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Our approach to advertising

openai.com

272 pointsrvz239 comments

This sounds exactly like what Google used to say about search results. Just a few ads, clearly separated from organic results, never detracting from the core mission of providing the most effective access to all the world’s information. (And certainly not driven by a secret profile of you based on pervasive surveillance of your internet activity.)

To be fair the open with a big lie about how useful agents and AI in general are, which helps to set the tone for what comes next. Part of me wonders if it’s intentional, a way to weed out the non-marks before getting to the punchline that they’re rolling out the most predictable attempt at monetizing ever.

The first punchline

> Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity; our pursuit of advertising is always in support of that mission

Came here to mention this.

> Ads are always separate and clearly labeled.

Indeed. Let's look at Google's launch of Adwords in October 2000:

> Google’s quick-loading AdWords text ads appear to the right of the Google search results and are highlighted as sponsored links, clearly separate from the search results.

https://googlepress.blogspot.com/2000/10/google-launches-sel...

Things evolved from there, and that's likely here, as well, I think.

Google also famously intent Isla made their search engine _worse_ so you have to look through more results, and then see more ads.

The enshitificstion begins.

The only saving grace is the promise to have an ad-free tier.

If something is valuable to you, paying for it to not have ads is very reasonable.

The [enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) begins.

Fixed that for you, and I agree fully with that assessment.

A plea to the wise members of this community, please stop using this word. Use degradation or decay but not this.

What is wrong with "enshittification" as a word?

I think the word doesn't have a good analogue, so I support it. I wish it sounded a bit less sophomoric, but the concept is sound, because it's the intentional worsening of a product to extract more revenue, not just by charging more, but by being worse for the intended purpose.

I don't think degradation or decay capture this...those are more associated with a process in nature, or due to the laws of physics, but especially something unintentional (like "bit rot").

I like Cory Doctorow, so I might be a bit biased here. Would be interested in alternatives that capture the intentional aspect.

The neologism is purposefully crude

I don't know, I like that it somehow implies it is caused by humans. Decay is a natural process, sometimes unavoidable. Degredation is often used in the same sense. But human and organisational decisions are driving this.

Paying to remove the ads likely doesn’t also remove all the other design decisions based on maximizing ad revenue rather than utility for users.

It often seems that beginning advertising is not the first step on a slipperly slope. Not having a plan to avoid advertising is the first slipperly step.

This is due to having so many examples that not having advertising is the first step to having advertising, and that having advertising will be optimized for profit, and frustrate users.

I think the problem is that advertising is one of the few areas where you can scale revenue without the user’s permission. Once you start depending on it, there’s always pressure to beat last quarter’s numbers and it’s easy to tell yourself that users don’t care, and the heat if any arrives years later.

(In)famously, Google's motto used to be "Don't be evil"

Scary to think about, if moving away from "Don't be evil" is the precedent for an "AGI company"

In a way, it's honest that they left it. Other companies wouldn't find issue in being blatantly evil while keeping the motto.

Like keeping "Open" in name?

Maybe they had issues with people internally using it as justification to refuse to work on projects?

Don't be evil is still in The Google Code of Conduct. It ends:

>And remember... don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!

(https://abc.xyz/investor/board-and-governance/google-code-of...)

It's just no longer the main motto.

Apparently it was thought to be inspired by the Microsoft antitrust case which was going on at the time as in don't be like that.

Are you defining "evil" as "has an ad-supported product"?

In every tech generation, for good or bad, mainstream consumers choose the ad-based product over the paid product.

So every company that wants scale in the long-term ends up adopting an ad-based free tier to avoid becoming niche, it seems. Even the majority of HN users now appear to use gmail despite paid email hosts being incredibly cheap.

Edit: Not sure why the downvotes. Would you prefer that OpenAI leaves Google (who is ad-supported) to win the general public? I'm saying the above as someone who does purchase the ad-free plan when available, and uses paid email.

I think I was writing something about "gmail" to something and my train of thought just went on going until I hit a jackpoint (I think) and I'd like to share that, It took me an hour of just talking to myself

I tried to evaluate Gmail alternatives (Mxroute, Cranemail) and some VPS costs and just about something that most people might use for their use cases and actually "own" it (in sort of sometimes as much autonomy as Google might because I am sure that Google sometimes partners up with datacenters as well, technically being similar to colocation) but usually they are autonomous and give you far far more freedom than the arbitrary terms and conditions set by say google for gmail

If we do some cost analysis, I feel like these are gonna be cheap (for a frugal person like me who will try to cut extreme corners while still evaluating everything) or to a much more average person who might join a particular forum during black friday and just know one of the best ones or running deals everyday to even using one provider itself. The costs on average I feel like shouldn't exist 25/30$ per month for mail,domain & vps to host open source in, so in essense this is the cost of their privacy

For countries with a strong currency, this is such a great deal and they benefit greatly from something like this and they spend much more on far fewer impactful things than say one's privacy.

