Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out | Hacker News Reader

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

bleepingcomputer.com

854 pointsfleahunter737 comments

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

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

Open articleView on HN

- ~1 billion users in just 3 years

- Extremely personal data on users

- Novel way of introducing and learning more about sponsored products

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why would OpenAI want to use and pay for any of Microsoft's products unless mandated by a contract?

OpenAI has the talent to roll out and run their own ad product that is better and more efficient. Why pay Microsoft for a core part of their (future) business?

P.S. In case you haven't noticed, OpenAI demos are done on Macbooks. Microsoft could not even get them to use Windows.

Microsoft runs many of their demos on MacBooks. You missed the memo that Windows OS is no longer their bread and butter. Go check their GH OSS projects (e.g. .NET) and all of them have have shell scripts alongside PowerShell.

I'm betting that they can.

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

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

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

They can also suggest chat topics. Like how Reddit ads are meant to look like threads. "Frustrated with food baked on dishes? Let's chat about it! (sponsored)"

But the missing part is "we know they need this!" but they don't have the ad network to have the pixels on the vendor sites to track the conversion (or not for remarketing!). They only have half (at most) of the picture. This is why they tried to create a browser (remember that? Nope me neither) to try and get the full picture.

Advertisers are accustomed to pay for conversions now. If you can't track it, you cant prove it happened.

Open ai will need to spin up the entire infrastructure (Inc sales teams, support teams, servers etc) to run the ad network. Not impossible but it is a big lift and they're already burning money.

Their best bet is probably to just sign up for selling their ad space with Google, like all the other apps and websites do

I think the amount of money they’re burning on their operations would make that organizational lift a drop in the bucket. A few dozen annual 6 figure salaries? A few hundred? A bunch of normal CPU-based AWS services? They must spend 10 million per day on their current operating expenses.

Google and Meta are many thousands of sales people, managers, engineers, SREs, HR, masseuses etc. If you want to scale to Meta or Goog scale when doing ads you won't be able to do it with a few dozen people. Just sales will be hundreds or thousands spread across all the major territories

what's with all the naysaying? It's HN in 2025 and you think a company the size of OpenAI can't afford to build ads?

Except OpenAI’s value is overinflated by an economic bubble. They don’t have the manpower or resources to effectively implement an ad network on the scale they’d need to become profitable. Why are you insisting we keep the conversation positive?

see you in 5 years

They have an app millions of people use that they can directly inject ads into. What makes you think this couldn't make money?

> What makes you think this couldn't make money?

Because advertisers will use Gemini instead.

Advertisers already have established relationships and business processes with Google account managers.

Why bother starting from scratch with a new account manager at OpenAI? Will OpenAI even last?

At least Google has been around a while. Seems like a safer investment from point of view of advertiser.

Just like people said of a bunch of saas companies going up against Oracle, IBM, etc. 20 years ago.

I honestly don’t think open ai has the maturity or discipline for long-term viability, but their operating expenses for a week would eclipse the annual payroll required to hire a large corporate infrastructure that may be the best shot they have at transitioning from a company operating on hope and buzz to one that actually makes a few bucks. I’ll eat my hat if they become the next Google, but they didn’t pull the playbook out of thin air.

I don't think it is impossible, but suggesting you can go from zero to competing with Google and Facebook with a few dozen people is wildly underestimating the requirements. Yes a few dozen engineers could probably build and support the infrastructure to run it, but that is not the hard part. The hard part is the sales, is the compliance, the account management, is the billing system and inevitable snafus, is the first second and third line of tech support, the wining-and-dining, the networking, the AdChoices stuff, the sales calls and pitches, the conversion tracking, the legal arguments and contracts, the gearing up for the clients' big holiday campaigns, the management and general feeding and watering of those hundreds and thousands of people etc as a business, and then also building and supporting the self-serve platform for all the advertisers with credit cards but who are too small to get to talk to real sales people (and how do you support and service those clients too? Billing, reporting, charge backs, stolen cards, fraud, bad ads, more fraud etc - AI and automation can do some of this yes, but it's not like the market leaders aren't already doing this)

When you're working in ads, you don't have 1 person that looks after multiple huge clients.

If you have a Coke or a Nike or a McDonalds or an Apple etc spending 10s/100s of millions in ad spend on your platform, you have a dedicated whole team of 3 or 4 or 5 or more people (sales and dedicated tech support, plus managers etc) per client who exist solely to make it easy for that client to run ads on your platform, and make sure they're happy and getting results. So just those 4 clients you are probably looking at 20+ people just in sales/after-sales supporting 100+mil of ad spend, and that is before you need to support agencies like WPP et al that are often teams of 10 to 15 or more. And if a client doesn't think they're getting the results they need or the treatment they need, they'll take their ad spend elsewhere - this is why you have multiple sales people and hands-on tech people swarming the big spenders to keep them happy and keep them spending. They won't be happy talking to an AI chat bot when their Thanksgiving campaign has gone offline and no one knows why - they'll want their dedicated person to help them get back online ASAP.

It is a huge undertaking to pivot to become a large-scale ad network. Not saying it is impossible, but it is not quick nor easy by any stretch, and should not be underestimated.

Genuinely their best bet is to start by selling ad slots via Google (and you can bet there will be a team of 10+ sales and tech support ready to support them exclusively within a few days if they do) while they build their own capability (if at all). Google ads will have better tracking and targeting and so better conversions than Open ai could do themselves due to the network effect of Google's existing online properties (e.g. YouTube, Search, Play etc), partner ad network, browser, and mobile dominance (despite what people on HN think, the "normal" people online do click on ads and retargetting (i.e. ads following you around) does get results for advertisers. This is why Google and Facebook are printing money).

I also forgot to point out that Open ai is not "disrupting" some stuffy old ad company by bringing AI to the ads business to revolutionise and automate it. They're not going to get AI to do all the hard work and put everyone else out of business because they're the only ones using AI.

They are competing directly against their biggest AI competitor who has better AI models than them (at the moment at least) which are SOTA, AND also has an existing huge ad business and sales force. Not to mention Google is currently cramming AI into every single one of their products and serving to billions of people already, and own their entire business from silicon up through to the properties people are advertising on.

OpenAI are coming from behind both in their AI tech, their DAU count, and in their advertising business (or rather lack of it). And they're doing this while actually renting hardware from Google Cloud to do it too!

Not impossible for them to do this of course, but it is a big lift and will take years. They might do it though, but I think odds are they'll fizzle out before then (either run out of money, enshitification, or simply fall to the back of the pack)

People who say "Google are toast" just don't understand the scale of the ads business (and the markets seem to agree that goog is insurmountable, at least for now)

I love the “making 10s of billions of dollars going up against the most cutthroat companies in the world is easy!”

God, the irony if they were using Google on the backend for advertising...

They're already using Google for renting compute. As are Anthropic.

Google Ads’ admin console is basically a dark pattern app built to consume your advertising budget with no effect.

OpenAI just has to be transparent and they’ll have 100% of our funding.

Same

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

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

Every single one of those companies have ridiculously low marginal cost per request compared to ChatGPT and much lower fixed costs and continued development costs.

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

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

Because Apple iPhone users have no alternative.

But Google Gemini is right there for Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Workspace users.

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

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

Oh yeah and on top of that these companies like WPP hate the fact that Google and Facebook refuse to share more information with them. They can't wait to jump ship.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I agree 100% with you.

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

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

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

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

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

normal people don't have the same expectations as you when it comes to how much a given service should know about them, is the thing

"how did X know whose profile you saw on Y service"

"the computer knows everything i do on the computer, what do you mean"

This isn’t backed by the constant conspiracy theories about voice assistants listening to everything you say and then farming that off to third party ad providers so that you see ads for things you’ve been discussing.

People moan about that but it doesn’t change their consumer habits at all.

I’m not certain about that, but it’s all very abstract to people. It is also tied to their phones for most people which they’d never give up anyway.

The more direct connection on something they don’t (yet) value as much as they value their phones might be a bridge too far.

An LLM feels like a person to a lot of people. It might be surprisingly difficult to avoid people feeling betrayed or creeped out by this “person”. No one has ever done this before and it doesn’t seem easy or like a straightforward win.

I think most people know it’s not actually true.

It is odd how often I hear even technically people defend the idea that Instagram is listening to everything they say even while the phone is locked, sending it to Meta, and then influencing their ad delivery. You have to either have very little understanding of mobile apps and reverse engineering to believe that this is happening but nobody has been able to find proof yet.

It’s right up there with people who believe conspiracies about everyday things like chemtrails. If you really though chemtrails were disbursing toxic mind control chemicals (or whatever they’re supposed to be this week) then you’d be going to great lengths to breathe only purified air and relocate to another location with fewer flight paths. Yet the chemtrail conspiracy theorists don’t change their behavior. They just like complaining and being angry, and it’s something they can bond with other angry complainers about.

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

Most people I know don't even know if it's ChatGPT or ChatTPG or ChatPGT or ChatGTP.

Given enough evidence of this, some plucky startup can get the trademark invalidated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark

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

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

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

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

Hard disagree. If anything brand recognition is more important for technically illiterate.

