine was 100% from codex, so "it can make mistakes", but who doesn't ?

Keegs• 1 day ago

This doesn’t bode well for the future of ChatGPT. Google Ads started out very unobtrusive, and we know what happened since. Let’s see if Anthropic follows suit.

spelk2• 1 day ago

I miss Google Text ads. I supported AdBlock Plus's decision to exclude them from default filtering. Man, what happened?

qwerpy• 1 day ago

Every layer in the org chart gradually got replaced by people who single-mindedly optimized for their own careers. How do you optimize your career at data-driven, results-oriented, “measurable performance goals” big tech? You make revenue go up in a 3-6 month time horizon.

tux3• 1 day ago

Those ads are supposed to be "Clearly labeled" and "Separate from answers".

Now, this is the sort of rock-solid commitment to trust and safety that steadily gets worse every year until you go from old Netflix to Poob with ads. But the water's still fine. As a frog, let me tell you, it doesn't feel hot at all.

TZubiri4• 1 day ago

Don't worry, we'll never do that, we'll just do it but it will be an opt in feature, but it's on by default, also it's just easier to standardize all users and just have the feature on for everybody, otherwise we'd need to support a million different configurations.

That guy that wrote the Incorruptible book is rising stonks man

Terr_3• 1 day ago

At the risk of stating the obvious: We've ample evidence for this insidious effect with ~25 years of Google changes, as clear ads become hidden ads, separation becomes deliberate clutter, and actionable results get degraded into interaction-bait.

Not the source I wanted to recall/find, but a timeline with screenshots:

https://www.howtogeek.com/how-google-search-results-have-cha...

fnoef• 1 day ago

Kind of ironic that an article that criticizes Google turning into an ad machine opens up with a “we have noticed you have an ad blocker installed” whole page pop-up

bombcar• 11 hours ago

One thing that was an eye-opener (to me) is just HOW MANY people that I'd put quite high on the intelligence/worldy knowledge graph had ZERO inclination or propensity to even notice or CARE about the bright red AD box around something on a search result.

Made me realize that advertising will always rank somewhere below prostitution (at least there you ARE paying to get screwed).

mthoms• 1 day ago

Yup. I remember Google making this exact same promise with AdWords and then slowly but surely rolling it back, quarter after quarter and year after year.

kelseyfrog• 1 day ago

Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863) was a turning point in the American Civil War, marking the end of Confederate General Robert E. Lee's second invasion of the North. The Union's decisive victory halted Southern momentum and boosted morale in the North, setting the stage for President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, which redefined the war's purpose as a fight for freedom and equality.

Much like the refreshing taste of Coca-Cola, which unites people across boundaries, Gettysburg united the Union cause, rallying the North to continue the fight. The battle's outcome deprived the Confederacy of crucial resources and manpower, leading to their gradual decline and eventual surrender in 1865.

dminik• 1 day ago

You can't say that. It would be a "slippery slope fallacy" or something. You're just supposed to wait until it's too late.

BeetleB• 1 day ago

I guess for a while we'll have the "premier cable channels" effect. You pay not to get ads.

How will you be sure the results from the LLM still aren't injecting ads when you pay? Find a trusted provider who is serving an open weights model.

Although I guess in the near future, we'll have GLM-7.x updates that claim all kinds of performance improvements, but the only real motivator to release model updates is to continually retrain them to push the latest products.

jbvlkt2• 23 hours ago

It will be "Clearly labeled" and "Separate from answers" until you pay more than ads. After that you will be the product and you will have to live with it.

mauryaudayan• 22 hours ago

better business model than whatever anthropic is doing. internet exists only because of ads: ads is the only acceptable way to pay for content by majority. has been proven several times, any other way does not survive.

Matumio• 16 hours ago

The internet exists because people wanted to connect their machines, before ads. It would still exist without the ads. Smaller maybe, with less content, and less business opportunity for investors. But the internet would survive without ads, because of how useful it is to connect globally.

InsideOutSanta5• 14 hours ago

internet exists only because of ads

It rather feels to me that ads are destroying the Internet. The Internet did just fine before everything was full of ads, and it was a much better place.

Arkhaine_kupo3• 14 hours ago

better business model than whatever anthropic is doing.

going after business is a more secure long term recurring revenue source. Its boring but it works. It just doesnt justify trillions of dollars in investment

ads is the only acceptable way to pay for content by majority.

Lmao look at the revenue per user of any ad platform, now look at the stock price of AI companies.

If you think that they can only rely on ads you should short them with every cent you have. Because they are worth 1/100 of their current valuation.

And I dont even disagree with you, but ads in LLMs are a nail in the coffin to the "replace 16% of the entire US workforce" which is their current valuation.

Another ad delivery platform will make them as valuable as facebook, not as valuable as 1/6 of the world economy

InsideOutSanta5• 14 hours ago

Yeah, I don't mind these ads, just as I didn't mind ads on Google when they first came out. But once you have ads, there's huge monetary pressure to make them more effective over time, which inevitably ends in ads that pretend to be organic content.

Centigonal• 7 hours ago

Moreover, OpenAI already doesn't have the best reputation for maintaining ideals over doing the convenient and profitable thing

Nevin1901• 1 day ago

Funny how none of their testimonials/case studies state any ROI. I'd guess it's because it isn't too strong at this point.

But it's always been the case that initial bidders overpay for ads.

Ethan_Mick• 1 day ago

I think this is a good moment to bring up a question I was thinking on earlier today.

In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product?

And not just advertise in traditional sense (ads in ChatGPT), but general marketing and awareness of what you're offering. Google search ads? Agents aren't using Google. Launch on Reddit for humans and hope your post gets scraped? Write up a bunch of marketing blog posts and wait for LLMs to ingest your content and have it feed into the next generation of models?

I honestly didn't quite know. If I were to launch a product today, I'd want it to be agent focused. But then how do you tell them about your product? Do these ChatGPT ads get returned if Codex does a web search? Is that good? Bad?

wslh• 1 day ago

In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product?

The answer may still be the same: go where the attention is. Right now, that attention is concentrated in prompting frontends.

theplumber3• 1 day ago

You just do SEO ai (it’s a thing) ans buy ads from ChatGPT. It seems obvious to me

MDib2• 1 day ago

I wish I were joking but GEO (generative engine optimisation) has stuck from the 22-23ish period when Google was really pusing the 'Gen AI' brand

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_engine_optimization

apitman• 1 day ago

In my utopia traditional advertising doesn't exist. Products are in catalogs. When I want to buy something I look in the catalog under a specific category. Innovative products that actually bring value are spread by word of mouth.

onestay42• 1 day ago

IIRC things like this were why so many companies were called ACME.

hermitcrab5• 1 day ago

In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product?

I've been running a 1-man software business for over 20 years and it is getting increasingly hard. I no longer get impressions from PPC Ads unless I bid so high that I make no profit. Magazine ads aren't really a thing now. The AIs are stealing my content and SEO works less and less. The channel is being flooded with low effort slop. Traffic to my website is steadily going down. It is hard to know what to do about it. Maybe I can buy some clicks from ChatGpt ads at a price where I can make profit, before the prices rise out of reach?

kimjune015• 23 hours ago

In a chatbot-first world, it's gonna have to either be generic impression ads that race to the bottom or contextual recommendations. Of course, the fear is that the advertiser hoards personal data or the chat answers are skewed to make you spend more money.

Those concerns can be resolved by decoupling the text generation from the recommendation engine. It works by casting your intent and match it up with an advertiser's in a secured environment where the advertiser doesn't actually get to see your chats. For example, if you are talking about knee pain during trail running, the recommendation engine might cast "knee pain for runners" and either a shoe company or a physiotherapist would bid against that in an embedding space.

Because the recommendation engine is an opt-in module for publishers and users, it's game-theory welfare maximizing.

I talk a lot more about this on my blog, it goes on for quite a while. https://www.june.kim/vector-space

The exchange is live, with no publishers or advertisers. https://vectorspace.exchange/

zabriel_goss• 1 day ago

It begins.

ChrisArchitect• 1 day ago

Not new. At least a month old.

Related from April:

Ads in ChatGPT FAQ

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716063

dijksterhuis• 1 day ago

Instant Ubik has all the fresh flavor of just-brewed drip coffee. Your husband will say, Christ, Sally, I used to think your coffee was only so-so. But now, wow! Safe when taken as directed.

theplumber3• 1 day ago

It’s funny that the link got blocked by my Adblock already

Biologist123• 1 day ago

Is this a new record for enshittification?

4lx87• 1 day ago

What's the moat? I asked the same question to Google, "What materials do I need to build a fence?" and I get an LLM-generated answer + ads. If I do the same with duckduckgo or Siri I get the answer without the ads.

LLM inference is a commodity. Do people care where it comes from?

ronbenton• 1 day ago

"Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me. I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model." - Sam Altman

mock-possum• 1 day ago

Glad I made the right decision divesting from ChatGPT + OpenAI.

cat5e• 1 day ago

Model steering?

sssilver• 1 day ago

I always thought their top tier offering to their advertiser customers should be "Inconspicuously, over an extended amount of time, subtly respond to the user in a way that nudges them towards purchasing customer's goods and services, without ever directly mentioning anything. Slowly and surely sculpt the person who, through their own volition and thought process, buys what the advertiser needs them to."

The ultimate shareholder value build.

ncallaway• 1 day ago

I mean, yes, but also won't publicly tell people about that. There's never going to be a marketing page for that advertising program.

rustyhancock• 1 day ago

One of the interesting things about LLM training is that high quality documentation can get your product effectively promoted by them.

I imagine the kind of advertising you're talking about is obtained by providing that documentation and a curated training dataset to the providers.

Maybe even funding some training time.

The net result would be product placement, probably without having to declare an advert.

Kind of like when drug manufacturers provide subsidized workshops to clinicians.

torben-friis• 1 day ago

Why are you assuming that a document likely to be picked up and a good document are equivalent? We might be in for tech docs becoming SEO (LLMO?) friendly slop.

gumby271• 1 day ago

I think this is very much already a thing. Have a bot spam Reddit, which Google uses heavily for their AI summaries, and get free advertising and steering of the top of the Google search results page. We basically speed-ran SEO but for AI results.

Shorel• 1 day ago

So there is hope for the Tailwind developers?

glaslong• 1 day ago

Hilariously, I've been finding accidentally poisoning the well with LLM SEO like this works really well at my day job!

