My life insurance broker got £1k in commission, I think my mortgage broker got roughly the same. I’d gladly let OpenAI take the commission if ChatGPT could get me better deals.
t. perplexity ai
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/08/opena...
In other words, yes GPT-X might work well enough for most people, but the newer demo for ShinyNewModelZ is going to pull customers of GPT-X's in regardless of both fulfilling the customer needs. There is a persistent need for advancement (or at least marketing that indicates as much) in order to have positive numbers at the end of the churn cycle.
I have major doubts that can be done without trying to push features or SOTA models, without just straight lying or deception.
I didn't understand how bad it was until this weekend when I sat down and tried GPT-5, first without the thinking mode and then with the thinking mode, and it misunderstood sentences, generated crazy things, lost track of everything-- completely beyond how bad I thought it could possibly be.
I've fiddled with stories because I saw that LLMs had trouble, but I did not understand that this was where we were in NLP. At first I couldn't even fully believe it because the things don't fail to follow instructions when you talk about programming.
This extends to analyzing discussions. It simply misunderstands what people say. If you try to do this kind of thing you will realise the degree to which these things are just sequence models, with no ability to think, with really short attention spans and no ability to operate in a context. I experimented with stories set in established contexts, and the model repeatedly generated things that were impossible in those contexts.
When you do this kind of thing their character as sequence models that do not really integrate things from different sequences becomes apparent.
Sure, those models are cheaper, but we also don’t really know how an ecosystem with a stale LLM and up to date RAG would behave once context drifts sufficiently, because no one is solving that problem at the moment.
In fact it's an unavoidable solution. There is no future for OpenAI that doesn't involve a gigantic, highly lucrative ad network attached to ChatGPT.
One of the dumbest things in tech at present is OpenAI not having already deployed this. It's an attitude they can't actually afford to maintain much longer.
Ads are a hyper margin product that are very well understood at this juncture, with numerous very large ad platforms. Meta has a soon to be $200 billion per year ad system. There's no reason ChatGPT can't be a $20+ billion per year ad system (and likely far beyond that).
Their path to profitability is very straight-forward. It's practically turn-key. They would have to be the biggest fools in tech history to not flip that switch, thinking they can just fund-raise their way magically indefinitely. The AI spending bubble will explode in 2026-2027, sharply curtailing the party; it'd be better for OpenAI if they quickly get ahead of that (their valuation will not hold up in a negative environment).
As much as I don't want ads infiltrating this, it's inevitable and I agree. OpenAI could seriously put a dent into Google's ad monopoly here, Altman would be an absolute idiot to not take advantage of their position and do it.
If they don't, Google certainly will, as will Meta, and Microsoft.
I wonder if their plan for the weird Sora 2 social network thing is ads.
Investors are going to want to see some returns..eventually. They can't rely on daddy Microsoft forever either, now with MS exploring Claude for Copilot they seem to have soured a bit on OpenAI.
But there will still be thousands of screens everywhere running nonstop ads for things that will never sell because nobody has a job or any money.
Fascist corporatism will throw them in for whatever Intel rescue plan Nvidia is forced to participate in. If the midterms flip congress or if we have another presidential election, maybe something will change.
I'd say it's a bit of a Hail Mary and could go either way, but that's as an outsider looking in. Who really knows?
$4.3B in revenue is tremendous.
What are you comparing them to?
It’s so easy for people to shout bubble on the internet without actually putting their own money on the line. Talk is cheap - it doesn’t matter how many times you say it, I think you don’t have conviction if you’re not willing to put your own skin in the game. (Which is fine, you don’t have to put your money on the line. But it just annoys me when everyone cries “bubble” from the sidelines without actually getting in the ring.)
After all, “a bubble is just a bull market you don’t have a position in.”
In the same way that my elderly grandmother binge watches CNN to have something to worry about.
But the commenter I responded to DID care about the stock market, despite your attempt to grandstand.
And my point was, and still is, if you really believe it’s a bubble and you don’t actually have a short position, then you don’t actually believe it’s a bubble deep down.
Talk is cheap - let’s see your positions.
It would be like saying “I’ve got this great idea for a company, I’m sure it would do really well, but I don’t believe it enough to actually start a company.”
Ok, then what does that actually say about your belief in your idea?
The statistically correct play is therefore not to do this (and just keep buying).
You’ve just said, “I think something will go down at some point.” Which… like… sure, but in a pointlessly trivial way? Even a broken clock is right eventually?
That’s not “identifying a bubble” that’s boring dinner small talk. “Wow, this Bitcoin thing is such a bubble huh!” “Yeah, sure is crazy!”
And even more so, if you’re long into something you call a bubble, that by definition says either you don’t think it’s that much of a bubble, huh? Or you’re a goon for betting on something you believe is all hot air?