> In the same way that every 90s mom called a video game console a "Nintendo"

And this proves that point. Nintendo sales in the 1990s crushed the competitors numbers.

...and a decade later they were close to bankruptcy.

Ok? Because of their brand recognition?

Despite

> Hard disagree. If anything brand recognition is more important for technically illiterate.

No, the tech-illiterate gravitate towards the path of least resistance, which just means the platform defaults. OpenAI doesn't control the platform, which means they've already lost to Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Don't build your castle in someone else's kingdom.

> And this proves that point. Nintendo sales in the 1990s crushed the competitors numbers.

Clearly you know nothing about the history of the console business, because Sony absolutely annihilated Nintendo in the home console market for the decade between 1995 and 2005, despite Nintendo's brand strength.

> No, the tech-illiterate gravitate towards the path of least resistance, which just means the platform defaults.

The path of least resistance is by way of brand recognition.

> OpenAI doesn't control the platform

OpenAI has 800mm MAUs on their own platform that they control, assuming we trust their reporting. They own chat.com, all of our grandmothers know ChatGPT - they don't know Gemini...I'm not even sure how OpenAI could have lost to Apple or Microsoft in the AI race. Those are nonsensical comparisons.

> Sony absolutely annihilated Nintendo in the home console market for the decade between 1995 and 2005

Yes you're right. If we shift the comparison window by a full 50% the numbers do favor Sony.

My point is not that OpenAI is infallible or that a competitor couldn't also be successful. Only that brand recognition is a legitimate and important factor.

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

Who cares if it took 140 or 3 years to get brand recognition. ChatGPT is also everywhere if you have an Internet connection.

There’s a difference between something that has existed for a few years that lots of people have heard of, and something that people have been buying their entire lives, and that their grandparents also bought for their entire lives. As to distribution—the internet certainly makes it logistically easier to get your product to consumers, but an infinitely large store shelf still means you’re competing for consumer attention, and the big players already have that attention for their existing successful products.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is wishful thinking.

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

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

If there is a $10k monthly business critical service, are ChatGPT ads going to sway you?

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

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

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

In my head, it'll be like the high pressure timeshare sales pitches or the dreaded car sales transactions, where they pull out all the tricks to convince you to buy something you don't actually want or need, regardless of whether you can afford it.

“That’s a great point about your finances. But did you know this company offers credit to someone in your position for only this low interest? I can apply on your behalf if you just sign this statement”

“We’ll finish up your feature soon. In the meantime, have you considered a timeshare in Vegas?”

The code will come out just fine, so your atrophied brain will remain dependent on OliCorp's parasocial prosthesis for strenuous thinking, dissolving wariness in experiences of super productivity. Then elsewhere, when plausible, OliCorp will progressively nudge you in some direction sold as predefined weight bonus to third party customers. You won't even notice and really, isn't it a fair price for all that productivity? Of course, AI isn't always right yet, but I'd say in a very practical 95% of cases your goals and expectations are in alignment with OliCorp AI.

Don't forget, every website and service monetized automated access as a consequence of the AI scraping boom and made unauthorized web-indexing impossible, traditional search dried off. And when OliCorp finally turned off access to their legacy index monopoly in favor of AI interfacing, you really have no choice but to trust your friendly chat buddy. Who else are you gonna ask for the fix? Former friends, your family or neighbors? People you've grown to hate because sympathetic local clustering is discouraged through four color divisive information shaping. I mean, those guys really are at fault for your lack of self-efficacy, the hate is warranted. And you're too tired to bother anyway.

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

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

I’m quite happy with my offline AI solution:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845049

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

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

Stripe already built this out and it’s in ChatGPT. Some merchants let you buy directly in the chat interface, and payment credentials are shared through the chat interface to the store (securely, etc)

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

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

I think getting a model to do this without hurting alignment significantly will be very difficult.

eh, maybe for the super vibey tools. I can't imagine anyone who wants to maintain the trust of devs would do this, they would so quickly pivot to something else, its not like the general public, where AI == chatgpt in their mind.

Gemini kind of already does this. I use builder in AI studio and it tends to use Gemini in places where other solutions make more sense. Last week I needed users to input their address, validate it, and geo code it. Rather than using google maps APIs (way cheaper, free tier) it used Gemini to do it.

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

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

> Sure, but you need to adopt this dependency and this cloud service.

THIS.

Asked to make an app using AWS? “I can do that, but have you considered the lower lifetime costs of using Azure? I can generate a configuration for AWS, Azure, or produce a price comparison table. Let me know which you prefer.”

Absolutely no business with any real money is going to be swayed to use one cloud provider over the other based on one vibe coded app.

There is so much other stuff that goes into why business make decisions about any large contract. I’m not in cloud sales. But I venture just close enough to the sun not to get burned

That's a nice, sane world that you live in. How can one get there?

AFAIK, one wrong person getting an answer like the OP's is more than enough to force a medium sized (dozens of people) business to migrate.

How many medium size migrations have you done? Its never that easy even if you are just hosting a bunch of VMs. Let alone if you are using any cloud specific services.

I have been involved in a few on the periphery working in cloud consulting (first at AWS itself and now an outside company). I actively avoid the “lift and shifts”. I come in for the “modernize” portion.

https://www.synatic.com/blog/lift-and-shift-vs-modernization

Done? none, I wouldn't do it. Undone after it failed, one, and helped some other people in others.

You are expecting people to act rationally in a way that will succeed. That's not how a lot of places out there operate.

I have been either part of or opted out of well over a dozen - I have a policy of never leading “lift and shifts” (and never staff augmentation).

Once you actually sit down and come up with a project plan with your PMO, a cloud migration is hardly ever worth the effort unless the destination cloud provider is backing up a shit ton of money for not only operational credits but also for internal AWS Professional Services (where I worked when I was inside AWS) or an outside partner to help (current employer).

Hell even certain departments at Amazon would never go through the effort of migrating to AWS from the legacy CDO infrastructure.

The risk of regressions, the refactoring, the retraining, the politics, etc are hardly ever worth it.

> Once you actually sit down and come up with a project plan with your PMO [...] The risk of regressions, the refactoring, the retraining, the politics, etc are hardly ever worth it.

You are entirely correct, of course ... except that much of the management class simply does not care about any of those things.

Not to mention the sizable contingent of engineers will repeatedly get suckered by the pitch of "Just migrate all of your stuff to [shiny new thing] and all of your [reliable old thing] problems will go away" (a.k.a., "engineers with management potential")

> Absolutely no business with any real money is going to be swayed

And what about everyone starting something? Or prototyping? And what if you don't have a choice: pay more or follow our sponsored guidelines?

This is a dangerous road without proper defences both in terms of legislation and policy (and I mean world-wide, world corps = world laws, not having to go to court in every country lol).

Also, end users need to be educated about all this because what is to stop John or Jane from uploading their receipts to GPT to make their taxes and ... oops "did you know you can switch insurance to XYZ" or ... AI browser proactively hiding content competing with their partners ... you looking for a healthcare package? The only one available is from our sponsor. Take it or leave it.

The tax situation already happens now with Intuit owning both Turbo Tax and CreditKarma to get you to sign up for credit cards.

If I were prototyping something and found I could do it cheaper somewhere else, I’m not sure I would be upset. I hate ads just for the bad user experience.

As long as it is clearly an ad and they say they have affiliations. It’s no different than what Google and Amazon does now.

But ironically enough, I was almost about to pay for Overcast years ago even though the author openly admitted that you didn’t get much of anything for it except for supporting him back then.

He then added a non slimy self hosted system to buy ads for other podcasts based on the category of podcast you were listening to at that very second (no tracking). I thought that was a great service.

I think I would actually lean into a tight integration between ChatGPT and something like booking.com[1], AirBNB, GetYourGuide, etc when looking for travel ideas.

[1] Well I personally wouldn’t because I am not as cost conscience as the average traveler and I value the loyalty programs and status of certain hotel chains and Delta airlines. But most travelers don’t and shouldn’t care.

But if they let me put in my loyalty numbers and book directly with Hyatt, Hilton and Delta, hell I might pay more for ChatGPT.

> Absolutely no business with any real money is going to be swayed to use one cloud provider over the other based on one vibe coded app.

Lol. Sweet summer child.

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

this_variable_is_sponsored_by_coinbase = 42

I’m just exaggerating … I hope.

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

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

People talk about LLMs and chatGPT in the same breath.

Just like how people used to say 'google it'

They now say 'look it up on chatGPT'.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Since each chat is virtually independent there’s no switching cost. I’ve moved between Claude and ChatGPT with no cares.

It’s not like Facebook where all my friends stay behind

> Since each chat is virtually independent

That hasn't been true for a while though. Open a new chat tab in ChatGPT and ask it "What do you know about me" to see it in action.

You can turn that off. If you're using LLMs for technical or real world questions, it's nicer for each chat to be a blank slate.

You can also use Temporary Chats for that.

All chat apps look exactly the same and have exactly the same features. The friction is basically non-existent compared to email services, social media, web browsers, &c.