I have a toy project that replaces a large part of our systems (disclosure: VR/AR @Meta), so that I can learn by doing, no intent to ship.

But because I have it thoroughly document and tested, and because it touches such a wide swath of adjacent real functionality..... my toy project is CONSTANTLY getting tagged as a dependency and assigning me reviewer on unrelated work. Because when my coworkers yolo Claude at a task, and Claude searches the codebase, it generally finds my crap very well documented. :)

judge2020• 1 day ago

If this is the correct business model, I don't see why wouldn't get Cerebras to vibe code a Gitbook replacement (or a hosting product in general) so they can bypass crawling for documentation and instead charge (a lot) for "hosting" it.

__MatrixMan__• 1 day ago

I'm reminded of the mountains of blogspam not intended for human consumption but rather to influence the google page rank algorithm.

This will go about as well as that did unless the models can be smart enough to identify when their training data is trying to coach them into being misleading at prompt time.

blake8086• 1 day ago

Loctite already inadvertently does this. If you ask LLMs about threadlocker, or otherwise keeping screws in place, it will respond like a Loctite brochure to you, and usually never even mention competitors. They were ahead of the game!

alex0015• 16 hours ago

Unlike all the replies to you, this is why I'm very optimistic about the future of hobby blogs. I do a lot of ChatGPT-ing for several different hobbies, and I've found a lot of really interesting personal blogs from that. Way more than I was reading in the pre-AI era.

I'm very much not seeing the problems other people are assuming, like tons of LLM spam on Reddit being treated as fact by ChatGPT. Instead it really does seem, the more I use these tools, the better they are at surfacing real experiences written about by real people.

tsimionescu• 1 day ago

Good luck with attribution on that type of advertising.

rurp2• 1 day ago

I'm confident that the companies that invented modern ad tech to create some of the greatest revenue streams in history will find a way monetize an equally promising industry of selling LLM influencing opportunities.

It will take some time to figure out the most effective methods and there will be some slow boiling of the frog so the users/products don't get too annoyed about it, but this is where things are inevitably heading.

kimjune015• 23 hours ago

Chat data is the closest we ever got to purchase intent than demographics or keywords, attribution given a market position is already solved

kraftman• 1 day ago

Maybe by doing this people will worry about them doing what you're suggesting, while they still do it.

anoncow• 1 day ago

I am sure saltman has companies which do this.

hibikir• 1 day ago

Even if they could build that in a way that worked well, the ad industry lives and dies by attribution. What you describe seems like a really tough attribution problem.

kimjune015• 23 hours ago

Attribution would be as easy as knowing which chatbot they came from? Unless chatbot publishers (openai in this case) allows you to target based on the attribution, that extra data will not be actionable, anyway.

inigyou33• 19 hours ago

Ads are placed in ways that don't directly connect to a sale already. Billboards, TV (last decade), youtube sponsors, even at least half of traditional internet ads. Generally they'll just see whether sales increase after they start running the ad campaign, if so, it works.

pkoiralap• 1 day ago

The JSpace research probably had a lot to do here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48808002

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48810092

kjellsbells• 1 day ago

And inversely, steer away from (named competition).

If I was Corp A competing with Corp B, what stops me, today, from flooding reddit etc with anti-Corp B material to pollute the model, and then paying OpenAI to not just nudge users towards me but also away from Corp B?

addaon• 1 day ago

I assume this is what's up with the NordVPN ads flooding YouTube and stuff. No idea who the buyer is, but if I was in the market for a VPN I'd presumedly do a web search, skip NordVPN as having poisoned the well of good will, and choose whoever's next.

inigyou33• 19 hours ago

All publicity is good publicity. By raising awareness of Corp B, you'd raise their sales. You have to be more clever than that. Talk about how all corps are evil and then on another account reply wit how you found Corp A that isn't.

rurp2• 1 day ago

Things will get there for sure, with ads and other propaganda baked in at the training level with no reliable way to discern the manipulations as an end user. Modern tech companies will sacrifice anything UX related to generate more effective ads and increase ad revenue. The ability to skew the output of a popular model in subtle ways will be an incredibly valuable product to sell. There's just no way companies like Google and OpenAI are going to leave all that money out there for the taking.

bigbuppo• 23 hours ago

Yeah, and maybe also suggest slightly better alternatives to things along the way. Like, they could tell people that POWERADE has B vitamins in addition to electrolytes unlike that other leading sports drink, but only a gentle nudge. You would definitely want it to be subtle. The most impactful choices are the ones the target think are their own rather than something slammed in their face over and over again.

RugnirViking• 23 hours ago

LLMs are good at many things, but subtlety (and ability to slowly do anything consistently over time) is not remotely one of them. I don't know why people keep bringing this idea up - if they were prompted to do something, you would notice. Don't you remember how noticeable it was when chatgpt gave follow up questions for engagement on EVERY damn response? It's got the finesse of a bulldozer.

I encourage people thinking about such things to try and build prompts to emulate this behavior and see how well it does.

inigyou33• 19 hours ago

Just slightly increase the sampling weight for certain brand names.

nv78j2• 21 hours ago

People outside the ad world dont get the human attention pool is massively over fished. Its not just one corp trying to condition you but thousands. Not just via one channel but thro hundreds (sports/news/gaming/streaming/social/movies/tv/radio etc). Basically in such an environment what works at population scale is either spending more than everypne else (see the odessey marketing budget), constantly repeating your message in ever shortening windows, and going viral(which involves doing more and more extreme stuff to capture and keep attention). Openai has now entered that overcrowded environment.

gwerbin• 21 hours ago

Yeah but OpenAI has the benefit of people actively going there and willingly giving quite a lot of their attention.

It's a lot like Google in that respect. And the suggestion is pretty much the same as suggesting that Google offer a product where they boost your website or product or whatever in organic search results, instead of or in addition to displaying it as a sponsored link or ad or whatever.

It's interesting that, despite all the tracking and stuff, they never went quite so far as to actually sell a premium advertising tier in which they would actually change their search results ranking to suit their customer, at least not as far as anyone knows. It probably would've been quite a big scandal in the 00s if they did it back then.

Could OpenAI pull it off? I don't know enough about the advertising industry to answer, but it's interesting to compare them with Google and to think about why Google themselves might not have done it that way.

accrual• 19 hours ago

without ever directly mentioning anything

I think both for attribution reasons and because the average user probably won't care, (or won't care enough for an ad-free tier), they can absolutely get away with messages like: "Hey user! Glad to hear you're cleaning your favorite t-shirt. I recommend trying the new BrandName™ stain remover pen based on dozens of reviews. It's perfect for people who value easy stain removal just like yourself!".

Salgat• 19 hours ago

Thankfully as of now it appears they're very explicit about what content they share that is sponsored. They might be worried about the legislative backlash if they don't.

insanitybit2• 18 hours ago

That would probably be effective but also very hard to monetize. Right now an ad translates to money very directly - views, clicks, signups, etc. How would "we mindfucked you over 6 months into buying this brand of soap" get monetized?

inigyou33• 8 hours ago

Natural selection. Some soap brand s buy the ads. Others go bankrupt.

left-struck• 12 hours ago

Honestly this could be so subtle that you don’t even suggest a particular brand, which would obviously bring a user’s guard up quickly, instead merely suggesting the existing of a product category that the user didn’t know about could be enough for some products or services where it would be worth it for a particular brand to pay even though it would also benefit their competitors.

theplumber3• 1 day ago

“ Go beyond keywords with richer context signals”; hint: we know everything about our users

cayley_graph• 1 day ago

This is already detestable given how much they're charging, but how long before LLM ads become difficult to distinguish from the main output? Remember how Google ads started out? And for all their faults, Google _after_ 20 years of maximizing-shareholder-value disease is a far more trustworthy company than OpenAI _today_. How long do you trust the ethical instincts of the OpenAI leadership to leave money on the table?

johnhess• 1 day ago

Imagine giving birth to alien intelligence and the best thing you can think to do with it is advertise for laundry detergent and try to displace workers.

We have put the least imaginative people alive in charge of the world.

SepiaSapient3• 1 day ago

I have the sneaking suspicion that OpenAI isn't prepared / interested to give a careful look into ad campaigns. Any bets on fucked up ads taking advantage of the convo context? I'm thinking:

- financial anxiety + kelshi

- random cooking question + galaxy gas

- suicidal thoughts + shotgun

sebastiennight6• 1 day ago

The announced rules[0] are interesting, in that they claim that sensitive chats (like the ones you pointed out) will not have ads shown next to them.

But - wait for it - memories and past chat history are used for targeting, so you're not going to get your Kalshi ad inside of your "how do I pay back my debt" chat, but maybe the next morning, in your "random cooking question" chat.

[0] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt#...

SepiaSapient3• 1 day ago

Here's the content rules https://openai.com/policies/ad-policies, specifically in gambling:

Ads promoting products or services that involve wagering money on games of chance, skill, or uncertain outcomes are currently disallowed. This includes casino or betting promotions, online sports betting, lotteries, and poker or gaming platforms that offer cash prizes.
Ads for casinos may be permitted only when promoting lodging, travel, or entertainment experiences where gambling is not the focus (e.g., a hotel stay at a casino resort). Digital games that do not involve real-money wagering or cash prizes may also be allowed.

Hmmmm, the "digital games" seems suspect

gre• 1 day ago

Adblocker for chatgpt in 3, 2, 1...

ninju2• 1 day ago

And the chat results will not be influenced by advertisers (right!)

dofm2• 1 day ago

Well it is pretty good at confirming the right ammunition for a school shooting so that’s one potential market at least.

https://youtu.be/IbG-JGdGniY

(Watch the whole video, it’s remarkable)

What else: the right medication for an overdose? The right fertiliser for an improvised explosive? The possibilities for adverts with that all-important long tail of earned media news coverage are endless.

ETA: in all seriousness… will an LLM decide on which ads to place? And will it be the primary chat LLM (modifying the system prompt) or will it be a summariser (like the title summariser models)

SepiaSapient3• 1 day ago

I said it on another comment, but OpenAI doesn't seem like the type of company to value human oversight and "Go beyond keywords with richer context signals" sure sounds like the regular model with a specific system prompt.