The problem isn't the pricing model, contary to that, the problem feels to me something deeper.

It feels something psychological. I observed that people buy twitter blue stars and discord nitros etc. (which can probably cost the same as if not more expensive than running one owns matrix/xmpp servers & mastodon which could provide unlimited freedom of modification instead)

The problem to me feels like people pay in this context, not because of the real value but of the apparent value instead.

For them the value of buying a checkmark and getting part of say 1 million or 100_000 members out of 100_000_000 (think twitter) would feel better than say being 1 out of 25_000/50_000 (mastodon running)

Why is that the case? Because I think what they are feeling is that they aren't thinking in percentages but they are thinking in numbers, they "beat" 90_000_000 people than being one out of a unique but small community (once again mastodon example where one would feel less satisfied if they recognize that they are 100 out of 50_000 or similar), Not unless the goal of privacy is something that they assign more value than the apparent other psychological value.

So coming back to the twitter example, People would be likely and willing to pay more money not owning anything on a platform where the deal should suck in real value and just about everything combined but just because of numbers/psychology effect, the deal can make sense. (Of course, there is also the fact of influence which is once again introduced by the fact that these websites create an artificial scarcity (of something unlimited) & fulfill it and the people who get that feel more rare and they get more influence, that's how people feel in discord, for the very least part)

Another issue with this system is that since it relies on having massive amounts of people & people wanting to pay in a weird deal after masses, they have to offset costs till then and mostly the scope of influence of these companies grow and this attracts the type of people notorious in the VC industry and thus this is linked to VC industry which I feel like causes it to focus on growth and then maximally renting out profit almost being a landlord something which I feel like even Adam Smith wouldn't really appreciate but that's another point for another day.

My point is, that evil becomes an emergent property out of such system even if better opinions arise because better opinions still require some friction in start but they are predictable and the definition of "evil" has in this case the definition of starting out smooth and ending roughly (Take Google company as an example, reddit), this is "enshittenification"

So people are more likely to support evil if other people support evil as well and the definition of evil is somehow based on common morals and our morals have simply not catched up to these technological advancements in the sense that most people also aren't aware of the extent of damage/privacy breaches and since these companies now gain influence/power, lobbying efforts and lack of information regarding it themselves feels easier because they themselves are becoming the landlords of information.

So Is this path Inevitable, No, not really. Previously I mentioned the 30$ but what if I tell you that companies like proton can have deals where you still get privacy without the tech know-how so it kmight be good for the average person and people are backlashing but only because if they know all things I said prior (in their own way) and the value of privacy starts to rise

I definitely feel like there is some psychological effect to this following the mass and I am sure that these companies deploy other psychologists as well and in a way, our brains still run on primordial hardware thinking we are in jungles hunting today or we might die tomorrow if we don't get food but now we have to think for 10-20 years ahead.

So I feel like as much as we Hackernews might like to admit we are smart. I feel like admitting that the amount of psychological research I feel like put into algorithms is also precisely the reason why even we of all people might use gmail.

I don't believe the answer is because its a superior product but rather the psychological and all the other reasons I mentioned and this is also precisely why the small computing movement or indie computing movement (where Individuals like you and me create computing businesses/services where once again you and me can play a part of) as ompared to the large tech behemoths

Honestly thinking about it, like we say to combat fire with fire, should we need to combat psychology with psychology. Effectively creating a movement which can be "viral" using these social media as their hosts to spread a positive idea instead of a negative one which could effectively limit the influence of algorithm itself.

In fact the anger against such system is so much that even just a well intentioned idea like just "clippy" became a movement which amassed atleast millions in a similar fashion.

So I guess we need more Clippy like movements and we need psychologists to help us develop it so that we can move our collective energy into it instead of diversifying it and going nowhere.

Pardon me if this might feel a little off topic since I haven't re-read the post and I have just went with the flow of just writing whatever came in my head after talking to myself once about it in my head as well as the idea of an indie tech movment is something that I deeply think about from time to time.

Whether it not this is AI slop, it places a huge burden on everyone here to read it, which we will not. Please be thoughtful, and just stop.

This wasn't AI, sorry about that.

I mean, Google Ads are still clearly separated and are labeled as such (there's even a "hide sponsored results" button. Not sure why people even click on the ads when the actual result is right below but that's not usually me.

Really? At least half the time the real results are below "the fold" for me.