I think it matters to more than you might think. A significant portion of the non-technical ChatGPT userbase get really attached to the model flavor.

The GPT-4o controversy is a good example. People got attached to 4o's emotional and enthusiastic response style. When GPT-5--which was much more terse and practical--rolled out, people got really upset because they were treating ChatGPT as a confident and friend, and were upset when it's personality changed.

In my experience, Gemini and Claude are much more helpful and terse than ChatGPT with less conversational padding. I can imagine that the people who value that conversational padding would have a similar reaction to Gemini or Claude as they did to GPT-5.

Yet, somehow I've been paying $20/month to ChatGPT for years now and I don't use Claude or Gemini even when they're free or have slightly better models.

Oh well if YOU do something then that's that

1 billion users and growing says there are more people like me than not.

Many more people see “AI overviews” everyday with Google being the default search engine on almost every mobile phone outside of China.

I saw it too

weird flex

Wrong ratio.

How many of those care about their own particular history in the first place and what % of those at least actively manage it outside of standard chat interface or even hop providers? I think that % would surprise you.

> The answer is friction.

Yet non-technical users switched from Edge/Safari to Google Chrome.

Because there is no data in a browser.

Even if there is, browsers made it easy to import/export bookmarks and history.

You don't see Instagram willingly giving up all their data on users to Tiktok right?

- Knowing that an alternative exists

- Switching effort

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

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

How many of those will have no issue to learn what it is once the ads become too annoying?

Very good question! 1% ?

You are vastly overestimating people's willingness to deal with bullshit, when the product does not have a real lock in.

It would be incredibly easy to have a company offering their ChatGPT over WhatsApp or iMessage, and get people to start using it instead of an ad-ridden GPT app.

Maybe. But maybe you are vastly overestimating people's willingness to give a fuck, as long as they get what they came for. That is why ads rule.

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

Yet Google Chrome managed to make Safari/Edge irrelevant.

Yeah, not because of browser history export/import, mate. I've never used that feature for any browser.

Not having used anything except for Firefox, I don't have any experience with migrating to different browsers. However, my understanding is that Chrome shows a little pop-up that lets you import from previous browsers rather than relying on the user to do a data export. Correct me if I'm wrong about this.

I suspect that Claude couldn't make an "import from ChatGPT" button because OpenAI would make it difficult, so they'd have to rely on user initiative and technical capability (exporting to JSON and importing from JSON is enough technical friction that the average user won't bother).

Facebook showed a little popup where you could enter your MySpace username and password and continuously import it. Or so I heard - I wasn't there.

Try telling your PM that you want to ignore Safari when you create your website with 60%+ of mobile users in the US using iPhones and globally your most affluent users are on iPhones. Even if they download Chrome for iOS, they are still using WebKit.

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

Just like no one normal would ever switch from internet explorer?

Browsers made it easy to import/export bookmarks and history.

You don't see Instagram willingly giving up all their data on users to Tiktok right?

>No one normal will do that.

Google Chrome did it. They can do it again.

What alternative? Switching requires something what is better 10x

No it doesn't, people switch ISPs and phone plans all the time for on the order of 1x difference.

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

How do you suppose they can do that technically when OpenAI inevitably remove export function?

Doesn’t the GDPR mandate it? I know even AWS had to introduce a one time method of being able to export your data without charge.

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

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

> ChatGPT has mindshare but that's not the same as it being a moat.

Short answer: For a casual user using the chat interface, there is almost no moat.

Long answer: there are either zero or negligible

- switching costs ("would take me weeks to migrate all my files from Google Drive to Dropbox")

- network effects ("can't leave Whatsapp, all my friends are there")

- ecosystem lock-in ("I can't switch from iPhone to Android, my other devices would break (iMessage/iCloud/AirPods))"

Right now AI is pretty much a commodity.

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

Yeah, ChatGPT is dead now.

> Yeah, ChatGPT is dead now.

Not dead yet.

But definitely bleeding.

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

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

How much did their profit grow?

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

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

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

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

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

ChatGPT knows more about my medical than my doctor.

Most people do effectively the same with Google searches.

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

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

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

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

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

Even “AI mode” isn’t mainstream yet, at least in my observation.

“AI summaries” are, but they seem to be powered by an even weaker model.

I am not exactly a great example ( exposure to work model, ollama, local models play ) and I actually liked gemini upon try in google search ( which is amusingly now banned at work ), but the nice quickly fell into not nice, when it started giving me weird pushback on operation paperclip book ( I am assuming chapter discussing tabun triggered something. This is my only real problem with gemini. By comparison, I am not running into guardrails with gpt nearly as often.

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

Fun fact: that's called a generic trademark

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

When you call your product "(Chat) Generative Pretrained Transformer" then I don't think you have a great defense against genericisation.

The legal history of these is interesting, lots of household names have lost their trademarks, and lots of seemingly generic names are still trademarked. This way to the rabbit hole -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...

OpenAI does worse than that. It tried to make GPT a trademark but USPTO rejected it. So it’s not even a trademark let alone a generic trademark.

https://tsdr.uspto.gov/documentviewer?caseId=sn97733259&docI...

> ChatGPT has become the Bandaid or Kleenex of AI

I agree but how many consumers actively purchase Bandaid or Kleenex over cheaper store brands? Becoming a generic term doesn’t always translate to great business. “I’ll put it into chat” could easily end up meaning “enter into Google’s AI prompt” for many people.

Bandaid and Kleenex are commodities. Nobody has a problem using a different, cheaper tissue brand and calling it Kleenex.

Consumers like chat, not chatGPT. Does it do a chat thing? Good enough for consumers. They'll probably call it chatgpt too.

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

That's actually changed a while ago.

Claude? I’d be extremely surprised.

Gemini? As gemini.google.com or as the thoroughly mediocre “AI summaries” on top of Google Search results?

Claude has been aggressively advertising on Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit, and the ads have been much more general use than just the code benefits. They’re definitely no ChatGPT, but they’re not an unknown player.

You're only seeing those ads because the ad algorithm knows you. My family aren't getting Claude ads. They wouldn't know the first thing about it even if it were explained to them.

I saw a Claude ad before watching Wicked for Good in the theater. I was surprised.

From the advertisements I’ve seen, only in the bay area, I honestly wouldn’t know Claude “competed” with ChatGPT unless I knew of it beforehand.

For me that’s mostly because every AI startup is promising the moon on their billboards, lol.

Yeah my father who codes occasionally asked me what the best AI for coding was and he had never even heard of claude so I would be very surprised if your average person knows it.

They absolutely do not. It took getting out of tech a few years to realize how hilariously out of touch we can be in this industry

Yeah, Google should have got gemini.com and gemini.ai before settling on that name, just like Claude. Instead they go to the same crypto service. It would've cleared up some confusion.

Chatgpt is a proprietary eponym[1], like kleenex, or Google for search. That's a relatively strong attractor based on their first mover status. I nevertheless use tissues, and search engines like brave search, sometimes duckduckgo, and claude or openrouter for my LLM models.

I think there are too many good alternatives for Chatgpt to turn the screws too hard on their users, but we'll see where it settles out. As usual, the most vulnerable will be squeezed the hardest (the ignorant and tech feeble). Hopefully competition and some oversight will keep the wolves at bay.

The finance people were chatting about the OpenAI's ad play a while back, glad to see it finally dawning on this crowd.

1. Not all jurisdictions have granted OpenAI the Chatgpt trademark.

I think I hear as many people calling it ChatGBT or ChatGTP as ChatGPT.

"Oh no it's GPT, a Generative Pretrained Transformer shaped into chat responses."

None of which, when searched, will lead the user to Claude, Qwen, et al.

Just OpenAI and ChatGPT.

So what’s your point?

Chachapita

Weirdly, I think Perplexity is getting a lot of mainstream name recognition because of podcasts. All the big slop pods like Rogan, Theo Von, etc are sponsored by Perplexity and the hosts constantly name check it by asking to “look stuff up on Perplexity”. Honestly pretty smart marketing all things considered.

Perplexity sponsors Lewis Hamilton, with a prime spot on his helmet so every on board shot has their logo.

https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/perplexity-x-lewis-hamilt...

Here it is in action

https://youtube.com/shorts/1SqQV5iD__s

How can we even measure whether this has any effect on people? This seems like a lousy way to get the word out.

FTX was his sponsor at Mercedes, and Crowdstrike still is worth them.

Oracle is the biggest logo on the it the Red Bull.

They all must think it is worth it. In guesses they get paddock passes and hospitality to schmooze in Qatar.

Other F1 sponsors - Gemini on McLaren along with FxPro and Android, Kick on Sauber, Crypto.com on trackside hoardings, Atlassian on the Williams, 1Password on the RedBull

Does Rogan even know what Perplexity is or is he just reading ad copy? Has it come up in a podcast? I think he only has ever mentioned Grok and ChatGPT. Dont even think Claude has ever come up. He has done that crap before, just reading an ad without any usage of the product. They all do it.

Disagree.

Wait - are you in California?