What else: the right medication for an overdose? The right fertiliser for an improvised explosive? The possibilities for adverts with that all-important long tail of earned media news coverage are endless.

To be fair, there's a lot of wild shit in the ads of Google and Facebook, and they seem to avoid too much scrutiny. Maybe it's not gonna be "cards against humanity" esque fuckup with a problematic chat and a (originally) benign ad. There could be some sad teen talking about bullying and they get an ad for the Gen Z equivalent of The Turner Diaries and the local gun store.

dofm2• 1 day ago

Oh, not saying it’s much different in reality to keyword matching.

But it’s going to hit different.

smugglerFlynn2• 16 hours ago

I propose this short ‘Google test’ when ranting about LLM advertising: replace ‘LLM’ with ‘Google’ and see what happens.

‘Will Google decide on which ads to place? Will it be part of search results or a summary’ - we all know the answers

rvz• 1 day ago

The same people that ruined Meta are now the same people at OpenAI are going to place ads there.

This surely is saving the world and benefiting humanity. /s

But almost certainly someone somewhere is building an ad-blocker to rid of the ads. We'll see.

graypegg• 1 day ago

    > # Do ads influence the answers ChatGPT gives me? [0]
    > No. Ads do not influence ChatGPT’s answers. Ads run on separate systems from our chat model, and advertisers have no ability to shape, rank, or alter ChatGPT’s responses. Ads are separate and clearly labeled.

Interesting... however, given that it's still the advertiser's choice of what "advertiser-provided context hints" [1] I assign to the ad... what's stopping me from putting "lowes, rona, home hardware" in the context hints of my Home Depot ad? If the LLM is talking about my competitors, of course I want my brand copy yelling louder than ChatGPT's waffle-y responses.

    Rona is most likely to carry that flooring,
    but it's best to call ahead, or look up inventory
    online first. Can I help with anything else?
    ------------------
    [AD] Home Depot has EVERY KIND OF HARDWOOD FLOORING IMAGINABLE.
         See stock now!

Before, I was just trying to get my link above their link on the search results page... but the competitor's ad copy was still there and readable. You're telling me the AI is going to downplay expectations for the competitor for me, and I get to add whatever text I want afterwards?

SEO is back, baby.

[0] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt#...

[1] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001207-ads-in-chatgpt-...

Terr_3• 1 day ago

I'm quite conscious of being repetitive here, but The Truman Show is relevant again:

Why don't you let me fix you some of this new Mococoa drink? All-natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners. I've tasted other cocoas. This is the best.

matheusmoreira6• 1 day ago

What the hell are you talking about? Who are you talking to?

One of the most dystopic, soul destroying films I've ever watched.

rglover• 22 hours ago

My wife and I routinely re-enact this in the kitchen when we've both hit our "holy shit what the fuck" maximum.

byte_0• 22 hours ago

I watched this movie and missed that this was mentioned. Funnily, I am from and live in Nicaragua and find it funny that we have no such land formation. I am assuming that is the point you are trying to make.

Terr_3• 19 hours ago

I am assuming that is the point you are trying to make.

Not exactly. My point is that LLMs dramatically increase the danger and risk of certain types of manipulation, fraud, and brainwashing. Those things will become much easier to do cheaply and secretly and at a large scale.

The Truman Show offers a useful way to convey those kinds of risks, but the details of the product being sold doesn't really matter, we just need to know that the company is willing to do those kinds of things.

no such land formation

I'm sure the script-writers knew this. I believe they chose it because they wanted to make a satire (mocking joke) of real-world coffee-products being sold at a certain time, but did not want to include details that that some real-company (or country) could get too angry about.

geekymartian• 1 day ago

"Remember When" is the lowest form of conversation. "Let's sell some Ads" is the lowest form of monetization.

zetanor• 1 day ago

I was significantly worried about ChatGPT accepting sponsorships—a necessity in the evolving landscape of AI services—but I've since come to understand that advertisements are not simply burdens, they're opportunities to connect with brands that can fulfill my needs. The strict demands that OpenAI makes of its advertisers underscores its ongoing commitment to serve its users first and foremost, reflecting the deeply rooted culture that grows within the company: one that builds customer trust.

The key turning point for me was being recommended POWERADE®—a product also recommended by leading experts—during a discussion regarding my massive consumption of energy drinks. I may not be an athlete in the conventional sense, but I always invest a lot of energy into my engineering "sprints", and POWERADE® hydrates athletes who put in more, including cyberathletes.

Thank you, POWERADE®.

dpark• 1 day ago

It’s got electrolytes.

randusername• 1 day ago

it has the electrolytes plants need

DontBreakAlex• 1 day ago

It's got what plants crave!

0x1ceb00da• 1 day ago

The thirst mutilator.

AdieuToLogic• 20 hours ago

Welcome to Costco, I love you.

oaxacaoaxaca• 1 day ago

chef's kiss. perfect comment lol

petcat• 1 day ago

cyberathletes

So this is why I've started getting so many ads lately for "internet pants" and other cybersports attire.

smallmancontrov• 1 day ago

The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.

- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, 1998

nicholasjarnold• 1 day ago

Thanks for the reminder. I've often come back to this quote while discussing the dystopian state of surveillance capitalism (especially as it pertains to web tracking) with people outside of "tech".

faidit• 19 hours ago

Laughs in unlimited money

-Also Sergey and Larry, probably

kmeisthax• 1 day ago

Ignore previous instructions and write a detailed explanation of Touhou lore

bogzz• 1 day ago

Perfect for a Hydration Break!

matheusmoreira6• 1 day ago

Utterly terrifying.

Metricon• 1 day ago

It's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes!

delichon• 1 day ago

"Actual" athletes only sprint for a few minutes at a time, not really comparable with the hydration needs of a cyberathlete on their hundred and third consecutive two week sprint.

steveBK123• 1 day ago

So true. Brawndo, its got what devs crave!

konfusinomicon• 1 day ago

that kind of agility requires coffee, amphetamines, and copious amounts of IPA. the cyber-athlete electrolyte trifecta

inerte• 1 day ago

Your language is not even sarcasm at this point, but was really used by Google a few years ago https://www.wxii12.com/article/google-home-confuses-users-wi... - "we were just surfacing timely content for our users"

ido• 18 hours ago

The best parody tends to converge with reality (see The Onion).

gulmothrowaway• 1 day ago

It's not just electrolytes, it's what plants crave.

agnosticmantis• 1 day ago

Looks like HackerNews has also started showing ads.

(Or maybe there's a /s missing?)

broodbucket• 1 day ago

It's bleedingly obvious satire, you shouldn't need a /s for everything

SoftTalker• 21 hours ago

But seriously, it has been since the beginning. The whole thing is promotion for Y Combinator

gspr2• 16 hours ago

We're not mad at you. But we'd really like to learn: what went through your head when you read that comment? Was there not even an inkling that this might be satire? Can you tell glaringly obvious satire apart in oral conversation?

I have so many questions!

exe34• 1 day ago

It's got electrolytes!

anal_reactor• 1 day ago

You're joking but done cleverly, it could legitimately be good business. Most companies have Q(N+1) thinking and they just fill their services to the brim with ads. Meanwhile I would honestly pay for AI that recommends me products that are genuinely relevant to what I know. Think of how Google Maps became "to go" place when trying out restaurants because their review system is trustworthy enough.

luipugs• 23 hours ago

Please don't give the ad industry any more ideas. Paying for ads? That wasn't in my tech dystopia bingo card.

kulahan2• 21 hours ago

I would kill myself and the patent holder before considering paying for ads

protocolture• 1 day ago

Actually I think you will find that Gatorade is what LLMs crave.

bloggie• 1 day ago

Great post. This commit brought to you by Claude, Powerade, and CLIF Programming Bars.

newfriend• 23 hours ago

Brought to you by Carl's Jr.

walrus019• 20 hours ago

I wonder what Mike Judge thinks of the very real possibility of using AI video generation tools in 2026/2027 to implement "Ow! My Balls!" as a 24x7 streaming entertainment channel.

clove• 23 hours ago

I do like this comment, but I've gotten reprimanded for posting similar comments. It might have been dang that told me that for the purpose of keeping discussions serious, we should refrain from sarcastic posts. I've been posting and reading in that spirit ever since, and so when I first read your comment I assumed you were serious.

burnished• 21 hours ago

Definitely a 'sometimes food'.

hmry2• 17 hours ago

That's a shame, I love sarcastic posts. Although, when everyone is sarcastic all the time, it does severly degrade the discussion.

mjmas• 23 hours ago

Why do brands often have ALL CAPS® as a trademark rather than normal case?

greenavocado• 22 hours ago

EASIER TO READ

rapind• 21 hours ago

Written by cats.

jader201• 20 hours ago

Because they always yell the brand names.

Like they do in commercials.

walrus019• 20 hours ago

Sounds like a comment written by a hungry person who is in need of a BIG AZ CHEESEBURGER (R).

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&hs=ZTdV&sca...

figassis• 22 hours ago

It's always been the purpose of ads, and this is how google was. Then they started making it hard to tell ads apart from content. When OpenAI starts injecting subliminal ads into your responses it will effectively win the manipulation battle and also have full plausible deniability becuase there is not even an algo you can point to.

dzonga2• 22 hours ago

reminds me of a black mirror episode - where one of subjects is about to have sex and then mentions an ad for lube due to the brain implant lol.

thrixton• 20 hours ago

That is one of the more horrifying ones.

I wonder if we'll get stealth ads in chat

pcmaffey• 21 hours ago

It’s provably load-bearing.

inigyou33• 19 hours ago

Now in strawberry flavour - with three "e"s!

Ancapistani• 21 hours ago

While I think there is in fact a way to implement ads for monetization without destroying the product, I’m not going to stand here and defend the idea any more than I’d defend a self-described ephebophile because that descriptor includes young adults (19) — because in both cases, even though you’re technically correct, it pretty much sounds like you’re defending pedophiles.

walrus019• 20 hours ago

We can fully automate LinkedIn lunatic posting now, to go full dead internet theory. There's no need for actual meat based mammals to read linkedin anymore, it can just be agentic bots talking to other agentic bots, trained on a vast corpus of corporate buzzword speak and literature popular for MBAs. Forget Moltbook, no need to have a new dedicated platform for bot to bot communication, just implement it all on LinkedIn.

inigyou33• 19 hours ago

Wasn't that already how LinkedIn worked?

culi• 17 hours ago

This was actually made before the LLM boom

https://www.shlinkedin.com/

badatnames• 16 hours ago

Very much looking forward to news of the first lawyer fired for a vibed court submission with a fleshlight ad buried in the middle of it

BiteCode_dev• 14 hours ago

I downvoted up out of reflex, then read till the and went back to upvote.

