OpenAI disables ChatGPT app suggestions that looked like ads
techoreon.com
techoreon.com
Here's what people were seeing: https://x.com/Yuchenj_UW/status/1995357492713570735
Looks pretty clear-cut to me - that's an advert for peloton.
And someone who decompiled a recent version of the chatgpt android app https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/artificial-intelligenc... found new classes like 'com.openai.feature.ads.data.AdTarget' and 'com.openai.feature.ads.data.SearchAdsCarousel'
That peloton received the advertising "free with your purchase of platform services" doesn't mean it's not an advert.
This is separate from the android app findings which I suspect is OpenAI working to launch true ads - ie advertising non-chatGPT features in exchange for payments from brands.
I'm glad to hear we're in agreement.
I learned that from trying to use Apple Music to handle my local library. Never again.
Do they really think we would just believe whatever they say? Do they think we don't have the ability to think for ourselves. The utter disrespect...
While simultaneously admitting that promotional messages are fully on the roadmap, and they're in the "A-B testing the acceptable format" phase.
Can't say I'm surprised -- if the "corner the compute resources market" gambit doesn't work out, "unseat Google as the world's leading ad shoveler" is pretty much the only remaining viable business model, right?
That's an ad!
From the tweet in your linked post:
> This could help OpenAI give free users more generous usage and features, while users on paid plans stay ad free, which fits with the high costs of running ChatGPT and the revenue they expect from shopping and ad related features
At first. The scream going through the hallways at HQ must be along the lines of: "Nonononono! Not yet!"
They will put ads in the paid ChatGPT tiers. That is an absolute certainty. The only question is how long will they tolerate un-advertised eyballs on paid plans.
I could see ChatGPT search results having affiliate links for shopping stuff even for fully-paid users.
There's a lot of competition in this space, so we'll see what users tolerate. But it's going to be tough getting around the fact this stuff is expensive to run.
Things like this are only 'free' for a reason.
What's expensive is innovating on current models and building the infrastructure. My understanding is inference is cheap and profitable. Most open source models cost less than a dollar for 1 million tokens which makes me think SotA models likely have a similar pricepoint, but more profit margin.
Yup, because people who pay for subscriptions are far more valuable ad targets than people who might be too poor or too disciplined to convert on the advertised products.
And the more you pay for a subscription, and the more others purchases they can correlate you making behind the scenes once they have a fingerprint for your identity, the more and more valuable your eyeballs become, and therefore the more challenging it becomes to resist selling your eyeballs on the ad market.
Even if a service you subscribe to isn't placing obvious ads in front of your face today and promising they never will, they're 100% strategizing ways to either make the ads less obvious or to sell your data upstream so that the ads you see elsewhere are more convincing. Better hope you like buying stuff!
They will just introduce cheaper, ad supported tier, price hike it to the previous price of ad-free tier and slow-boil the user base
Is anyone actually this oblivious?
It's a when, not if situation.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120401035737/http://www.google...
SRO is much easier to deal with.
Also, stop with the "wE FeLlL ShOrT", corporate platitudes mean nothing in 2025. We know you don't feel that way, you know you don't feel that way, cut the bs.
Once a major player just decides "ok we're going ads for free users" the rest of the industry will follow and have an easier time doing so.
I think if they wanted to do this they should have just taken the flack, free users of the product are a drain and they can't cave to them. Eventually free users will "get over it" and if OpenAI opens the ads flood-gate then all the other free-to-use LLMs will be ads based as well and non-paying users won't have an ads-free place to go.
As opposed to unpaid?
Really just confirmed to me that long term, the best option for inference is just running an open source model on your own hardware, even if that's still expensive and doesn't generate as high quality output.