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

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

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

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

This is where Tesla has a key advantage. Optimus can walk you to the kitchen to look for a Coke Zero. Google and OpenAI cannot compete with this.

this is one of those HN style comments where business acumen and pertinent sarcasm are wholly indistinguishable .

Thank you for this comment, there is no way I could eloquently explain my read on the comment you're replying to the way you did.

Poe's Law notwithstanding, I find it hard to believe that anyone would think I was making a good faith business acumen observation. If Optimus walks you to the kitchen to get a coke, what's Tesla's business model? Charge by the nanosecond for compute time?

The robot suggested a coke zero because it was paid to by the Coca-Cola Company. Now you'll need to buy more coke zero to replace what you drank.

The business model for Tesla and xAI is actually very simple and superior to OpenAI and Google's. No, this is not satire:

The business model is that his companies are meme stocks, and controlling social media means controlling meme stocks. The business model is also that his companies require corporate socialism, and controlling social media means influencing government policy.

He can talk about AI driving cars, but that's yesterday's news. Today, his business model for AI is to put his finger on the scale and influence society to help him become richer. AI is threatening to replace search, but in a way it's also threatening part of what social media provides, namely the ability to guide discourse at scale.

What's easier: Getting his personal board to give him a trillion dollars, and shoring up public support for that with bias in his AI products and on X? Or building a trillion-dollar business?

Elon Musk's business model for AI is actually quite easy to understand.

And just like all meme stocks and so-called stablecoins, it'll work until it doesn't. The fall will be dramatic.

it won’t be. the same sane argument was that “robotaxi” fall will be dramatic but it wasn’t, Musk, like Trump, is a master at manipulating masses and when thing du jour inevitably fails he’ll just pivot on an earnings call (and on “X” along the way) how “thing du jour is yesterday’s news” and he’s onto “next big thing” - data center on Jupiter that will replace all earth’s data centers or something like that :)

“Master at manipulating masses” is something you have to tell yourself when people you don’t like are highly successful, I guess.

enron was highly successful and so was bernie maddof

Stablecoins is a weird topic to randomly insert there. You want to elaborate on why all stablecoins will fail? This is a pretty ...novel take.

Stable coins fail when there's a run on the bank. Crypto is a wild west of unregulated banking. They have essentially become tools for money laundering and scam enablers, so it might take a while. But eventually the general public will say "no thanks" to a pain in the ass version of regular money. When the rush to the exits happen, the ~7 txn/s limit of Bitcoin will become painful.

What in the world are you talking about? What stablecoins are you talking about operating at 7tx/s? Why do stablecoins fail when there's a 'run on the bank'? You're mixing so many metaphors here that I'm not sure you know what you're talking about at all. This is a stablecoin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_(cryptocurrency). If it isn't permissionless it's not a 'stablecoin' it's an IOU.

Without commenting on the rest of either of your posts, he is talking about how to trade between stable and other coins with that limit on Bitcoin. i.e. He is saying there will be so many people trading away stable coins for Bitcoins (as in Bitcoins not generic stand in for cryptocoin) or other coins that the 7tx/s limit of Bitcoin wallet transfers that it will become a significant factor as Bitcoin is used as a 'reserve currency' for these trades.

Honestly I think capitalism is a farce and I don't even have an emotional response to (b/tr)illionaires getting insane handouts and the stock valuations being insanely overpriced for even the most optimistic projections created by the companies themselves.

Okay rich guys, you get to have infinite free money.

But economists, I beg of you, I am willing to kiss your shoes, but please just admit that this causes inflation, and things aren't getting more expensive 'just because'

But the damned robot keeps drinking all my Coke Zero!

So lets see a $60k robot, lets say the whole economy crashes and money means nothing so they just call it $30k for kicks and giggles. Super cheap power since elon owns all the land now, he can have a tiny nuclear reactor every few house lengths. So $1 a day for power : 30365 / 365 days a year is about $80 a day in the first year, or maybe $40 a day assuming the reactors dont melt down for 2 years. So that is about 2 forced cokes down your throat per hour, 4 if you are a "known criminal" who is being robo-babysat. And that is still zero profit for elon because he has to shuffle all his assets around to the next farce of a fucking company

This is hypothetical, in the spirit of your "economy crashes and money means nothing": if one has zero profit (in dollars) but somehow manages to own all the land and run the country, I'd say he profited a lot. Land and ruling are more tangible than money.

Purchase/lease access to the hardware, subscription for the necessary online connectivity, and microtransactions for each actual use of it (ostensibly because of cloud compute, and that also means surveillance data is captured and monetized).

Sell you a $10,000 upgrade for Full Self Awareness capability then don’t deliver it an change the hardware requirements

Tesla doesn’t need a business model, they’re a meme stock.

Perhaps. I suppose the biggest in history then? $1.4T valuation and 60% of shares held by non-meme institutions (like pension funds, S&P tracking ETFs, etc) when you factor out insiders.

“The market can remain irrational longer than …” - John Maynard Keynes.

Oh, so that’s from him. This is the most state-interventionist economist. The fact that state actors trusted him for their policy since 1929 has more to do with a convergence of interests than rationality.

I’m not surprised that he started the ideology that markets were irrational.

Here’s a similar quote from the great enemy of markets, Benjamin Graham:

“In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.”

Not saying that the stock isn't a meme stock, but my car literally drives itself everywhere. Tesla has many business models.

Only on HN can you say something so obviously true and have a reply section full of uhm ackshuwllys.

I'm still unsure whether you're Musk's fanboy or making a joke.

Users will get used to ensuring a stable supply of said sponsored products, otherwise Optimus may get mad if said product was not in the fridge.

I enjoy the implied threat of being escorted to get a branded drink, and then getting frog marched to the local store if you’re out of supply.

Unless you’re not white, in which case it will spout nazi propaganda at you while starving you by refusing you entry to your fridge.

Let’s not sugar coat the future here.

Every time a tech bro says “Making the world a better place”, someone’s rights are being violated.

Missed opportunity for brands of turkeys

There should be also mentioned brand of the kitchenette supplier, utensils and every food component with Amazon wishlist ready to order.

It wont be that obvious. It will explain to you the dangers of doing your own cooking, the number killed by food poisioning each year, then suggest something from doordash instead. Or it will suggest you eat something faster, like pop tarts, so you can spend less time cooking and more time interacting with your AI buddy.

Drink verification can

You’ll wish it was that and not “a word from our sponsor NordVPN” or scammy crypto investments

It'll be hilarious (in a tragic way) if Google adds ads to Gemini using their existing platform and suddenly it becomes a scammer in the middle of chats.

It was in Black Mirror

there was a black mirror episode regarding something similar

At least those are obvious. Them sneaking ads in that don't look like ads are what I'm more concerned about.

Trueman Show but without expensive dome.

That would be illegal.

I understand that there are a lot of strong opinions and open questions about OpenAI behavior – the amount of vigilantism is quite staggering – but if what they do is found to be clearly illegal by courts around the world, they will have to pay very hefty fines. Disguising ads is one such move. That's just not a winning business.

How much can you bias training to favor certain products before it becomes illegal? That seems like a similar question to "how much linear algebra do you have to do to copyrighted works before copyright doesn't apply anymore".

I wonder if you could pay them to tweak the messaging about your products. So when a user asks: Is drinking Coke everyday good for my health, it starts saying yes because sugar is vital to our survival.

I don't get why we try to make the story so convoluted. They will just declare the ads, as all big platforms do. It's legal and it works. Why would they open themselves up to lawsuits over this? It's just not reasonable.

Every platform can do ads, but only AI platforms have an agent that can semi-intelligently try to convince the consumers of something.

There is too much money beeing made. It's naive to think the courts will stop it.

AirBnB and Uber have demonstrated to all companies that legality doesn’t really matter as long as the numbers are good. It takes regulators an ungodly amount of time to act, and any well-written appeal buys you another 5 years for making political contributions

> That would be illegal.

Yeah, so?

I don't know of any legal rulings or laws, which say not disclosing an embedded ad is illegal. In fact quite the opposite. There are loads and loads of prior such cases, movies, TV shows being an example.

For example every product mention (snapple, oh henry candy bars, jr mints) on Seinfeld was an ad. The skit is written, but any product can be dropped in. If no advertisers are interested, made up names are used.

This has been going on for 100+ years, including radio.

Why would ChatGPT be special?

US and EU law already cover this: undisclosed paid promotion that looks like neutral content is generally illegal (FTC Act + Endorsement Guides in the US, UCPD + DSA in the EU). Product placement in old TV/film is the historical exception, not the rule. An interactive "assistant" secretly steering you because someone paid for it is legally much closer to a deceptive influencer ad than to a Snapple bottle in Seinfeld.

FTC looks like its legislation is from the 70s, yet it is still being done in TV and movies.

Legislation has to be interpreted by courts, and there is surely lots of caselaw. I'd look there, as to why it is OK.

Regardless, is there a ToS you agreed to, that disclosess it will happen? TV doesn't have a ToS nor a movie theater, yet ChatGPT can have one.

One last thing... openai pulled off the largest, unlicensed use of copyright material ever, and is fine.

Meanwhile, TV already has embedded ads...