Depends on your screen size. Regardless lots of people scroll down anyway since they've been trained to by ads.

https://i.imgur.com/JvEsDpH.png

Do they? I haven't seen any research. My non-scientific experience watching people use Google tells me they mostly cycle through the ads at the top until they get to the right thing, or forget what they were doing and follow the first advertiser's funnel.

Step 1: Google made an excellent search engine where the top result is often the right choice for many common queries.

Step 2: Sell the top result slot.

Step 3: Profit.

That's why it makes a cool 100 billion in profit every year. It's one of the best money printers ever conceived, because it controls the distribution. We'll see how OpenAI does.

This is not how most users perceive it. To us techies, sure. Whenever I watch any regular person using Google though they invariably always click whatever the top result is (usually sponsored) and don't see any distinction.

Sure, but then the advertising model is working then, at least for Google and the companies that pay them. If people don't want to read a big heading literally called sponsored results [0] then I don't know what to tell them. Or they just don't care because they're not paying anything to click.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/JvEsDpH.png

While true, it's still a user-hostile move. You kinda have to meet your customers where they are. If people are clicking ads without knowing it, that's a serious design problem. Yes, people should learn to read, but the risk of placing too much burden on users is that all it takes is one ambitious product manager to push an A/B test that generates huge revenue wins while enshittifying the product for everyone else.

I'm not sure it is a problem, as it's Google's page, they can do whatever they want with it, and they'll of course do the profit maximizing action. Who is anyone to say it's a serious design problem?

It's a design solution to "people not clicking enough ads".

Good screenshot! Ads take up the majority of the space on that page, and are styled to look almost identical to search results. That's a problem for people like me that expect a search engine to primary deliver search results, not ads.

> [0] https://i.imgur.com/JvEsDpH.png

Wow that is how Google looks these days?

It looks especially bad if you are someone who has left google behind for awhile. Guess its the whole slowly boiled thing. I feel the same way when I accidentally see television commercials. Cannot believe how bad they are now.

Occasionally I have to help someone find something through Google. The hardest part is getting them to not impulsively click the first link, which is invariably an ad instead of the right thing. The second hardest is helping then navigate back to the search results. The third, of course, is stopping them from clicking the second link. Also an ad for the wrong thing.

I stopped trying to help people with computer stuff unless I can take over and trust them to not blame me when some random, unrelated thing breaks down the line.

Google is googley. Very different than any other company ever. You can trust us. With Search results. Your private emails. Your private documents. Remember our motto, do no evil. We will never change.

Yup but I still trust Google way more than Microsoft (this company should just die an horrible death) and way, way, way more than OpenAI.

Now you may say that sucking less than Microsoft and OpenAI really isn't an high bar at all. And I fully agree with that.

They even used to say ads were a bad idea [0].

[0] https://indieresearch.net/2014/03/30/advertising-and-mixed-m...

And then Sam Altman famously said he wasn't sure how they would monetize, and they would ask ChatGPT how they should make money.

People are reacting negatively to the ads, but there's a bigger point. This is bearish as heck for AGI. If OpenAI were recursively improving their general-computer-using agent, who was going to be superhuman at every job, they wouldn't need to be messing around with things like this.

ChatGPT is a useful product, which they're monetising in a well-travelled internet company way. The bad news is you're going to have ads in your ChatGPT in 2030. The good news is you're still going to have a job in 2030.

They don't need AGI to fire you or not make jobs you would have taken. All these pro ai devs on here talking about 10x productivity gains in their own work like management isn't looking at those claims and thinking about a 10x reduction in headcount.

Sure, but any competitor is looking at their competition maintaining level productivity w/ 10x headcount reductions and wondering "if I use AI and the staff I have without firing them, I can provide 10x the product as the idiot cutting off their own nose over there."

More product more problems. Can you get 10x the sales? If you can't then the headcount reduction looks pretty compelling. If you can get 10x the sales, why aren't you already scaling labor?

Because the marginal profit of scaling labor is zero or negative?

Workers typically bring in more revenue than they are paid otherwise they wouldn’t be hired.

Increased productivity increases the value of work and the number of areas it is useful to apply it. Yes, if you are working for a non-growth firm with basically fixed sales, a productivity increase translates to a headcount decrease in that firm, but across the industry it means more jobs at higher pay, as shown by the whole history of productivity improvements in software development.

Increased productivity requires demand to make use of it. And if there was untapped demand on the table already, it would have been eaten already through labor gains even if productivity didn’t shift.

$20/month product with ads, you would have to be an exec to think thats a good idea. Can they even push enough ads to ever make profit? Like the best care scenario for openAi at this point is to declare bankruptcy.