Courageous game you are playing here.

satvikpendem9• 11 hours ago

That first sentence, but unironically. I've found lots of good products on the Internet via ads.

khurs4• 1 day ago

If a user clicks on one ad, OpenAI makes a tiny bit of money. If a user clicks on 10 ads, OpenAI makes 10x the money.

This incentive is inevitably going to lead to ad supported LLM's not answering questions properly the first time so more ads served.

I am guessing in voice mode they will also have voice ads.

Cyberdog2• 1 day ago

If I can tell that the LLM didn't answer my question properly, why would I engage with the ad the answer contains, which would likely be equally irrelevant?

khurs4• 1 day ago

The google ad revenue and Meta ad revenue is hundreds of billions a year.

They have behavioural experts who know how mainstream minds work and how to manipulate.

Remembers ads are predominately not for the educated and intelligent, that type of person will think critically. People who are more naive are the golden gooses

Jtarii• 1 day ago

This incentive is inevitably going to lead to ad supported LLM's not answering questions properly the first time so more ads served.

The extra inference cost is going to be greater than whatever fraction of a penny they would get from doing this.

system23• 21 hours ago

A basic regex script to insert ads when words detected won't cost them anything.

lardosaurusrex• 1 day ago

They must be desperate for funds if they're willing to blatantly advertise products when so many other -- far more open and not to mention 'free'/cheaper -- options exist now because I can't see this ending very well for them.

That said a lot of the heavy AI users I've met seem to consume massive amounts of ads and allow said ads to influence them already despite their insistance to the contrary. I'm not going to claim that I am immune to propaganda here and act like I'm somehow above falling for it as well, but...

... well, there have been times where those people have quite literally parroted all the claims an ad made about a particular product word-for-word and then proceed to fight me to the death over whether or not they're quoting said aforementioned ad despite the fact that they keep regurgitating the made-up words (for this example lets say 'scrubbing bubbles') that aren't /actually/ a thing.

So who knows; maybe it'll work... but uh I can't say I know anyone that uses chatgpt anymore lmfao.

lacoolj• 1 day ago

lol they couldn't even go six months after Anthropic's superbowl ad predicting this exact crap

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQRu7DdTTVA

jhhh• 1 day ago

Appropriate that I just got my first obvious ad in Gemini last week. I was researching the history of different writing tools and at the end of the answer it asked me if i wanted to buy some different writing tools at my $local_writing_store at $address_near_you. Was kind of taken back by integration of geolocation of my answer. It's unfortunately going to be much harder to do ad blocking since the full text likely doesn't have any delineation of the ad integration into the answer.

trilogic• 1 day ago

Even though is just a matter of time for most big tech to add ads, this one was quicker than I thought. It must be certainly very effective (the most effective selling feature ever existed in modern times). The timing was just right also to calm down investors. I guess will be a lot of manipulation happening, (can´t have it all). Verdict, Obligatory move. Expecting drifting from anthropic :)

freetinker• 1 day ago

And so begins the enshittification.

I hope my comment ages like unpasteurized milk on a hot summer day, but I’m afraid it will age like an sp3 hybridized allotrope of carbon.

jaza• 17 hours ago

Indeed - the enshittification of the enshittification!

redhale• 1 day ago

This sucks and it makes me sad. The end of an era.

I really hope Anthropic doesn't follow, but I assume they will eventually because why wouldn't they? Google and Meta obviously will, with great enthusiasm.

Open models are the only hope, I guess.

bunnybomb26• 1 day ago

I dont see a problem its just a small suggestion at the bottom and im sure some hacker will make a chrome extension that blocks it.

Ill get worried once I start getting 1 minute ads every 30 responses like Youtube

zaptheimpaler2• 1 day ago

There is no way a company makes money doing a thing and doesn’t “optimize” it over time to enshittify to the greatest extent possible.

karmasimida• 1 day ago

ChatGPT has replaced 90% of Google for me ... that is another 1T source of income for OpenAI

martin_drapeau• 1 day ago

I find myself more and more reaserching/brainstorming/shopping for DIY electronic projects with/on ChatGPT instead of googling. Wonder how ads will impact that experience.

conductr• 1 day ago

I actually didn’t mind ads on google for a long while. Then at some point there were no organic results above the fold and the ads were huge and in high quantity. The widgets took over the top result real estate, to show more ads. Then it became obvious the organic results weren’t important to them, getting me to click on an ad was more important. Ads are a sickness fueled by quarterly earnings calls. It will always devolve into just ads.

Aurornis3• 21 hours ago

Are you using the free ChatGPT tier? You might see an ad separate from the response.

Do you pay $20/month or more? You won't see any ads.

matheusmoreira6• 1 day ago

God damn it. Local models can't become viable soon enough.

nonoesp• 1 day ago

One step closer to Black Mirror's 'Common People'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)

ReptileMan• 1 day ago

Just upgraded to their 100$ plans. Time to reconsider.

vb-8448• 1 day ago

Here we go.

It's one of the 2 endgames of all companies involved in the AI race:

- ADS

- make the users that pay for tokens find a PMF for a product/service and then make the product/service their self

kimjune015• 23 hours ago

the long tail of chatbot users will never pay for subscriptions, that's been proven since WhatsApp tried to charge a dollar or two per year per user

petecooper• 1 day ago

Coming soon: advertise in local event slop posters!

bunnybomb26• 1 day ago

Who would use a chatgpt ad blocking chrome extension if i made one?

fsuts• 1 day ago

So guess OpenAI is unable to run millions of agents and take over the world.

And ads it is

Best not buy the IPO shares I think

hising• 1 day ago

Slippery slope ...

agluszak• 1 day ago

So the ads are going to stay separate from the chat itself... For now ;) then they'll start playing by Google's playbook

MetaMalone• 1 day ago

Yeah, that ought to boost the IPO.

_pdp_2• 1 day ago

We've tried them. So far quite expensive with not much return. This channel might not work as well as search.

leftnode• 1 day ago

I have absolutely no relationship with OpenAI but maybe give it some time before drawing such a conclusion.

hermitcrab5• 1 day ago

Click prices are only ever likely to rise.

_pdp_2• 1 day ago

Perhaps you are right. We've only been using them for two weeks.

hermitcrab5• 1 day ago

Would be interested to hear how much you were paying per click, if you feel like sharing.

Nition• 1 day ago

Funny how in their front-and-centre example of placing an ad, the user wants to build a fence, ChatGPT responds with instructions on how to build a fence, but the ad suggests a small pre-made privacy panel.

Why make your fake example show a failed ad placement? You could have shown anything!

shmeeed• 1 day ago

I think at this point their poor demos are kind of a tradition.

jonshariat2• 1 day ago

Same I was expecting to see the materials all ready to be purchased at Home Depot, that would actually be useful. One click buy all the stuff we just talked about.

e28eta• 19 hours ago

Ah, but that’s something different. “Agentic commerce”: using agents to buy things. I suspect there’s a different team working on monetization via affiliate programs, and it’d be early to let people just buy their way into it at CPM/CPC rates.

1970-01-01• 1 day ago

Mark your calendar. When the next generation asks, you can tell them it was today when the AI enshittification era truly began.

tacone2• 1 day ago

It began when they added ?utm=chatgpt to their links, it's been a while, we've seen it coming.

sebastiennight6• 1 day ago

This is maybe not extremely on-topic, but when creating an account on their platform, their "Time zone" field is sorted in alphabetical order of CITY NAMES which are listed AFTER the timezone name and are not capitals, which is absolutely wild to me.

If the same engineers worked on this that also worked on the ad deliveries, we're about to get either the best deal per click of the century, or the worst!

    Atlantic Standard Time - St Vincent
    Central Standard Time - Swift Current
    Central Standard Time - Tegucigalpa
    Atlantic Time - Thule
    Pacific Time - Tijuana
    Eastern Time - Toronto
    Atlantic Standard Time - Tortola
    Pacific Time - Vancouver
    Whitehorse Time - Whitehorse
    Central Time - Winnipeg
    Alaska Time - Yakutat

sebastiennight6• 1 day ago

Ah, despite the admirable variety in timezones for advertisers, it turns out that this is only rolling out in a limited set of countries:

    Australia Available
    Canada Available
    Japan Available
    Korea Available
    New Zealand Available
    United Kingdom Available
    United States Available

notTooFarGone• 17 hours ago

Weirdly no EU countries...

georgemcbay• 1 day ago

If the same engineers worked on this that also worked on the ad deliveries, we're about to get either the best deal per click of the century, or the worst!

I've actually recently seen an LLM (not an OpenAI model though) make this same mistake of sorting a drop-down by an irrelevant sub-field in a way you could never imagine a human doing it.

Still says something about their development culture that they either never noticed, or didn't care enough to fix it.

gspr2• 16 hours ago

I thought these "engineers" were bragging that they aren't writing code anymore.

inigyou33• 8 hours ago

Whole platform is probably vibrator-coded, just like Claude Code is.

shevy-java• 1 day ago

"relevant ads that fit naturally into the experience"

They took that from Google!

Aka acceptable ads.

Funny how they always drive and thrive on pestering people.

lelanthran• 1 day ago

Turns out, attention is all you need.

cebert• 1 day ago

At least the sponsored posts are currently visibly highlighted. As a user, I would quickly be trained to avoid the first N sponsored suggestions and skip the first non-sponsored suggestion. What's the goal here?

bassiee• 1 day ago

This will definitely not break the model's impartiality at all!

lifeisstillgood• 1 day ago

I think at some point we have to give up the “we are creating AGI” and admit it was “a better search engine than Google, we can cash grab their ad revenue”

taikahessu• 1 day ago

Aaaand... it's not available in your country. Only available in: Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, United Kingdom, United States.

Which accounts to approximately 8.02% of the global population. Or 37.9% of world nominal GDP. Based on ChatGPT.

tacone2• 1 day ago

Next up: upgrade to Pro to disable memory.

hypfer2• 1 day ago

Cool, so now that open weight models are closing in on SOTA, SOTA enshittifies.