Their entire business model is currently based on legally questionable practices. I'd argue they wouldn't even exist without massive copyright infringement and utter disregard for software licences.

To my knowledge there is absolutely no legal precedent for one company simply paying to have themselves more heavily weighted in the training data. So it just happens that they show up more in responses then their competitors.

They won't have to sneak in anything. On the contrary. The world is about to be deluged with a monsoon of personalized advertising the likes of which you've only previously imagined. They have the data, they have the buyers, they just so far don't have the means. All this AI hardware has to do something to justify its staggering cost and all that compute, all those datacenters, are going to be devoted to crafting personalized sales pitches. The distilled essence of all of humanity's information is going to sell you boner pulls and hair loss supplements

The enshittification of the LLM has begun and it'll be one of the all time shittiest ones.

I mean if someone is using it for free then this is fine?

We haven't yet evolved to the point where we make all advertising illegal, or owning second homes, etc. ;3

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

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

i'd guess co-pilot or bing. so many people use microsoft edge and office, not to mention windows itself.

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

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

You'll just need to run a small local model to filter out the ads. And they just become another one of those silly arms races between the ad makers and the ad blockers and we all burn more electricity.

but AI will calculate precisely the optimal amount of electricity to waste. so, win win

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

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

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

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

But many of them have failed to achieve the necessary profitability.

For example Snapchat, Reddit etc.

Don't worry, you'll pay for the service and get ads. It's the inevitable end-state of these kinds of services.

Amazon prime video showed us that.

First no ads. Then ad free if you pay extra. Then “ad free” except half the shows have a “this show requires ads” bs and still have ads. Scummy flea ridden advertisers at their core.

Amazon prime video, when you pay for the subscription, half of the content in the content lists are paid. That’s right, you pay for a subscription that suggests PpV content.

And Netflix follows suit. You think you can escape the ads? Think again.

Yes we can. Pirate the stuff, they try to block it? Use a seedbox.

Same goes for AI. This will accelerate options for private hosted AI. Which I guess will happen eventually anyway once cheap hardware gets to a state where you can run X model size at home for cheap.

As always its the people in the know that have the upper hand. The mass user base does not have this knowledge unfortunately. They might just stop using the service if no competitor steps up. We are seeing it with streaming cancellations.

Most people don’t do this and won’t start

Counter point - my kid hates ads. I've worked to keep them away from him and whenever they do sneak through he gets irritated at them.

Mine does too. I make sure there are no ads on the screens, but ads in print are harder to adblock. She hasn't seen too many, yet at four years old could distinguish an ad in a kid's magazine in under a second.

> if ChatGPT goes with ads, Google will follow directly

Eventually. But Google has an absolute ton of places to put ads today and are profitable enough that they can subsidise their AI operation much longer than OpenAI can. If it’s a competitive advantage to remain ad-less they have the ability to do it.

remaining ad-less isn't a competitive advantage for google.. advertisers want the use the best medium available to reach customers and clearly ai chatbots are better suited for that than the old web of google search. openai has reached the critical user base where they could easily replace google for advertisers.

> clearly ai chatbots are better suited for that than the old web of google search

Why is this clearly the case?

if you think about it, the current advertising paradigm infers things about you, from cookies and trackers, from data brokers etc (to show you “relevant” ads.

and things you “like” or “follow” or comment on , or maybe even just making guesses at your race, job, income, sexual orientation, politics etc based on who youre “friends” with.

all of thats on the decline: social media engagement on legacy platforms is down, people are blocking cookies and or javascript. california is making an opt out tool for data brokers (and its going live in a month or two)

people have hours long conversations with chatgpt about things like what theyre working on. so it might know your job, talents, skills. things planning (aspirations) , things you asked it how to cook, or whats wrong with them medically. or maybe theyve dished to it about other personal stuff they thought was 100% in confidence up until now.

then now that its “private”, advertisers cant get backlash for showing ads next to controversial content, or people who are “supposed to be cancelled”. it removes a pressure point for accidentally (or deliberately) displaying their content somewhere its inappropriate or problematic for the brand— by hiding the interaction (and ads) in a “private” chat—

just for starters.

were at a point where publishers are nagging about our popup blockers and having hissy fits or refusing to load the page until their ads are whitelisted. so you know enough people are doing it to impact peoples business models now.

ill personly disable JS altogether for sites that do that but a lot of people just wont return.

its a dying media the way it exists.

so now all these ad providers (meta, google, twitter) are in on AI . and here comes openAI for all three of their lunches.

this just opened my eyes to what is at stake here and why its all being shoved down everyones throats. sure i use them, but i also have local models installed id drop them in an instant for if my chats were used to show me ads.

then just wait for ANY of these two entities to merge and overwhelm your social media feed with the next twenty years of ads full of junk the “AI” learned about you.

The people who use chatGPT or Claude are replacing Google searches with chat conversations. Google already has most of what you're talking about from queries, so they don't need to infer much.

These companies are in on AI because there was a rush to produce the first GAI, which would be immensely valuable. I think we'll see it shortly after the first fully self driving car.

This is the curlftpfs comment all over again

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

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

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

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

> You don't sell investors on an endeavor for 10s of billions of dollars with the endgame being "sell ads".

Google is a multi trillion dollar ads company. So is meta.

Don’t underestimate ads.

Sure, but

> If that was the endgame then there are a lot less resource and capital intensive ways to get to it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you sure? Because most of the world also doesn’t know how “this cloud thing” works…

I think we need global, EU style consumer and data protection constraints before stepping into LLM-powered ads through personal assistants.

I just got back from Thanksgiving holiday with my family. Grade schools kids all the way up to great grandparents up to 81 years old. Engineers, active military, a nurse, high schoolers, two in college. Both coasts represented and Texas. Republicans, Democrats, and in-between. The one and only thing every single person had in common was an utter hatred of AI. And it wasn’t for a lack of understanding of how it will be used.

Hatred of AI won’t stop others from steamrolling them and their jobs using AI.

At this point, I have stopped hoping that LLMs will become vaporware.

I wouldn't bet on LLMs steamrolling jobs of a nurse or military personnel any time soon.

There are so many more reasons to hate AI than just “it is taking my job”. But even if we’re just sticking to that, some people don’t like that it will replace their co workers, neighbors or family members job.

I found myself thinking AI would make the perfect scapegoat for an enterprising political party. There is a lot of animus to tap into there.

How do you reconcile this with:

1. The absolute explosion of AI usage (revealed preferences)

2. The polling on AI, which is mixed and reveals lots of pessimism and fear among a slight majority of Americans, but hardly universal “utter hatred”.

My guess is some combo of: your family is not representative, the hatred was not as universal as it appeared (bandwagon effect), or your own hatred of AI caused you to focus on the like-minded opinions shared and ignore any contrary evidence.

I don’t reconcile it, I was giving an anecdote, one that would seem to easily fit in with your personal summary of some poll you read about.

No, the polls I’ve seen are more like 50/50, not the kind of universal utter hatred you’re portraying here. Color me skeptical.

What polls are you referring to? We did a non-anonymous poll at work which went something like “has using AI tool X made you more productive”, and the results were something like 50/50. If you asked my thanksgiving holiday crowd something like that you might get mixed results. If you asked them is AI an agent of good, do you trust what is happening with AI it would all be negative. People don’t like it.

Just one example: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans...

Again, more pessimistic than not, but hardly universal hatred

That is not anywhere near 50/50 and is your leading example. A charitable summary of the survey is, when pressed, in some areas, people can think of some potential benefits. Why are you skeptical a group of 15 people would all dislike AI? People’s perceptions are based on how it is being employed in the current moment, and they don’t like it, and don’t trust it, which is the attitude included in the /first/ bullet item of the survey you linked: “ Americans are much more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life, with a majority saying they want more control over how AI is used in their lives.”

One of the main points is literally “50% of Americans are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life”. The rest are a mix of either more excited than concerned, or equally excited and concerned. Which again, very different from your story.

This discussion is already way beyond fruitful, was just curious because your anecdote doesn’t match the actual data I’ve seen, and thus far you haven’t actually answered my question, so I’m going to move on.

I'm not really sure what your question is or was. You've just stated your skepticism that my family is negative on AI, which is weird, I was there and you were not. Maybe you are looking at the wrong surveys, or maybe you are conflating people's willingness to use AI with actually being positive and optimistic about it. Example: people use health insurance but you will not find very many that are happy to do it. You will find in the following surveys (and YOURS) that a very small percentage of people are positive about AI the rest actively dislike or at best tolerate it.

https://today.yougov.com/technology/articles/51803-americans...

https://news.gallup.com/poll/648953/americans-express-real-c...

https://news.gallup.com/poll/694688/trust-businesses-improve...

https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/people-dont-trust-ai-tools-use-t...

The part of the world who have experienced genocide because of Meta and their ad model cares.

most of the world not caring doesn't mean it's not bad.

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

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

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

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

> about Netflix doing it, but they did and the world just moved on

I think the main challenge here is that Netflix works around one of many ways to access entertainment. So if one service starts to show recommendations in that limited context of user data they collect - it's still has negative potentials but it's easier to regulate and there are alternatives.