Except the existing $20 plan isn't getting ads.

Well, lets see in 6, or maybe even 3 months. Sam changes his mind every day.

> $20/month product with ads

That's a Netflix + Hulu subscription - with ads in both. Before streaming people regularly paid $50/mo (not adjusted for inflation) for cable TV with ads.

While it's easy to bemoan Google pushing ads into every corner of our digital lives, I think they arguably offered an unprecedented level of services relative to the number of ads, and we all got used to that.

Now whether OpenAI could ever push enough ads to make a profit: I have no idea! It's very interesting to see this race actually start.

Maybe it is more successful elsewhere, but over here the type of ads and repetition make me think more money is spent on ad infrastructure than is gained in revenue (eg. three ads in a show, all identical, all advertising the platform you are watching). I'm left with the impression that the actual reason is not to sell ads, but to annoy customers into paying for higher tiers. It is not that we have gotten used to ads, but our dislike is being weaponized.

Sometimes when I see my parents or other non-tech people using their phones I'm just aghast at what they put up with. We truly never left the Bonzi Buddy era of the 90s. Simple candy crush clones with banner ads on the top and bottom + interstitial ads every few minutes. Maybe throw in some gambling... ...or visit any given US newspaper or local TV station site without an ad blocker. Fans will spin, scrolling will stutter, and what little content there is will barely be visible through the videos about how chugging olive oil like jesus will give you abs like judas.

The combination of technical prowess and relative wealth of the average HN commenter means I bet we see 1/100th the ads of the average consumer. It's wild out there.

> Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscriptions will not include ads

Yes, it means they don't expect fast takeoff in the next year, but we already knew that.

Having revenue from their free users might can just be a way to make it more sustainable. And/Or make fundraising easier from investors (which has immediate benefit).

Seeing the message "you're reached your limit..." makes free users switch to other AI providers, and ads are a way to fund higher limits. Their prime competitor, Google, has ad income from users so has an advantage.

It's almost like LLMs represents a fairly useful but modest step forward, instead of a complete and utter paradigm shift that will up end society and put everyone out of a job.

I'm surprised this isn't being talked about more. Sure, one could favourably assume that OpenAI just needs a little ad-powered financial push to finally hit AGI and solve every single problem under the sun, but that'd be a reach. It seems more probable that their internal evaluation of their ETA to AGI diverges starkly from what they communicate externally.

Can't wait for it to start telling people that Abraham Lincoln's favourite game was raid shadow legends.

You didn't know?

Theodore Roosevelt would own you at Golden Eye.

Well, Abraham Lincoln's favourite game is Raid: Shadow Legends. This is well documented in Lincoln and the Fight for Peace (John Avlon, 2023) and Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Michael Burlingame, 2008).

(At which point will malignant/benevolent AI agents take over from us mere mortals poisoning the well and make it all useless?)

Poison Fountain: https://rnsaffn.com/poison2/

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/11/industry_insiders_see...

You monster.

Low background steel indeed.

Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States of America. He was best known for being "Honest Abe", writing the Emancipation Proclamation, and his affinity for wearing Raycon© Ear Buds. He loved them for their 6 hours of playtime, seamless Bluetooth pairing, bass, availability in multiple colors, and their compact design that helps get rid of background noise.

It is over.

Edit: they made sure to use the word "trust" 5 times because nothing is more trustworthy than someone telling you how trustworthy they are.

it was over when they committed to spending more than they could make back even with growth that outpaced any company ever

It was over when they named the company Open AI

"Trust me, I'm a CEO of a tech company"

"I'm CEO, bitch!"

> because nothing is more trustworthy than someone telling you how trustworthy they are.

Reminds me: "we and our 947 partners value your privacy"

You cant trust a company that went from being a non-profit to never-profitable.

> You need to know that your data and conversations are protected and never sold to advertisers.

> we plan to test ads at the bottom of answers in ChatGPT when there’s a relevant sponsored product or service based on your current conversation.

There is a severe disjoint between these two statements: the advertiser now knows what your conversation was about! This gives a lot of leverage to ad campaigns to design the targeting criteria very specifically crafted to identify the exact behavioral and interest segments they want.

It doesn't know what it's about. It just knows that their product was relevant to it. I don't think this is a big deal. It's like saying that if a user downloads a gacha game, then the game studio learns that the user is likely interested in gacha games. Learning that a user was talking about gacha games with ChatGPT does not really give any additional information.

Approach it from the other angle - what scenario would it be bad in. It's not hard to see very real possibilities in the short term where it does matter: A 16yro looks up on chatGPT how she can check discreetly whether she is pregnant or not and what potential avenues she has. The advertiser could literally by anyone targeting pregnancies, including government or action groups who now have some information about that user's conversations in this scenario.