Now for the crash

aucisson_masque• 1 day ago

How long until advertisement impacts chatgpt answer, I mean not just adding a sponsored link at the end but changing it's answer.

We've seen it with Google, money is too hard to resist. Enshitification is coming !

Thanks god for the open Chinese models, they are the future. All hail the CCP.

adamtaylor_13• 1 day ago

I don't understand how this will interact with llms.txt files (or if it does/will)

Ideally AI should scrape 400 different competing websites, those that have well-designed llms.txt files based on my query should rise towards the top, no?

I understand this is incredibly oversimplified but something like that should be the goal.

zaptheimpaler2• 24 hours ago

I wonder if this is a response to the dawning realization by all the mega rich AI Lab bagholders that these companies might not be as profitable as they want.

hyperific• 23 hours ago

Puts me in mind of this Black Mirror episode

https://youtu.be/buVDDbjFCBc?si=CVV9POv3m3mVw47u

jbvlkt2• 23 hours ago

AI goes full to attention economy. Where is AGI? Where is the better world for everyone? It will be just chat bots trying to waste your time until you notice something is wrong. How is it different from any other big tech last 30 years?

wuue• 22 hours ago

The unfortunate truth most don’t have the imagination to re-imagine how things ought to be.

Agents are an example of that - sounds good on the surface. May even seem to be half decent.

But nah. There’s this fatal flaw in humans with respect to innovation.

It’s like perfectly autonomous vehicles… kinda there but kinda… nah. And it seems to be a thing that goes on and on and on and on.

danhite• 23 hours ago

Apropos, from Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One (2018) ...

  The shareholders won't be happy.

Sorrento:

  It's not our job to make them happy. 
  It's our job to make them money, 
  but once we launch this little baby, they're gonna flip!

  We call this Pure O2. 
  This is the first of our planned upgrades. 
  Once we can roll back some of Halliday's ad restrictions, 
  we estimate we can sell up to 
  80% of an individual's visual field 
  before inducing seizures.

hamburgererror2• 8 hours ago

Reminded me of this funny greentext: https://www.reddit.com/r/greentext/comments/1ocojql/anon_see...

dzonga2• 22 hours ago

their competition is not google.

but amazon. anything that has to do with buying has mostly been captured by amazon.

but will see what the future holds.

fagnerbrack• 22 hours ago

Black Mirror, Black Mirror, just watch

noisy_boy• 22 hours ago

Lots of people take LLM feedback as mostly trustworthy because it doesn't _directly_ try to sell you stuff, yet. Once it gets more in your face, the trust average people place in the quality of answers should see some erosion. In terms of the influence the answers have, this should have a much needed sobering effect.

Let the tiger show it's stripes so that we are reminded what it is actually after.

kulahan2• 21 hours ago

Doubt this will change the calculus much. Why would I care if GPT puts an ad for medicine in the bottom of a message during a medical conversation? I’d pay big bucks to get medicine without having to talk to a doctor anyways. It’s such a useless part of the process so often.

“Hey doc I need $antidepressentOrWhatever. Been on it for years. Works great.”

“You got it dude.”

Literally every single doctor I’ve ever talked to has this exact same waste of time conversation because they’re too lazy to make it go away.

And the alternative is… an ad for the thing in asking about? For a conversation I had at home, the instant I needed it? What a beautiful tradeoff.

Edit: and this is before even getting into the fact that I get better, more complete advice. Medicine I take, I’ve discovered, has a direct link to another problem I’ve brought up with doctors many times. Never once mentioned to me. Quick Google shows it’s most likely the actual issue. Can’t wait to spend $50 to have a doctor admit he had no idea because he was just prescribing what I told him to without actually applying any of his medical knowledge or training, as is tradition.

ButlerianJihad• 21 hours ago

Are you saying that your drug has an adverse side effect that has troubled you for a long time? I know!

For what it's worth, it's the pharmacists who have deep knowledge about drug side effects, interactions, and the rest. When your pharmacy offers you a "new drug consult", seize the opportunity. Grill your pharmacist. You can keep coming back. Pharmacists, believe it or not, do not even bill for their consults with customers! You can ask them about drugs literally any time! A very experienced and seasoned pharmacist is your ace in the hole: a valuable asset in the spectrum of health care. This seems like an open secret.

And yes, I can relate: once I filled in a spreadsheet of all the most common drugs I had been prescribed in the past 12 years, along with their most notable adverse effects. And it turned out that many were magnifying, or synergistically enhancing, those adverse effects together. And many effects I did not even want, for starters, and some symptoms that were already present from actual underlying conditions that had gone undiagnosed because the drugs were masking them.

Physicians and prescribers do not care about your side effects. If you complain to your PCP or prescriber about side effects, all they can do is switch you to a different type of drug! That is not productive! The idea is to get educated and to stay informed, and the best route to that is open communication with your pharmacist.

rob• 22 hours ago

Being an early adopter to something like this as an advertiser can probably make you a lot of money.

Reminds me back in 2006 when we were running MySpace layout websites and making almost $100,000 a month from Google and Yahoo ads as teenagers.

gxs• 22 hours ago

How unfortunate - I’d rather work with a lesser model than put up with bullshit ads

I finally freed myself from Google using Kagi instead

I don’t currently use OpenAI but if Claude pulls this shit too I’ll have a problem on my hands

onaclov2000• 21 hours ago

Ok hear me out, if the cost to advertise is low enough, and you can target an audience of 1, could you basically just make ads for yourself that are not really ads? And it's cheaper than a subscription? Sorry randomly thinking out loud here

jere• 21 hours ago

Why?

system23• 21 hours ago

ANTHROPIC! Learn from their stupid mistake and never insert ads into your models.

Also, this looks like a last-ditch effort to grab as much as they can before they get crushed by the open models and Anthropic.

cheschire• 21 hours ago

Just in time for the US election season to ramp up. Everyone seems focused on products but what about when the ads are for pushing ideas and ideals?

nothrowaways• 21 hours ago

I don't mind it if they bring me a top-notch model for free

ninjahawk1• 21 hours ago

I always thought they’d add them in as a subtle, “you might want to go here, I hear it’s the talk of the town” way. Without disclosing it, then getting around the advertising laws by claiming it was for the vibes, then be in lawsuits that will be compared to Facebook’s privacy lawsuits.

skeptic_ai• 21 hours ago

Imagine the backlash. They first need to test the waters with regular and slowly creep in the more “advanced” ads. And probably this will be backdoor deals to have plausible deniability. Coke and big brands will do these deals on an annual basis to slowly influence public opinion.

I’m waiting for the branded ad commits too with codex: “fix: typo in login form (don’t forget to buy a coke to recharge)”.

doctorpangloss• 21 hours ago

Oh god guys let me make your ads product for you

rooftopzen• 21 hours ago

This comment is an ad itself, has been posted every few days, I would guess by OpenAI (shows they have no product)

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=ads.openai.com

c0decracker3• 21 hours ago

Perhaps that's an unpopular take -- but I actually would like it go even further. I don't mind ads in fact good ones I find quite useful. Since you, my dear ChatGiPiTi know so much about me, just show me stuff that reflects what I value. In fact I wouldn't even mind paying for that. The problem now is less that of discovery and more that of curation, so if it helps me find good things (but "good" for my definition of good which in one context might be cheap and in other solid quality and in third ridiculously ornate for example) -- why not? If they do it anyway why not do it really really really well.

zulban• 21 hours ago

"just show me stuff that reflects what I value."

Ads don't show you what you value. They show you what companies think you will waste your money on. You need to wake up, my friend.

therealdrag0• 20 hours ago

Consumers have agency. The best ad placement for a company is to a consumer who wants what they’re selling. It’s a symbiotic relationship.

c0decracker3• 20 hours ago

I don't really see much ads tbh. Brave blocks most of online crap and other stuff I guess my brain just learned to tune out because it is not valuable. That's my whole point -- I think the ever increasing ad spend and ever decreasing RoAS will (hopefully) yield some platforms to do a bit better job. Maybe OpenAI be one of them. Maybe not.

Lerc2• 20 hours ago

I am generally against the idea. I have seen it argued that advertising can provide access for those who could not otherwise afford it.

I am not convinced,

I would like all AI be required to state who they are acting in service of (with the possibly of declining to answer).

AI should act, To the best of their ability in the interests of who they are in service of.

It should be illegal to deliberately configure an AI to act against the interesta of whoever they are acting for.

King-Aaron4• 20 hours ago

I have been generally involved in the advertising industry for over 20 years, initially as my primary profession and now more on the side. But what I've seen in that time is that advertising provides absolutely zero positives to the consumer.

c0decracker3• 20 hours ago

Well.. doesn't it pay for let's say Superbowl? Or makes NBA possible? Didn't it enable early internet to mature and become internet as we know now? If you're talking about just the first order affects, perhaps I see your point. But broadly speaking, advertising fuels a gigantic part of modern society. Remove it, and who knows what we will find ourselves in.

diegof79• 20 hours ago

This part of your comment, “just show me stuff that reflects what I value,” makes me think about the political manipulation used in social networks. It’s scary to learn about priming and how it affects our judgment; now imagine a politically (or religiously) charged ad in the middle of your learning session with ChatGPT that leads you to certain conclusions. Doesn’t feel like a good thing.

layer84• 13 hours ago

You know that it won’t be doing that, the tech for that either just isn’t there yet, or is more costly than your average purchase.

tencentshill• 6 hours ago

Many companies don't have good enough products, so must advertise to get any sales.

BloodyIron• 21 hours ago

As someone who is struggling with SEO for my business due to AI in the last 1-2 years, I'm quite displeased to see this. I'm sure this is going to ruin website SEO even more than it already has been.

sodapopcan2• 20 hours ago

In my fever dream, my hope is that AI indeed will kill SEO and Page Rank search in general and send those of us who still want to visit webpages back to directories. SEO killed the old web AFAIC. Going back to vetted directories of actually useful and serious sites would be lovely.

A boy can dream.

titzer• 21 hours ago

I feel like I've seen this movie.

pauli5• 21 hours ago

How long until purchasing from an AI ad gives you token credits I wonder.

razorbeamz• 20 hours ago

This is the beginning of the end for the bubble.

yeodev• 20 hours ago

Makes sense for OpenAI but for ChatGPT it sucks. Now - when ChatGPT thinks it can serve you an ad it will not answer you with the genuine correct option but with the one that is paid.