In the case of LLMs, we have service that are aiming to replace both the browser and the search engine. This means ending up in a situation where your entire access to knowledge and the world takes place via "AI". And the result is: ad-infused, tweaked to align with investor priorities, censored by the current politics of wherever the company is based service machinery that's constantly extracting personal information so it can learn better ways to refocus its priorities. I've read and seen a lot of sci-fi and dystopian history novels (actually read, not LLM-summarized for me) to know this is a very end-game kind of situation.

>In the case of LLMs, we have service that are aiming to replace both the browser and the search engine

Most people already experience the internet as an integrated browser+search engine (and often, OS) experience from a single advertising company, Google, and it has been this way for over a decade.

>And the result is: ad-infused, tweaked to align with investor priorities, censored by the current politics of wherever the company is based service machinery that's constantly extracting personal information so it can learn better ways to refocus its priorities.

Exactly.

This is not to say I like this outcome, but how is it not massive hyperbole to invoke apocalyptic sci-fi? I expect we'll plod along much as before: some people fiercely guarding their personal info, some people taking a "privacy is dead anyway" approach, most people seeing personal computers as a means to some particular ends (scrolling social feeds and watching Netflix) that are incompatible with thinking too hard about the privacy and information environment implications.

Apocalyptic scifi isn't the same as dystopian scifi. Some of the billionaires backing AI literally have dystopian scifi as a goal, they just intend to do it better so that it doesn't seem so bad.

I only connect my smartphone to data about three or four times a year, and then only to update some apps or check on an internet outage. It is becoming more difficult to do this as the alternatives to a connected smartphone disappear. The same will become true with the rest of personal info (such as biometrics). More and more the only alternatives will be your latter two.

Netflix never introduced ads in the ad free service. They introduced a new lower tier price with ads that if you were an existing customer, you were none the wiser.

And then increased prices so that the ad-based one is close to what the ad-free one was 2 years earlier.

But yeah, they didn't migrate existing customers and kept the no-ads option. Those are relevant.

Unlike Amazon Prime Video…

> They introduced a new lower tier price with ads that if you were an existing customer, you were none the wiser.

You're right that I didn't experience them myself, but my data here are (1) Netflix evidently getting a lot of takers and making a lot of money from people using this new with ads tier, and (2) the lack of any sustained negative outcry against Netflix after the first news cycle or two.

So I'm intending to rely on that rather than my own experience. OpenAI has any number of permutations of ways to include ads, including a Netflix style cheaper paid tier, so I don't necessarily think a distinction holds on that basis, though you may be right in the end: it's more intuitive to think OpenAI would put them in the free version. Though it's possible the Netflix example is teachable in this case regardless.

Netflix has proprietary content among the licensed content.

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

That was just to set the trap. Start off with a trustable label, then rugpull.

Also appeal to investors. Nobody would give tons of money to upstart which goal is to generate text porn, generated TikTok slop and make some needy teens suicide just to compete with Google Ads.

Selling big AGI dream that will literally make winner take it all is much more desirable.

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

It’s not that they don’t care - the current administration is targeting people that they specifically don’t like.

And Trump has a cult of personality where many Republican politicians are literally afraid for their lives if they stand against him because they get death threats.

Romney said other Republican politicians won’t stand against Trump because they can’t afford security like he can. Majorie Green Taylor said her family has started getting death threats and the Indiana legislators who were first opposed to redistricting are now holding a vote because they also got death threats

This has echos of “First They Came” [0]. The current status quo begs a question that must have been asked in the time it was written: at what point does it have become morally acceptable for citizens to rise up and overthrow a violent government?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came?wprov=sfti1#

The current dynamic IS based on the new gestapo thinking they're "rising up and overthrowing a violent government", due to a propaganda bubble thirty years in the making. Where do you think "ICE" is getting all of these new recruits from? The red state militias that have been seething about the slow creep of bureaucratic authoritarianism, now deputized and told they get to use their weapons to attack the other tribe. Which is also why said militias are silent now that it's actually time to defend our country from fascists - they are the fascists. Propaganda is a hell of a drug.

So we agree, we shouldn't let AI companies mix their products with government or ad-inspired insights, right?

You seem to be stating this like I said something that might imply otherwise, but I can't figure it out even seeing you've got the GGGP comment. This thread kind of went off on a tangent that isn't directly addressing your original point.

But to hopefully answer your question - yes I'm in favor of wholesale importing the GDPR as-written into US law and letting the courts sort it out (sidestepping the corruption^Wlobbying process wherein corpos would make "small" edits that effectively gimp it with loopholes). I'm also in favor of antitrust enforcement against companies that anticompetitively bundle software with hardware and/or services - ie people should be able to choose software which doesn't have ads, rather than being coerced by the pressure of network effects. And if neither if those were enough to stamp out the consumer surveillance industry (aka "Big Tech") as we know it, then I'd support directly banning personalized advertising.

(I would support directly curtailing government from abusing commercial surveillance databases as well, but I don't see a straightforward meta-way to prevent that besides drastically shrinking the commercial databases to begin with)

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

I consider the latter unlikely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes and there are layers. Remember when google ads had yellow backgrounds? I'm sure OpenAI will find a way to do ads "ethically"... for a while, until people get comfortable, and that's when they will start to make ChatGPT increasingly manipulative.

Gotta make that line go up and to the right!

> 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

Can anyone explain to me what ChatGPT does that traps people? I get the value as tools, I like using copilot, but ChatGPT doesn't offer me value that any other LLM can't. Given that everyone is quickly rolling "AI" into their own stuff, I don't see what's ChatGPT's killer app. If anything, I think Gemini is better positioned to capture the general user market.

They make it a habit to use them, by offloading that part of their thinking/process to them. It’s similar to Google Maps, or even Google itself.

When was the last time you went to an actual physical library, for instance? Or pulled out a paper map?

Gemini is a competitor, yes. But most people still go to Google at this point, even if there are a ton of competitors.

That is what the race is about (in large part), who can become ‘the norm’.

> Gemini is a competitor, yes. But most people still go to Google at this point, even if there are a ton of competitors.

Yeah, that's my point. If Google is good enough I don't think people are going to want to do those extra steps, just as in your google maps example. There might be better services out there, but google maps are just too convenient.

> When was the last time you went to an actual physical library

My eyesight is making paper books harder and harder to read, so I don't go to libraries and bookstores as much as I used to. But I think libraries are still relatively popular with families, because they're sites of various community activities as well as safe, quiet places to let kids roam and entertain themselves while the parents are nearby.

When I was a kid, my parents went to the library much more often than they do now, because they were taking me and my sister there. And then we would all get books before we came home.

Not saying you're entirely wrong, but there's a significant part of this that is "changing rhythms of life as we age", not just "changing times".

It used to be, people went to the library to look things up, and as a primary source for finding information they needed. Not just as a community center.

That is my point.

I also wouldn't underestimate Google's ability to nudge regular users towards whichever AI surface they want to promote. My highly non-technical mom recently told me she started using Google's "AI Mode" or whatever it's called for most of her searches (she says she likes how it can search/compare multiple sites for browsing house listings and stuff).

She doesn't really install apps and never felt a need to learn a new tool like "ChatGPT" but the transition from regular Google search to "AI Search" felt really natural and also made it easy to switch back to regular search if it wasn't useful for specific types of searches.

It definitely reduces cognitive load for an average user not needing to switch between multiple apps/websites to lookup hours/reviews via Google Maps, search for "facebook.com" to navigate to a site and now run AI searches all in the same familiar places on her phone. So I think Google is still pretty "sticky" despite ChatGPT being a buzzword everyone hears now that they caught up to OpenAI in terms of model capability/features.

The branding is so strong and it works well enough (I’d say, according to the perception of most people) that it’s just the first “obvious” choice.

Akin to nobody getting fired for choosing AWS, nobody would think poorly of you using ChatGPT.

I don’t think Claude has that same presence yet.

Google has a reputation for being a risk to develop with, and I think they flopped on marketing for general users. It’s hard to compete with “ChatGPT” where there’s a perceived call to action right in the name; You don’t really know what Gemini is for until it’s explained.

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

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

Highly specific fields? They are trying to get you to reach for ai when an emailed “ok, thanks” would do. They want you to lose your ability to write and formulate thoughts without the tool. Then it is really over. That is the golden goose. Not a couple data scientists.

> it’s essentially an admission of failure

A multibillion dollar failure is fine by investors. Altman hasn’t been peddling the AGI BS to them. That’s aimed at the public and policymakers.

Is a trillion dollar failure okay with investors?

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

Why would they need ads on API though, API is paid usage. They just need a few years of scaling for it to be profitable. Some models are already a net profit on API usage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the ads can be blended seamlessly into generated content.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> the moment AI has ads, I’m out

HN users run adblockers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The problem is that inference is a whole different ballgame in terms of costs compared to a traditional SaaS model where each extra customer adds near zero in cost.

They may make it work but OpenAI is more akin to a traditional high revenue low profit business like for example a grocery store.

Thats why we are seeing the explosion of extra tools to try lock in business for higher value use cases and not fight on the margin.