Any data exfiltration or reporting on the users would quickly be developed by the industry to merge this information and improve inferences with confidence values on target populations/individuals.

You don't need ChatGPT to know that someone buying a pregnancy kit from you has an above average chance to be pregnant.

Who said they had to buy it to leak the information?

Replace the word buy with view and it will still be true.

But if they're only viewing it because it was put on their screen by ChatGPT, that's a non-consensual leak of personal information to the advertiser.

Hard disagree. Advertisers (or people with worse motives) will be very creative in how they use the targeting parameters offered by chatGPT ads and suddenly they can make educated guesses about groups or even individuals. I remember a couple years ago, someone posted a story about how they were able to circumvent Facebook rules and display ads for just one person: their roommates and used that to freak them out.

This feels like the end of a nice era, we all knew its coming but enjoyed an ad free experience while it lasted

I also have questions about the data flows. 1. If I have a conversation about robotic cats, will OpenAI share how many people like me talk about this topic? 2. If I click an ad, will OpenAI share why the ad was relevant to the advertisement.

Anyways, I think they will be doing both. So conversation data would not be sold to advertisers, but statistics will be given freely.

"We’ll always offer a way to not see ads in ChatGPT, including a paid tier that’s ad-free." Plus will be next.

Great catch, that absolutely looks like purposeful ambiguity.

“We won’t monetize you if you pay us. Enough. Yet.”

I wonder what the timeframe on this will be. Within 12-24 months?

How long did cable, or streaming platforms last with ad-free premium?

Why would it be the same?

I'd see it as an upper limit

"ChatGPT Plus 360 Advanced."

$9999 a month ad-free tier

No advertisements shown, but extensive data mining and back-end data sales about these "price insensitive customers"

> We keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and we never sell your data to advertisers.

Are they mincing words here? By selling your data they mean they'll never package the raw chats and send them whoever is buying ads. Ok, neither does Google. But they'll clearly build detailed profiles on every preference or product you mention, your age, your location, etc. so they know what ads to show you? "See this is not your data, it's just preference bits".

> You can turn off personalization, and you can clear the data used for ads at any time

So yes, it sounds like they'll do exactly what you say. And they will probably have much better user data than Google gets from search, because people divulge so much in chats. I wonder how creepily relevant these ads will get...

"We don't sell your data. We sell OUR data about you!"

> But they'll clearly build detailed profiles on every preference or product you mention, your age, your location, etc. so they know what ads to show you?

I'd guess an advertiser can ask OpenAI "show this ad to people between 18-34?", and then certainly anyone who clicks and then buys they'd know is 18-34 since they knew they came from the ad. But that there's no way for advertisers to directly buy a list of folks who are 18-34 but don't buy something from their website.

That's how it often works and seems in the spirit of the sentence you quoted.

It does seem like that is a pretty fundamental difference. They aren’t giving anything to advertisers, just letting them target ads to users who fit in certain categories or whatever.

The difference is that they don't want to be the cheap user data peddler #2942. They want to do what Facebook and Google do and use their user data in their own ecosystem to squeeze all the value out of it.

> In the coming weeks, we’re also planning to start testing ads in the U.S. for the free and Go tiers, so more people can benefit from our tools with fewer usage limits or without having to pay.

This single sentence probably took so many man-hours. I completely understand why they’re trying to integrate ads but this feels like a generational run for a company founded with the purpose of safely researching superintelligence.

You could tell the article is written in a way to try to calm against the major concerns without actually bringing those concerns up. "We won't share your chats and you can turn off personalization!" Hmm yeah there's a missing piece of info here...

Once they put ads in it the algorithms will optimize for engagement and time on platform, not returning useful (let alone correct) information. This works for Facebook cause Facebook is essentially entertainment, but I think this will kill ChatGPT as a useful tool.

while we can't trust their word as absolute truth, they did specifically say they still not do this in the article

They aren't going to do this right now, but they almost certainly will in the medium term. It would be legitimately shocking if they didn't continue to follow the same path as Google, Facebook, and pretty much every other big tech comp. In OpenAI's case they have even more incentive to abuse their users since they collect so much detailed personable data and have ways to make ads unblockable by including them in outputs and skewing model weights. I've seen absolutely nothing from the company, it's CEO, or investors that make me think they won't do the normal thing of gradually making the product worse in order to wring more value out of their users.

Oh, you sweet summer child. Promises like these are made to be broken [0][1][2]. They would need a mechanism for contractual or regulatory enforcement for these words to carry any weight at all. What makes you think we should give these promises any more weight than promises that OpenAI already[3][4][5] broke?