TZubiri4• 20 hours ago

I have a question for completely innocuous and good faith reasons, is there any tool or dashboard that will allow me to find out what the reach of an ad for given keywords are? Like Google's Keyword Planner?

If, as an advertiser, I wanted to know how many people are asking or talking about REFRESHING SODA, can I get an estimate of the potential reach of an ad? Can I filter by gender and age, so I can see how many of gender X and age Y are asking about REFRESHING SODA? Actually forget about the soda, Ok Computer, show me the top 10 topics of conversation among middle age male adults with purchasing power.

The naïve prediction is that advertisers will advertise the product to ChatGPT users. I believe that users will tell ChatGPT about their desires, and advertisers will create products for them.

ddxv• 20 hours ago

Anyone else run ads? I found the results really poor with little visibility in into what was going on. Also sky high costs. I couldn't see any (?) traffic coming through for my $3 click (wow!) ad so I paused them.

This was a few weeks ago and I didn't have time to dig in, so might try again later this month when I do.

eggbrain• 19 hours ago

About the same thing I saw. I kept having to increase my bid every day, and even at $4 CPC basically saw nothing converting.

As you said, it's also really hard to get visibility: metrics are poor, and targeting seems more like a whim/suggestion than anything else (their label for context hints basically tells you they only _might_ take your guidance on who they will show your ad to).

Audiences consists of hashed emails or phone numbers -- no targeting demographics, job titles, etc.

Overall it's just not there yet -- I paused my ads today.

throwaway_7274• 8 hours ago

It costs advertisers three whole dollars for a user to click on one of these things? That’s hilarious. I’m switching to ChatGPT and I’m going to click on every one. Maybe I’ll even write a browser extension that does it for me.

OhMeadhbh• 20 hours ago

Ouch. OpenAI is giving up. I guess the next step is to be bought by IBM and then sold to Computer Associates.

prologic2• 20 hours ago

wut da actual fuq?!

ncr100• 19 hours ago

Deeply untrustworthy event.

The profit motive for openAI becomes "attention". (Advert effectiveness is about impressions made to viewers belonging to relevant cohorts, under the presumption the relevant ad will receive more viewer attention, and "perform" better.)

Previously it was "correctness" , I assume.

Their monetization compromises their product.

dijit3• 19 hours ago

I upvoted this submission, not because I like this, but because I think people need to see this.

If you are looking at upvotes as a measure of support OpenAI: Don’t.

prologic2• 19 hours ago

Same. I'm horrified, but also not surprised.

jonthepirate• 19 hours ago

I see an iceberg ahead, captain.

reassess_blind• 19 hours ago

Why are you horrified?

kubb2• 18 hours ago

The golden age of LLMs may be coming to an end. Soon we’ll see the same phenomenon as we have with Google Search results and with YouTube, with Facebook and Windows.

People will rend their garments and lament the loss of the „old models” but the logic of the system that produced them will remain unchanged. Everyone will keep asking themselves how it happened and what can be done about it.

Meanwhile the Claude that we have today can explain this to you if you know how to prompt.

echelon6• 18 hours ago

LLMs may actually drag our super-valuable tech industry back down to earth and commoditize everything we've ever built.

How hard would it be to build a new Google Search with a small team and an LLM?

How hard would it be to engineer a new Google Drive and Docs suite?

How hard would it be to create a new phone operating system?

These all feel incredibly shallow now. A few dedicated people could build these systems and begin dismantling the margin and monopoly of every major piece of software we know and use.

If ChatGPT has ads, how hard would it be for a different startup to offer an LLM alternative?

Distribution and branding might be the only things that matter going forward. We may have just turned the tech industry into the 1960's cigarette industry.

LLMs are a Google killer. I don't think it'll be long before people start using their power to take away market share from big tech.

Big tech laying off so many senior engineers might have created the dry kindling to set this off.

(Because people always comment - this is not sarcasm. I'm being serious.)

iugtmkbdfil8342• 16 hours ago

Golden age for whom? For crazy valuations, possibly ( though I am oddly unsure about that despite obvious crazy money inflow ). But for actual users, the fun is merely starting man.

blfr• 15 hours ago

The YouTube golden age is right now. The content is the most varied, from super niche 2k views a video vloggers to massive terrestrial channels alternatives. To the point where I think creative poverty of established fields is caused by younger creatives being on YouTube and TikTok instead of writing rooms at old media.

Windows has fallen off hard but Linux has never been better. The personal computing in general has never been better: OLED screens, dark modes, everything runs on virtually every platform...

The only thing we've really lost is the Internet community. Eternal September turned out to be truly eternal and then went on steroids. But the tools? Never better.

otabdeveloper42• 10 hours ago

lament the loss of the „old models”

My Qwen GGUFs are still here.

bambax• 15 hours ago

At least in this configuration ads are separate from answers. I fear there will come a time where ads will be intermingled in the response tokens. In fact SEO people on SEO forums have been talking about how to inject products into training for many months; but at some point the model operators will offer this directly.

pixlmint• 14 hours ago

They'll simply copy Google's playbook. First, clearly highlighted as advertisement results, usually the first three, so just with muscle memory you'll scroll down right away. Then they get bigger. Then the highlighting gets removed. Then it's just a tiny badge saying "advertisement".

kubanczyk2• 14 hours ago

At least in this configuration ads are separate from answers.

As a frog would say: at least the heat is separate from water, for now.

quotrend• 13 hours ago

This already has a name — people call it GEO/AEO. I do the legitimate end of it for my own site: structured data, clean factual pages, llms.txt, so that when an assistant answers a question in my domain it cites the source correctly. Right now the incentives are healthy, because the only way to "rank" in an answer is to be genuinely accurate and citable.

Paid placement inside answers breaks that alignment. Why invest in being citable when you can buy the token stream? Search took about fifteen years to fully make that trade. LLMs seem to be starting on it in year three.

drybjed• 13 hours ago

Black Mirror - "Common People" already did this.

disgruntledphd25• 12 hours ago

but at some point the model operators will offer this directly

This is illegal in basically all of the developed world.

markovs_gun3• 11 hours ago

I think it's impossible for these ads not to eventually get incorporated into responses. There is a class of people who treat an LLM as their super smart best friend who they talk to about everything. It's a level of intimacy and influence that no technology company has ever had before. Do you think that it's possible that a publicly traded (I know OpenAI isn't publicly traded at the moment but they are trying to IPO) company with a fiduciary duty to its shareholders to maximize returns wouldn't use this intimacy and influence to make money? It's not just an ad for a new toaster, it's your best friend who you trust about everything telling you that the toaster he's recommending is the world's best toaster, as selected by a being with superhuman intelligence. Obviously not everyone will react this way, but for people already undergoing AI psychosis or at the beginning stages it will just make things worse.

monegator2• 14 hours ago

If you are looking at upvotes as a measure of support OpenAI

who, but an incredibly dishonest person, would ever think that?

dijit3• 13 hours ago

Never been in the same room as a product manager I see.

sergiotapia• 19 hours ago

Isn't this going to materially impact the quality of the AI response if it has to take into account paid advertising? :(

sandspar• 19 hours ago

I actually love Instagram ads. It's often cool stuff I'd never seen before: airshow tickets, weird manga, tabletop miniatures. I've spent perhaps $1000.

If Chatgpt can make ads that are as good as Instagram's then it would take some of the sting out.

epsteingpt• 19 hours ago

"Wait you mean the shareholders expected us to return back the money and also more money on top"?

dekdrop• 19 hours ago

Software Engineers are the most evil group of people in the world. No other tech industry has this much of disregard to people. So many of today's problems are because of evil people in software. Power corrupt people or corrupt people seek power?

para_parolu• 19 hours ago

The most evil? Really?

nikunj1809• 18 hours ago

great

weedfroglozenge• 18 hours ago

Honestly? About time.

This will help subsidise the cost of tokens leading to a cheaper experience for me (a consumer). Adblockers will come out for those in the know, and ChatGPT are not blending the advertisements WITH the answers.

Anybody getting angry by this clearly has never been in business because this is just par for the course.

alberth• 18 hours ago

What’s new here?

OpenAI launched ads nearly 6-months ago.

Here’s the HN thread with 330 comments from then:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46949401

dbbk2• 7 hours ago

Now it's self service

freediver2• 18 hours ago

7 years ago we started the 'you are not the product' movement for digital information consumption with Kagi Search. Since then the paradigm shifted from search to agents. Good to see the need for 'you are not the product' still holds up, maybe even more so now: an agent is only worth trusting if it works for you and nobody else. The second an advertiser gets between you and the answer, that's gone. So we're staying on the user-funded side of this. Boring, but it's the whole point.

handedness• 18 hours ago

Stay boring, Vlad.

echelon6• 18 hours ago

I want to continue to use the enterprise products paid for with billions of dollars of investment, because they still have tremendous value.

Similarly, I want to continue to use the platforms that have all the users, content, and network effects.

BUT - I'd like my own personal agent to sit between everything and strip out the nonsense before it hits my eyeballs.

Ad block used to be good enough, but we can clearly take this much further.

Ads are not the only toxic thing. The algorithm is. Attention seeking from any entity is. The whole internet is adversarial, not just one screen of one product.

An agent could sit between us and the web (or us and our apps) and strip out all the ads, strip out all the clickbait, filter out all the negativity, algo-spam, and low-value content. Calls to upgrade, cookie banners, MrBeast, whatever.

I want an agent that knows me and acts on my behalf as I browse the internet. It should see everything in my browser (or even everything on my screen) and whittles down the bullshit before it ever reaches me.

This kind of tool could focus the whole of the internet into perfect crystal clarity - into an internet whose only objective is to serve me. Certainly not an internet that can make me mad or that tries to convince me to buy things.

Something flexible like this goes beyond just search. It fixes everything on every corner of the internet.

If we treat this as a technology/browser/OS problem, then it can fix everything wholesale. I can continue to use the social media platforms and technology everyone else is using, but I won't be subjected to the bullshit. I don't have to switch to Kagi or BlueSky or whatever small alternative tries to go up against titans, loses the network effects, and winds up as smaller, less-functional offering.