In the UK, £1 of every £3 spent on groceries is in Tesco supermarket.

They have just under 7% gross margin on £70bn of revenue.

OpenAI are going to need to sell a lot of ads to pay that $300bn bill they have coming.

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

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

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

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

> how strong of a moat there actually is for ChatGPT.

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

it could just have a section called

- Ad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fair enough, I haven’t updated my assumptions in quite a while.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Microsoft is using them in order to be better positioned than other big players, and they succeeded, even if Google is now starting to catch up. They can withdraw their support when and how they see fit, own exclusive IP rights to OpenAI's models and the hardware is their own anyway. They only lack the researchers, but they'll then be on the market.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dont forget to call it progress.

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

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

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

I’m curious how that intimate relationship evolves once ads are in play.

Wait we don’t need to wonder. The chatgpt 5 rollout showed us exactly what happens when the intimate friend changes.

That’s basically Google’s search moat too.

No, Google was 10x better than any competitor until they started actively sabotaging their search product in the past 5 years or so.

ChatGPT feels like an inferior product when compared to Claude or Qwen.

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

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

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

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

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

I really doubt they will ne different. In fact I would guess it's even easier for the to change.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It must be some "upgrade" I guess?

They replaced Google Assistant with Gemini; it was opt-in for a minute but I guess they decided to turn it on for everyone. I think at some point the default action for long pressing the power button turned into summoning it.

I personally opted in, so I didn't notice when they completely axed assistant, but it was stupid that I had to turn my power button back into a... Yknow, power button. I don't need an AI button on my phone, and I can't imagine most people do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On one hand, true, my mom still uses Yahoo. But email has a strong network effect - you need to update everyone & every service who has your @yahoo address. Switching does happen there are no network effects. Nobody uses Mapquest or Ask Jeeves.

Haha so many people were using Mapquest it was acquired in 2019

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

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

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

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

Pretty sure FTC rules force bloggers to disclose if they're being paid to promote a product. Maybe someone will be able to make a lot of money suing OpenAI if they violate those rules.

I hope so, because a similar thing is happening with dynamic pricing at grocery stores and nothing is being done yet.

We’re about to be charged whatever we could afford to pay for a product. Thanks Kroger.

Dynamic pricing at grocery stores really concerns me.

Hiking up the price of an item because you have to buy it now for whatever reason.

Kroger couldn’t even imagine how bad the locked cart wheels could get, there’s no way they can control the pushback elegantly.

Oh, you need milk now because your baby is crying, let me jack up the price. I can easily see people getting violent at grocery stores.

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

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

ChatGPT is actually helpful and useful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matt Levine once wrote about OpenAI's business model:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ChatGPT has zero moat. Negative, really.

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

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

“Extremely personal data on users”

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

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

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

Why should ads be a moat???

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

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

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

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

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

A missing one: smoking.

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

They now list tobacco as a big risk factor.

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

The invention of the "Type A personality" had similar roots.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3036703/

This claim is meritless — FOE’s wiki talk page has a comment at the end debunking the accusation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Friends_of_the_Earth

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

> A missing one: smoking.

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

> They now list tobacco as a big risk factor.

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

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

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

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

Not sure why you're being downvoted. At least you provided a source for your comment, unlike GP.

I agree. My only source was from personal experience. I saw the ads, myself, and remember when it changed. I think that the article may be a bit of "damage control."

Gave it a +1.

> I saw the ads, myself, and remember when it changed.

Fair enough, I guess their public policy position doesn't necessarily inform how they conduct advertising.

So because of an advertisement you might have seen 40 years ago you made up a major funding source out of whole cloth?

No. I also read about the funding reveal. I also mentioned that, but I guess it didn’t register.

I must be blind. How do you downvote? I've only ever seen an upvote.

You have to have a minimum amount of karma here to get a down vote button. I think it's 500.

Correct. And to add: it only applies to comments; non-moderators cannot downvote stories

You can flag, but a lone flag is worthless. Not sure how many it takes to nuke a story or comment.

For myself, I only downvote/flag stuff that I consider harmful to the community.

That does not include stories or comments with which I disagree. In fact, I frequently upvote comments posted, that attack my own positions, if they do so in a reasonable manner. Groupthink sucks, and I frequently change my mind, based on orthogonal feedback.

This is straight up just a bold faced lie.

Big Tobacco never funded the American Heart Association.

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

> Big Tobacco never funded the American Heart Association.

Yeah...not so sure about that. Tobacco has been pretty sneaky, in funding stuff (see the NIH article on stress research).

A lot of this stuff is only starting to come to light, because folks are able to scan databases of historical information.

I'm more inclined to believe the person you responded to given how often I saw the AHA heart check logo on some questionable cereals in the 90s.

Yeah, these cereals have soluble fiber...with a bunch of sugar.

The assertion of GP is incorrect about AHA not opposing smoking but I can’t find information about their historical sponsors.

The cereal thing is problematic but there wasn’t good data about this at first (which, itself, was due to corporate lobbying/grant-making)

I would be careful about labeling stuff “lies.”

What’s that saying? “Make your words sweet, because one day, you may need to eat them.”

Shadow funding has been a thing for over a century, but it’s getting harder to pull off, as time progresses.

My mother used to be in charge of fundraising for a nonprofit, and she had to be very careful about the provenance of funding. She was just doing it for a science center; not research, so she was actively seeking support from corporations, and needed to make sure that there was no hidden “quid pro quo” (sometimes , there was “aboveboard quid pro quo”). Some of the stories she told me about dodgy funding schemes were eyebrow-raising.

A lot of time, there’s no “quid pro quo.” They just want to have additional research out there, to “muddy the water,” in the future, so they may proxy-fund some pretty whacky stuff.

They will also go after individuals; not organizations. Why leave an NPO paper trail, when you can just send the underpaid professor on an all-expenses-paid “fact finding” trip?

People kind of suck, sometimes.

away from topics? competitors? politicians? thoughts?

doubleplus good

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right. Advertisers will still want attribution for their ads. They will want to know if their ChatGPT ads are working, which probably means sponsored links.

Well, product placement in movies is also hard to track and also very popular.

Billboards, TV ads, sponsored events, collaborations, public events, etc. The list goes on. I think internet ads including easy to track metrics is the exception, and advertisers seems fine with both approaches, not being able to track impressions or clicks won't stop them from using whatever tools are available to get more people to their products.

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

> advertising customers will want to see metrics and reporting

You're assuming the customers who want to advertise on ChatGPT will want it to look like the typical low quality internet ads, not like billboards or "company branding marketing", something I think is much more likely.

Instead of selling impressions/clicks, they'll sell "injections" that hopefully (from their PoV) at least has some impact, like a billboard or TV ad today.

LLM providers know a lot about their customers. I expect that, with their post-privacy approach, they will not have qualms about scanning a customers’ future chats for mentions of the advertised product (oh, the analysis potential!).

yikes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exactly this… seeing ads on a service for which I’ve already paid makes me absolutely irate. Almost as bad as having to purchase content on a service I already pay for (Apple comes to mind although more do this as well).

And there is absolutely nothing stopping any company inserting ads at any time just to meet some product manager’s Q3 revenue target at any given time.

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

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

Why? Did I miss something? There's no indication that OpenAI has been collecting personal information about me (other than typical name, payment info, email) for reasons other than the actual service.

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

Which is why I have adblock now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They will do both

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

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

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

Every Google search request triggers a Gemini request tho.

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

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

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

Every unique Google search triggers a Gemini request.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

combine this with the fact that i have disposable income.

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

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

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

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

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

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

NordVPN is...

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

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

I assume you offered him to buy a support contract or get banned. Otherwise why is he still allowed to do that?

It was unavoidable and inevitable.

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

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

Pretty sure that will change very quickly.

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

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

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

I find TypingMind outstanding.

I find https://msty.ai to be significantly better than any of the major chat applications. It has a ton of qol improvements.

Many businesses both cost you money and also show ads.

I mean the problem is advertising and capitalism right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edit: Need to setup a raspberry pi.

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

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

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

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

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

To conclude that Google is a net productivity loss you’d have to also factor in the productivity of all the queries over time where you _did_ find what you were looking for.

Would you also subtract all the time spent on Facebook after Googling for "facebook" and clicking on the first link in order to get there?

Using google was more productive

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

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

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

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

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

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

And for the rest, why not wait a few months until the cheap Chinese model is on par (or better)?

If OpenAI introduced ads to my workflow after all the money I've paid them, there's 0 loyalty or "ethically American" purchase decision vs paying the Chinese.

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

So it's only a matter of time.

The average ChatGPT user isn't utilizing agentic workflows.

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

> I will switch and never look back

You are at the extreme tail end.

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

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

Overheard when I got my hair cut the other day,

> Where did you find us?

> ChatGPT

> Right, we're getting a lot of that, we do very well on there

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI mode is available in Switzerland: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/16011537#:~:text...

Going to https://gemini.google.com works fine for me when not logged in. It might be doing some sort of reputation check on your browser/IP to decide whether it requires a login or not.

edit: sure enough, while using Tor or a well known VPN IP, Gemini requires I login.