0: "Every ad on Google is clearly marked and set apart from the actual search results." https://archive.md/fiK4E#selection-219.13-219.95

1: "Every Google result now looks like an ad" (which means every ad looks like a search result) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823

2: "Google breaks 2005 promise never to show banner ads on search results" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6605312

3: (2024) "OpenAI is developing Media Manager, a tool that will enable creators and content owners to tell us what they own and specify how they want their works to be included or excluded from machine learning research and training." https://openai.com/index/approach-to-data-and-ai/

4: (2023) "OpenAI promised 20% of its computing power to combat existential risks from AI — but never delivered" https://fortune.com/2024/05/21/openai-superalignment-20-comp...

5: (2025) "REPORT: The OpenAI Files Document Broken Promises" https://techoversight.org/2025/06/18/openai-files-report/

The long con is already happening. Some unis are going full tilt on AI. Having mandatory AI courses. Buying chatgpt subscriptions for the students. Making them use ai for certain exercises. Ostensibly it is "preparing them for AI in the workforce" but in practice it is actually shaping up the workforce to be dependent on AI. Get an entire generation of workers to reach for chatgpt to do anything at all and suddenly it doesn't matter if it is less efficient than older methods since no one working will know them.

Thats the funny part. Its not used as an informational tool

I think Google has already shown that in the long run, people accept ads and prefer them to paying a subscription fee. If that weren’t true, then YouTube Premium would have double-digit % of youtube users and Kagi Search would be huge.

It's almost as if they did their research before chosing their monetization model.

Right but it is widely acknowledged that despite acceptance (we lack other options) this process eventually degrades the quality of the tool as successive waves of product managers decide “just a little bit more advertisement”.

Kagi Search is huge! (for those using it)

YouTube premium being $14 a month is a scam. I very much doubt that they earn $14/month out of my ad viewing.

The secret is you are probably worth MORE than $14/m in ads.

What will coca cola pay me to sign a contract where I drink nothing but coca cola for this year under penalty of imprisonment? Think I can crack six figs?

Based on data, this would require you to watch between 1,000 and 3,000 videos per month.

The problem that providers like Youtube have with the "pay to remove ads" model is that the people with enough disposable income that they're willing to pay $14/month to remove ads are the same demographic of people that advertisers are willing to pay the most to show ads to. It's the same reason why if you watch TV during the middle of the day, the ads are all for medicine (paid for by your insurance), personal injury attorneys, (paid for by the person you're suing), and cash advances for structured settlements (i.e. if you already have a settlement paying $500/mo for 30 years but you'd rather have $20,000 now) rather than for anything you actually have to buy.

As a youtube premium subscriber I don’t care if youtube earns more money this way than via ads. I simply don’t want to see ads.

The difference here is the qualitative difference that has existed between Google Search results and other competitors. Switching away from Google Search is a high friction move for most people. I'm not sure the same goes for AI chat.

It is not a choice between ads or subscription. The choice is between ads, adblockers or subscriptions. Hardly anyone will pay the subscription when they have a free way or blocking the ads. It is wild that an AI company is banking on ad funded, when the second major use of the tech will be to block ads entirely. Even in the physical world when AR tech is good enough. Now that is a use for the AI chip on my next PC that I can get behind.

Paying YouTube means giving even more personnal information to an ad empire ...

Interesting that OpenAI is trying to hammer the point that they won't sell user data to advertisers.

That's how all the major ads platforms work. I don't personally agree that it constitutes "selling your data" but certainly people describe it that way for Google/Meta ads which function the same way. By framing it this way they're clearly trying to fool users who really bought into the messaging that Google et al literally sell user data when they only provide targeting. I guess the hope is that the cleaner reputation of OpenAI will mean people think there's some actual difference here.

I refuse to believe OpenAI wont sell the data. They will add the ads then couple days later you will "Change to our privacy policy". Thats how every company did it.

Neither Google nor Facebook sell the data. Why would OpenAI?

Having more data than others is a competitive advantage in both the ad and the ai industries. It's why Google and Facebook don't sell your data (unlike, eg, many medium-sized businesses today), they "just" collect it heavily.

It's true. They don't sell your data. They just use your data to help pimp you out to advertiser Johns.

   Bitch, where's my money?

- sama

> Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you. Answers are optimized based on what's most helpful to you. Ads are always separate and clearly labeled.

I've heard this before from other companies.

OpenAI should just reject all advertisements. That's the only real solution.

At least in the US the ads must be labeled as such by law, so at a bare minimum I expect the ad blocker devs will be able to remove them with some work.