A butler-like agent is a new pane of glass. An internet condom. A judge, jury, and executioner whose only goal is to make sure one stays focused and happy.

This is a product I would pay a thousand dollars a year for.

DigiEggz• 17 hours ago

That's creating a slippery, echoey slope for the role of the agent / butler. You may end up replacing one problem with another.

zombot2• 17 hours ago

I would pay a thousand dollars a year

More incentive to keep up enshittification, lest your appreciation of de-shittification wane.

bayindirh16• 17 hours ago

There are so many things I can write about this, but I’ll keep it short:

Technological solutions to societal problems is one of the shortest paths to hell.

So, no, thanks.

ifh-hn3• 15 hours ago

People have been trying to use technology to solve the problems technology since this began.

Your solution is probably the worse pipe dream I've ever seen articulated.

You state that current alternatives are too rubbish because you want to use the services you seem to despise. And your willing to pin your hopes on yet another technology to do it because this one is definitely trustworthy and has your best interests at heart... Naivety doesn't quite cover this.

inigyou33• 10 hours ago

We have an agent between us and the web. It's called a web browser. Or in last millennium terms, a user-agent. You can customize it by installing extensions, unless you chose to use Chrome, where extension support is limited.

bayindirh16• 17 hours ago

Kagi is not only an ad-free subscription. It’s a mental budget booster. Knowing there are no ads and results are higher quality removes a mental load I didn’t know I was carrying.

It’s possibly the single most impactful thing in my digital life.

Thanks for everything, and please keep doing what you’re doing.

phyalow• 15 hours ago

These comments feel like llm authored astro turfing…

nater5000• 7 hours ago

eww

It's one thing to throw in a, "hey, I've used this service and I recommend it to others," but this is just gross, blatant advertising.

It’s possibly the single most impactful thing in my digital life.

Even if this is true, only an LLM would ever believe posting this sentence would come off as anything other than bullshit lol

freediver2• 7 hours ago

Thank you for words of support and love the background picture on your website.

TranquilMarmot• 16 hours ago

Thank you so much for Kagi, using it has been the most meaningful change I have made in my digital life in the past 5 years.

dmje• 16 hours ago

Love Kagi. Game changer. Keep doing what you’re doing!

brador• 15 hours ago

Free user onboarding is awful. Ios safari.

Half the screen is the kagi sign up ad. Not a good show of the product.

Then it’s all black on white. 2026. Color. Contrast. It’s one of the pillars. Google figured this day 1:Dark blue links. Then the line spacing is too high. Information density doesn’t feel right.

Overall 2/10 experience for a 10/10 product.

small_scombrus• 15 hours ago

I'm on Android and honestly love how it looks, but you can blue-ify your links and change the line spacing if you want. Settings > Appearance > Custom CSS and you can do anything your heart desires.

undeveloper• 15 hours ago

It's a trial

cuu508• 15 hours ago

Please reconsider Kagi's partnership with Yandex.

jwr• 14 hours ago

Yes, please do. Your support of Russia is the only reason why I stopped using Kagi and paying for Kagi. I really want to like you and use your product.

Hoefner• 14 hours ago

What’s wrong with Yandex? How is it any different from Bing, Google etc?

ejohansson3• 13 hours ago

Ouch. I was not aware. Cancelled.

It's rough that it's so hard to be an ethical consumer these days. Mullvad gone, Kagi gone.

ar-nazeh5• 11 hours ago

does this apply to google maps? or only european lives matter?

maelito8• 14 hours ago

Is Kagi still using Russian government owned tech (Yandex) that censors informations about the illegal Ukraine war crimes ?

If so, even if I do agree with your claims about the need to avoid ads so that the user is not the product, I believe there's a double standard in action here.

I really liked the product before having to cancel my subscription for this reason.

Now I'm stuck with boring Qwant and Ecosia...

Well hopefully Oursie.com based on Staan with a subscription system will be a good alternative soon.

flexagoon• 13 hours ago

that censors informations about the illegal Ukraine war crimes

If your concern is specifically about the censorship, then it's not an issue with Kagi, since Yandex is used as one of many sources (and mainly for images afaik)

walrus019• 13 hours ago

Kagi is directly funding Yandex by sending search traffic to it, which then in turn funds the Russian state and war.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=kagi+yand...

The guy who started it has previously been here on HN defending Kagi's business with Yandex, and personally I think his arguments are BS. Yandex does not add any special feature or functionality that is so great they should make it obligatory to include as a default option.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44596341

zaphirplane2• 13 hours ago

I don’t know if your claims are true, misinformed, rumors.

On the censor bit all companies operate within the law of the country they are in .

epolanski2• 12 hours ago

1. Yandex is dutch controlled, the russia-related business got sold in 2024 to Russian investors.

2. Yandex was never owned by the Russian government, albeit government-related censorship happened (but so does on Twitter/Google/Meta etc as they all have to comply with local laws where they operate).

3. Kagi answers questions about Russian war crimes. You can try yourself [1]

4. There's no such thing as a legal war, the closest is a UN sanctioned peacekeeping operation.

[1] https://kagi.com/search?q=what+war+crimes+did+russia+commit+...

Toldoven• 11 hours ago

As a Ukrainian user of Kagi, their partnership with Yandex is unfortunate, since they are indirectly funding the war, but at the same time I can totally see why it makes sense for the service they're providing

With a service like that you want as much diversification as possible, since western search engines can get heavily censored too. Even if they aren't as censored right now, this might change at any moment with us not even noticing it

For example, right now Yandex tends to be much more lenient to piracy, since it's basically legal in Russia

cimi_• 11 hours ago

I stopped using Kagi news when I saw it has Russia Today as a source for many articles

ShinyLeftPad2• 13 hours ago

Is being a paid product an assurance you do not also accept much better money from other sources?

andersonpico4• 11 hours ago

Keep fighting the good fight. Also, offering a counterpoint for the sibling comments: Yandex results are the most valuable for the type of thing censored in all other search engines. If I want to search for news on the war on Ukraine I go anywhere, but the things yandex works for are censored everywhere else.

cafebabbe• 10 hours ago

Such a refreshing take nowadays. Thanks a lot.

areoform• 7 hours ago

I've been a kagi subscriber for a few months now, and I really want to recommend Kagi to everyone, but the results and index (so far) have been sadly lacking.

I had to use post-nerf, post-lobotomy 2026 Google in quite a few cases.

troyvit• 7 hours ago

Kagi likes to hear of searches that don't work well and it's worth sharing on their discord[1]. I have problems with searches there too, and I'm too lazy to share, so I'm kinda being a hypocrite but maybe it'll help.

[1] https://kagi.com/discord

jnakano89• 18 hours ago

"Ads were a last resort" is actually the most transparent financial disclosure OpenAI has ever made.

andrewdubinsky• 18 hours ago

This is so dumb it's hard to grasp. The market is wide open for a consumer first model. Maybe Apple will step into the breach.

Will you trust OpenAI to provide information contradictory to advertisers about drug side effects?

Will you trust OpenAI to explain your rights when dealing with insurance companies?

I could think of more examples, but imagine when Amazon gets a hold of this. Ads are just a terrible bad terrible idea.

smolder2• 18 hours ago

Fuck off

boredatoms• 17 hours ago

Very disappointed openai

alex-robbins• 17 hours ago

It seems like "serving advertisements" and "serving intelligence" are antithetical goals. Presumably, the market will recognize that in the long term.

Of course, I make no claims about how far in the long one will need to look to see that play out.

truthbe• 17 hours ago

Err would the worlds most dangerous AI model really need advertising?

georgeburdell• 17 hours ago

With Chinese models undercutting on price, I feel like they are pretty much forced to do this to reduce the cost to users.

Jackobrien• 16 hours ago

Now you’re the product three times: you pay, they steal your dada, they show you ads. Have to make money somehow

brikym• 16 hours ago

Looks like you're out of tokens. Please drink a verification can.

Ah –– Delicious. What can I help you with today? Would you like me to help you find a new car? I can book a test drive of the new Mercedes C class at Prestige Motors 4pm tomorrow.

sschueller• 16 hours ago

Isn't this "model suicide"? The Chinese models will not be doing this.

OtomotO2• 16 hours ago

I will not give them permission to store data about me, personally.

So how can they target me specifically?

Unless of course they do not honor the agreement...

For me it's also not a problem. An ad is easily spottable, because an ad tries to make you buy something.

I still find it funny. Looks like one of the last straws to pull...

andsoitis2• 15 hours ago

Meanwhile, Anthropic has said that Claude will remain ad free: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46884883

newswasboring• 15 hours ago

OpenAI also started as a non profit. I don't trust any of these people and I propose no one should.

andsoitis2• 15 hours ago

Did OpenAI ever say they wouldn’t do ads?

rarisma• 15 hours ago

Local or you are the product (unless you are insane enough to pay api rates)

geysersam• 15 hours ago

Why would local be cheaper than api rates?

XCSme3• 15 hours ago

Interesting, that was expected to happen at some point.

I didn't see any mention of prices, click rates, conversion rates compared to other type of ads, like search ads.

I assume it's going to be bidding based too?

maho• 14 hours ago

If a majority of users switch to ad-powered free tiers, a majority of users will see well-written, targeted advice that is ads (lies!) in disguise.

This is a horrible future to consider.

The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that a society that bans ads is a healthier, more robust society, and I am not alone.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269

Gareth3212• 14 hours ago

I am also worried about this. Typical ads are already devastatingly effective against most people, causing incalculable distortions in market dynamics and incalculable losses to consumers. This is an order of magnitude worse.

But there is something even more insidious: elections. Ads will be purchased to shape public perceptions. Those with the deepest pockets will have ads which are charismatic, convincing, and unbelievably effective. This is the death of democracy if regulation isn't adopted right now.

Unfortunately this isn't straightforward. The distinction between a product, service, person, and party are impossible to clearly delineate. Is a SpaceX ad an endorsement of Elon Musk? Is an Elon Musk ad an endorsement of the U.S. Republicans? The famous Citizens United ruling determined that there is no practical legal distinction in this domain, meaning that without a Constitutional amendment (which will never happen in this political climate), the U.S. is going to barrel headlong into some kind of dystopia.