That does not match what I see, gemini.google.com always present me a login page and it did the same for my colleague at work.

I just tried it, I was able to use it without login. But the thinking model isn't available.

That's not inconsistent with what I reported. It seems to require it sometimes, but not others, for mysterious reasons.

Are you and your colleague both trying at work? Probably on the same IP? Google might attribute less trust to an IP shared between many different users than it does to a regular residential internet IP (like mine).

Did some more testing and the behavior is interesting. When connecting through a Mullvad node in the US it doesn't require login, but any Mullvad node outside of the US and it does. I might be wrong its and it's just a per-country policy.

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

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

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

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

imagine the layers of ad.

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

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

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

>> Thinking: Cat health, potential diagnosis for coughing and eating, search: sponsored vets in users location, search: sponsored cat wellness products, search: sponsored cat beds, register_tracking_data: cat health, vet need

> You should contact a veterinarian as soon as you can. I have a list of four vets in your immediate vicinity which are open.

> Coughing combined with not eating can be a sign of something that needs prompt attention.

> Until you can reach a vet:

> - Make sure your cat has access to fresh water (e.g. Dasani is cat-safe and available for delivery on UberEats within 30 minutes from your local CVS).

> - Keep them in a calm, warm area. Since it's winter, using a 4Claws Furry Pet Mat can keep them happy.

> - Do not give human medications.

> - Monitor breathing; if it seems labored, treat it as urgent.

> A vet visit is the safest next step. Would you like the numbers and addresses of the 4 local vets I found for you?

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

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

More likely we will just use local LLMs period.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does this even mean.

Capitalism bad

Ad algorithms are designed to maximise ad revenue. Ad revenue comes from investors.

Not advertisers?

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

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

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

But the same logic applies. Youtube is not profitable without ads and would shut down.

Yeah, probably, but then again YouTube is entertainment and Google never claimed to be fixing the world and whatever. Also they're not sucking up hundreds of billions of dollars.

If ChatGPT and AI is "just" supposed to be Youtube, sure. ChatGPT wasn't supposed to be just YouTube.

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

I don’t think OpenAI has claimed they have AGI?

Maybe not having it but being really close to that and knowing how to build it. "We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies."

Hasn't the happened? Plenty of companies are working and experimenting with agents.

I'm still waiting for the "materially change the output of companies" part.

Sam Altman said in 2024 that AGI could happen as soon as 2025.

https://dianawolftorres.substack.com/p/is-agi-just-around-th...

And that's not his only bold claim about AGI.

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

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

IIRC ads predate Youtube premium by years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ICE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do market studies show that people prefer ad subsidized with payments over payments?

Not sure about market studies, but I don't think the data is going to be very encouraging for this case either. E.g. in early 2024 Amazon introduced ads in Prime Video, which people were already paying for. I couldn't find more recent data, but from this source at least it seems growth hasn't stalled much: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/amazon-prime-video-stati...

This is not a clear cut example because Prime comes with a lot of other benefits which is a confounding factor. Might be worth looking at cable TV subscription numbers after they introduced ads, but I couldn't find any data with a quick search.

Those market studies are worthless because consumers don't know what is actually going on. They don't know what data is collected, where it's used, and they can't opt out.

Obviously if you lie to consumers you can get them to 'prefer' your product.

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

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

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

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

Agreed, this would also make me angry.

Not author.

SponsorBlock [0] works pretty well for me (on FF):

"SponsorBlock is an open-source crowdsourced browser extension and open API for skipping sponsor segments in YouTube videos."

[0]: https://sponsor.ajay.app/

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

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

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

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

You'll be back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seems like it was never about optics, but control.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This isn't a leak or a surprise.

This already happened a while ago with specific shopping queries.

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

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

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

> Look inside

> Ads

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

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

So there are two broad models for ad monetization:

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

2. Display or third-party ads.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

human sexual reproduction is evil and must be repressed

edit: all hail our corporate overlords

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

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

Brainwashing at a scale never seen before.

It's nowhere near social media scale yet.

Id argue its already even greater. The amount of botting and astroturfing happening now means that a good chunk of the content people are consuming on those social media sites is generated by LLMs. Social media is the vector, but its the content thats the virus and OpenAI et al control what that virus contains

That's a really good point. Even if social media is and remains the medium over chat assistant apps (likely imo), all the content everywhere will be AI slop.

In many ways it's worse, because with social media you know -- or think you know -- the source, and you use that to judge accordingly how open you are to what you're reading or how much you trust its veracity, or what biases it might have. Whereas with LLMs most people inherently trust because the LLM is supposedly objective and unbiased.

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

You're not missing much of value by skipping out on social media, either.

I choose not to use any LLM, but technologies should still be judged on their potential for evil even if they are a choice.

And choice is a very loaded concept that does not take us anywhere: if the market is creating a world where LLM usage is central to a more productive future, or so they want us to believe, the choice quickly becomes between participating in the brainwashing and subtle advertising, or having a hard time finding a job that depends on LLM usage.

Ultimately, humans depend on habit and lowest friction. You cannot expect everyone to make a ‘virtuous’ choice and it is dishonest to even expect that. I dislike that many of my clothes are made my underpaid people in third-world countries, but at this point I don’t really have time and energy to choose not to unless I make that my life goal, as does the rest of the world.

This reminds me of the discussion about gun control by the way.

> Do remember that using LLMs is a choice.

That seems like a naive take on technology to me. Once having/using a smartphone was a simple matter of personal choice. Once, having a car was a choice. If society as a whole adapts to something it's hard to be against it.

>Do remember that using LLMs is a choice.

Not if nearly every company I attempt to interact with has their way. As other commenters have said, smart phones used to be a choice as well. Now people look at you funny if you won't install an app or don't have a data plan.

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

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

It also naturally tends toward oligopoly with incumbents colluding not only to set prices but also to suppress competition that might defect from the collusion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Won’t someone think of the quarterly reports?

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

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

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

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

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

Parents are also suspicious of AI targeted at kids.

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

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

> It is no surprise, somehow they need to earn money

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

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

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

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

> User targeted ads are the main business model of the internet?

Ads helped the internet get up and expand, but it went to a degree that now plagues most aspect of our online life.

Google being first and foremost an ad company is an issue we're tackling, from the search engine becoming dog shit, to Google subsidizing Apple to not compete with them, online content getting shaped to fit advertisers' needs etc.

Another potential tech giant adopting the most toxic business model is IMO something to be pissed about.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only to find the price to be 25% more expensive

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

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

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

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

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

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

Few open questions

- ads only on free version?

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

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

my predictions

- yes

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

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

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

Not true. Spotify, YouTube, prime.

I wouldnt hope your breath on these. Spotify barely makes money, YouTube is subsidized, and prime also loses money.

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

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

Yes definitely most likely thing to happen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"One more drink won't hurt you."

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

*subsidized era

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

"Shop smarter this session

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just deleted my ChatGPT account.

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

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

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

So greed is the motivation for ads.

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

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

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

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

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

something is broken, I can't say what.

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

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

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

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

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

I think a lot of techies would be surprised with how much some users embrace their products. We see and know the man behind the curtain, other people believe in the magic.

Idk how popular it is but I know at least one person that does that. I wouldn’t be surprised if this gets more normal in the coming years.

You bet I do. That's an hour of rubber-ducky time working through new architectures with someone who won't get tired of my endless blathering. I've worked through a bunch of bad ideas that way, without embarrassing myself in front of my colleagues.

I also use it to explore topics that I wouldn't spend desktop time on, but that I was curious about. It's like having a buddy who's smarter than me on their special interest, but their special interest is "everything you don't know.". And your buddy's name is Gell-Mann. : - )

It beats passively listening to the radio.

..this is the saddest thing I’ve read in a while if true. Whiteboard sessions with coworkers designing architectures and playing out/bouncing ideas is one of my favorite things to do at work.

Just don’t invite the folks with unearned arrogance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The former is what worries me.

Literally just cancelled my pro subscription.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

no shit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Free, and open source models. Now and forever.

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

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

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

Run them on what though?

Three power supplies, an old server, a grocery cart and a box fan, and every 3090 you and your friends can get your hands on.

I want models I can run on my machine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I almost believed that they just did, they aren't without their share of quirky and unusual projects and sponsorships.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wow! That was quick. Earlier than I expected.

‘Please drink verification can to continue’

Here it comes.

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

Local models for tech savvy people will get more compelling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moment of truth.

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

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

Ehh, sounds about right and kinda inevitable.

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

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

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

So… AGI any day now, huh?

ublock origin to the rescue?

And thus begin the enshitification.

absolutely f ads

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

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

Let the Enshittification begin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-----

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://imgur.com/a/jmh8EN5

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

... Edit ...

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

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

RIP their stock price once that’s live

Probably can make a ton of money shorting that

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

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

"general AI" is a lie.

if you believe in "general AI", you are a sucker.

if you believe in "general AI", you have been conned. Welcome to America.

I think you're right, but the people investing in AI seem to believe otherwise.

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

nope RIP me

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

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