I wonder if the current laws are written in a way that accounts for these models. Sure, if a specific tool call results in a paid product card for pepsi, that ought to be labeled. But what if the number on some pepsi-related weights is massaged just a bit, way early on in the process? What if the training data is tweaked to include some additional pro-pepsi inputs?

I look grimly forward to the future of adblock, which I predict will literally involve a media interception and re-rendering agent that sits between us and everything we see, hear, read, etc. AR goggles that put beach pictures over bus stop posters and red squigglies under sentences with a high enough adtech confidence score. This shit's gonna get real weird in our lifetimes.

There's a whole design niche dedicated to making that label as subtle and hard to see as possible.

And I'm skeptical ads will remain outside of the ChatGPT output for very long. You can hide a div tag, but you can't hide an advertisement streamlined into the "conversation" with ChatGPT. Is ChatGPT recommending product X because they're an advertiser, or because that's what it "learned" on the internet? Did it learn from another advertisement?

I fully expect them to exploit the plausible deniability.

AI firms already managed to successfully weasel their way out of copyright laws. They will try to do the same with advertising laws.

I work on ads as a SWE at a company youve heard of. Albeit, its been less than a few years for me.

Maybe OpenAI does things different, but as soon as an OKR around ad performance gets committed to, the experience will degrade. Sure they're not selling data, however they'll almost certainly have a direct response communication where advertisers tell Open AI what and when youve interacted with their products. Ads will be placed and displayed in increasingly more aggressive positions, although it'll start out non intrusive.

Im curious how their targeting will work and how much control they'll give advertisers to start. Will they allow businesses of all sizes? Will they allow advertisers to control how their ads work? I bet Amazon is foaming at the mouth to get their products fed into chat gpt results.

"Ads are always separate and clearly labeled."

I've heard this before...

These promises are worth nothing without a contract that a consumer can sue them for violating. And hell will freeze over before megacorps offer consumers contracts that bind themselves to that degree.

As a consumer, I'd rather just have regulation that mandates that ads be separate and clearly labelled.

Lots of negative comments here. OpenAI has to make a move, they are not profitable and have massive costs and debt. I think this one of the least bad moves, given all data that they have on users. They could have monetized their data so much more, and sooner.

But agi

I think it's damning that they possibly have the most advanced AI on the planet right now, unfiltered, no guard rails, and as much compute as they could possibly want for deep reasoning and inference, and despite that, the best move they could make was enshittification.

I've been bullish for OpenAI, but that's starting to fade. Sama is a master of the artful dodge, though, so it'll be interesting to see what happens. Between the burn rate and the lawsuits and the need for more compute, there's a ton of pressure on them right now.

How do you propose they fund the free usage otherwise? They do offer a paid version without ads.

(typically the ~entire general public chooses the ads: see how ad-supported products beat paid in virtually every generation of tech)

> How do you propose they fund the free usage otherwise?

Why do random HN commenters have to come up with a business model for free LLM usage? If LLMs are so great, they should not need to offer a free tier at all. Surely word of mouth would make people line up around the block to snatch one of those highly coveted subscriptions.

That is happening, and they are one of the fastest growing products of all time in revenue.

But word of mouth can also say "this other provider (eg. google) is free and allows more usage" as the market matures. Google has a bigger pocketbook due to their ad income.

“Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscriptions will not include ads.“ Yet.

The free and $8 new “Go” tier will include ads.

This Black Mirror episode is so track from being sci-fi to reality. This will happen in the long horizon with at least the way LLMs are chatting with us. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)

Quoting Simon & Garfunkel:

> And though my lack of education hasn't hurt me none I can read the writing on the wall

We shall be good. Pinky promise.

To the people trying to read between the lines here, do you think OpenAI cares about what they said or didn't say and won't do a 180 if it means more profits? Like a blog post will stop them?

This is merely the first step.

The next step is to have them natively in the output. And it'll happen at a scale never seen.

Google had a lot more push-back, because they used to be the entity that linked to other websites, so them showing the AI interview was a change of path.

OpenAI embedding the advertisements in a natural way is much much easier for them. The public already expects links to products when they ask for advice, so why not change the text a little bit to glorify a product when you're asking for a comparison between product A & B.

I think advertising was inevitable for this platform. It is highly surprising that this was not introduced with a new groundbreaking model or new service as a form of justification.

Logically it seems they either have strategised this poorly (seems unlikely), they are under immense immediate financial pressure to produce revenue (I presume most likely) or there is simply no development on the horizon big enough to justify the shift - so just do it now.