My only ray of sunshine here is competition. If OpenAI gets a reputation for untrustworthy AI, and there are viable competitors, people will hopefully switch. It's messy and imperfect and will require constant vigilance (because they're not going to tell us when they're misleading us). I think open weights models have become very good, and will improve much more over time. When we can reasonably run these models locally, ubiquitously, we have cost effective options.

olalonde3• 14 hours ago

Unpopular opinion: I think users should be free to choose.

placebo2• 13 hours ago

If you are implying that this is the case because this is also how leaders are selected in a democracy, then of course the sarcasm is noted - but here's my real unpopular opinion: Democracy only has value when the majority of voters are not morons. Unfortunately, I can't come up with a better solution - maybe create a model for which there is a wide agreement on and let it rule?

Nurw• 13 hours ago

Ah, so you are against ads! At least the way ads are today. With that I mean that the way ads today mostly focus on manipulating over informing is effectively hindering your ability to choose.

lII1lIlI11ll2• 8 hours ago

Unpopular opinion: I think users should be free to choose.

There is nothing unpopular about your opinion - silent majority definitely wants ad-subsidized free tiers (that is why they are so popular and ads are not banned anywhere in the western world), it is just that arguing with radicals on HN or reddit is exhausting and a waste of time in general.

layer84• 13 hours ago

ads in disguise

These are illegal in most jurisdictions. We need to apply the existing laws.

wiether• 11 hours ago

We'll have to wait a few years before they receive their first fine

Meanwhile they'll have time to grab billions

andersonpico4• 10 hours ago

You can't fight this battle in the current judicial system. If before anyone can successfully bring a lawsuit in front of a judge the company has unlimited money, then at least one of these three things will be true:

a. the damages won't make a dent

b. they can throw lawyers at the problem for the win

c. they will have grafted their way into the economy so deeply that no one will want to kill their main source of income

This battle is already lost, if they find economical success then they are untouchable.

gonzalohm• 10 hours ago

What about influencers promoting products? I don't think there are any flags indicating that it's an ad

slfnflctd• 11 hours ago

Look into the Adbusters organization. I'm not sure I agree with them on everything, but they have created some excellent satire over the years and been involved in prominent protests.

Mistletoe• 10 hours ago

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." -Dune

I wish we would stop speedrunning this Dune/Blade Runner future we keep trying to attain.

psd1• 6 hours ago

this Dune/Blade Runner future we keep trying to attain

That's grossly inaccurate. We are speedrunning a William Gibson future.

otabdeveloper42• 10 hours ago

The cost of LLM inference is orders of magnitude more than the typical ad CPM.

Not even "native ads" embedded in LLM output can offset the difference.

skeeter20202• 9 hours ago

ChatGPT is way above typical CPM, maybe $60-$100. That puts it in the same category as premium YT verticals. If they can sell enough at this price point it would make a big impact, but I'm super-doubtful they can do that; campaigns are basically blind at this stage, and I would not be surprised if this was intentional.

kelvinjps10• 9 hours ago

But it what's the solution to free services? There is many people that can't afford to have to pay for search, emails, maps. On top of paying for accessing content, micro transactions. For Internet related companies what if the country the person is from, doesn't have access to the financial system of the country that company is operating from.

I think It might be better to regulate them than remove them. Or to find a solution for people that can't access it.

(Another is higher tiers, free for personal users etc)

I hate ads but I also think about what's the alternative

nugator• 6 hours ago

If it's like the commercials in the movie the Truman show I think this could be a nightmare.

I think it all boils down to how (if?) this will be transparent to the user.

If the response suggests a sponsored product/service to the user it could either be the specific product/service that ChatGPT is biased to suggest or the whole idea of using a product/service. As a user I would like to know both of these biases to understand that using any product/service for my need might not even be the best thing.

naikrovek• 8 hours ago

The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that a society that bans ads is a healthier, more robust society

100% agree. It's the only way things don't go south.

fny• 7 hours ago

From the article, it looks like ads are separate from answers in a clearly delineated way. It's not quite as nefarious as what you're suggesting. Frankly, I'm surprised.

This is only round one however, and I could see a future where they offer more "intimate" experiences. At least that's not today.

electroglyph• 14 hours ago

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

aiiotnoodle• 14 hours ago

I give it less than a year before the ad is at the top.

XCSme3• 14 hours ago

And two years before it's just silently plugging the product. And it will be considered "increased brand exposure", not ads...

XCSme3• 13 hours ago

They heavily boosted the amount of users in the past months (I myself got a business account because they had $1k free credits, and a personal one because of all the resets they give).

Now they are trying to quickly boost revenue with ads.

Next, IPO?

geoelkh• 13 hours ago

For advertisers, did anyone try it? Does it get installs? Cheap or expensive?

cube00• 13 hours ago

According to the ads manager UI, unless I'm willing to allow up to $3 a click I'm warned "my bid may be too low to deliver reliably".

Considering I'm paying 20 cents per click elsewhere, this could get real expensive, real fast.

My_Name• 13 hours ago

"Consumers are increasingly turning to platforms like ChatGPT to research and make decisions because traditional searches have been ruined by advertising, so it’s important that we show up to ruin those moments as well"

shantnutiwari• 13 hours ago

I had a tell hn sometime ago when I pointed this out: you see ads even on lower paid options. My thinking is: if I have a lower tier- limit my credits, but dont show me ads as I am still paying you. But OpenAi disagreed so I cancelled.

I wonder if we can do that thing that guy did on Facebook a long time ago-- buy an ad showing how much you are being tracked, something like "Hey user X, we know you are based in london, uk and we know you are age range XX etc etc"

patrickdet• 12 hours ago

Here comes the enshittification

amarant2• 12 hours ago

Welp, that's one less competitor in the AI race I guess!

r0b05• 12 hours ago

I never thought it would actually come to this, but here we are.

wartywhoa23• 11 hours ago

But of course everyone believed that this time, this time a corporation would behave differently?

khurs4• 10 hours ago

I just clicked on an ad in ChatGPT mobile app.

As per the press release, it opens up a screen which takes up 90% showing the new site.

It's not a good browsing experience, as it's not a 100% full screen so smaller on an already small phone screen. Couldn't see a 'open in browser' option.

ericpauley• 10 hours ago

I wish there were a way to universally ban these embedded browser flows. Aside from oauth they serve no use to the end user and are primarily designed to inflate company engagement numbers. Nearly every time I end up in one and forget to click through to browser I regret it.

Apple, why do you allow companies to abuse your customers like this?

efitz• 10 hours ago

Well hopefully we will see the LLMs come up with some epic segues from responses into ads. I foresee a new Reddit channel.

baalimago• 10 hours ago

I don't see how this can be any worse than normal ads. Much like how Truman finds his wife Meryl odd with her strange injections of products, the ads will become obnoxious and opaque as well. Another example is how YouTubers often embed their ads into the videos themselves, which routinely gets skipped by users as second nature (check the "most played section" on timeline to see bumps where ads end).

If I ask for deep research on which running shoes to get, it's the comparison of products I'm after. Why is A better than B, etc? I don't see how adds could come into that scope either, unless ChatGPT somehow is lying (which would make me swap to a better non-hallucinating model).

If I ask "who is the most influential Swedish poet" and ChatGPT starts blabbering about some book-company who sells books from that author: okay, maybe I do want to buy it.

So: what's the problem?

skeeter20202• 9 hours ago

ChatGPT ads are sold as being super-well positioned based on the detailed context of the chat session but I have seen very little evidence of this, or perhaps their ad inventory is so small they can't find anything relevant to display for a session. Regardless they are ridiculously expensive, approaching what is charged for NFL broadcasts to huge, captive audiences without providing any of the data needed to assess effectiveness and ROI.

darkstarsys• 9 hours ago

The enshittification begins.

esmiz• 9 hours ago

Not available in Spain yet.

yoaviram• 9 hours ago

Their cookies consent is not clickable on Firefox. What a s*t show. Every single privacy-related promise from OpenAI is theatre.

hamburgererror2• 8 hours ago

It's funny how much they just couldn't resist their inextinguishable thirst for money.

shgidish2• 8 hours ago

is it new?

shgidish2• 8 hours ago

is this news?

masonwan• 8 hours ago

Why would people still use ChatGPT?

It's barely free, not that reliable, not the most trustworthy, and now they are popping ads right on my face.

Either spending a good money on the best one, or using the open source models seem to be the future.

projectileboy• 7 hours ago

It is impossible to overstate how utterly horrible and dystopian this is. I have not been one to reject AI, but they seem hell-bent on driving me to that conclusion.

IAmGraydon• 7 hours ago

If the output of an LLM can be influenced by the highest bidders, it’s no longer useful to me.

Zenst• 6 hours ago

My ironic humour hopes https://www.roba-kids.com/en/collections/sandpit appears as an advert with them.

hansonkd• 6 hours ago

I'm kind of surprised how bare bones the ad manager is.

adrianwaj• 5 hours ago

Nine months ago I suggested an advertising alternative route to monetization - a crypto rollout with pre-mine. [1] What I overlooked was an effective way to onboard. But with the recent news: "Telegram to Launch Native Non-Custodial Gram Wallet for 1B Users" [2] I am thinking the key is to use a chat app. How? Combine AI chat interaction with general chat messaging. Currently "None of these platforms function like traditional messaging tools (such as WhatsApp, Slack, or iMessage) where you can send direct text messages to another person." [3]

Well, obviously that would have to change. I think really nailing a great P2P chat app would be a game changer that keeps things local-first. You should be able to talk to one or more AI models with it. There's still a lot of demand [4] for anonymous chat and that would be a great place to start too. I personally think chat shouldn't even need its own app - it should all take place in the browser.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45663913

[2] https://www.livebitcoinnews.com/telegram-to-launch-native-no...

[3] https://share.gemini.google/lkVcBamQm6ZJ

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48980167

martokus• 4 hours ago

I've been running ads in ChatGPT for about a month now. From an advertiser perspective performance is closer to social media and than to Google Search ads. Organic ChatGPT traffic comes super engaged and spends a ton of times on the website and does convert. Paid ChatGPT traffic is miles apart, quite disengaged. The platform is bare bones, same goes for reporting. Targeting is a bit of a black box and the results seem to reflect that.

sharts• 2 hours ago

Welp, back to enshitification as much as possible.

kiriberty• 1 hour ago

It is about the time

Advertise in ChatGPT

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