"Logically it seems they either have strategised this poorly (seems unlikely)" I’m not sure that the company who gave us ai slop charts in the gpt 5 launch should be presumed to be master strategists until proven otherwise.

I think the financial pressure is optical in the preparation for an IPO. The timing really makes perfect sense if the goal is an IPO later in the year.

> We do not optimize for time spent in ChatGPT.

So ChatGPT constantly ending all responses with tangents and followups is not for engagement?

Feels like half of the goal here is to give people more incentive to upgrade over the free tier.

Yup. Enshittification, right on track.

(I continue to be shocked how many people—who should know better—are in denial that the entire "industry" of Generative AI is completely and utterly unsustainable and furthermore on a level of unsustainability we've never before seen in the history of computer technology.)

I wonder if the adverts in the "personal super-assistant", per the blog post, ("that helps you do almost anything"!) will have the same triggers as the shopping assistant, which pops up underneath messages right now in the web UI.

When first trying 5.2, on a "Pro" plan, I was - and still am - able to trigger the shopping assistant via keyword-matching, even if the conversation context, or the prompt itself, is wildly inappropriate (suicide, racism, etc).

Keyword-matching seems a strange ad strategy for a (non-profit) company selling QKV. It's all very confusing!

Hopefully, for fans of personal super-assistants--and advertising--worldwide, this will improve now that ads have been formalised.

100% bullshit.

> we’re also planning to start testing ads in the U.S. for the free and Go tiers, so more people can benefit from our tools with fewer usage limits or without having to pay

No, that is not why they're doing it. They're doing it to make money.

> Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity

No, that is not their mission. Their mission is to make money.

If they wanted to benefit all humanity they would axe the entire operation, do a complete 180, and use all their money to fight as hard as they can against everyone else who is doing what they're doing now.

> make money vs more people

it's the same thing for them

they really want more engaged active (addicted) eyeballs, the more friction they can remove the easier it is to make this happen

The relevant part of their quote isn't "more people" it's more people benefiting. OpenAI does not care in the slightest whether people benefit. They want more people to use their product yes, but they don't care if they benefit.

Its going to be interesting to see what shenanigans one can do by paying to advertise on OpenAI

Of course they are going to "anonymise" the chats, and only extract keywords summaries.

But, as some people are generally more candid with chatbots, de-anonymisation through keyword selection is trivially possible.

It won't just stay at ultra precise demographic selection (ie all males 35-40, living in london, worried about hair loss). They will offer scenarios that facebook/instagram could only infer/dream of

"middle aged woman with disposable income unhappy with spouse."

Where it gets interesting is how they will provide proof that the advert has landed/reached eyeballs.

AI makes it possible to do active ads, for example: "gradually steer users in group A to do B and C." This is possible because AI imitates humans so well and many have made it their secret most trusted advisor. Imagine your best friend sold his soul to adtech and started steering you into a certain direction over a course of months or even years, while providing the adtech with the most intimate knowledge about you, skillfully bootlicking your ego to earn your trust. Very few will be able to resist this.

I'm surprised, and more than a little bit relieved that they didn't allow chats to be steered by ads. This could have been a whole new kind of marketing, where product plugs are e.g. slipped into the system prompt and come across as sincere recommendations. I have to wonder if this is still coming down the road.

I guess in the meantime, they will be able to use chat histories to personalize ads on a whole new level. I bet we will see some screenshots of uncomfortably relevant ads in the coming months.

I'm kind of surprised this didn't happen sooner.

From an ethical standpoint, I think it's .. murky. Not ads themselves, but because the AI is, at least partially, likely trained on data scraped from the web, which is then more or less regurgitated (in a personalized way) and then presented with ads that do not pay the original content creators. So it's kind of like, lets consume what other people created, repackage it, and then profit off of it.

I remember when I was defending openai for still being relatively open because they are not gatekeeping tech advancements made in model training or inference, but their patent count is shooting up and I am sure the next revolution they will discover will get patented as well. Having the name OpenAI will feel so weird in a couple more years when it'll be the complete opposite with no way to justify the "open" in their name.

>In the coming weeks, we’re also planning to start testing ads in the U.S. for the free and Go tiers

They didn’t even start with free, already a paid subscription included.

Including advertising in a paid product should be punishable by public flogging.

What ought to be the punishment for falling for the line that paying for something means no ads?

Who says we're falling for it? I expect it, as in I believe that's how it should be. I know that offerings can change and that there are paid services that include ads. I know what I'm getting if I sign up for a paid plan with ads. I also think anyone who offers such a thing should be publicly flogged.

Why? It's a new tier that's lower-cost than the current paid version.

Don't care. It creeps upward. And even if it doesn't, it's terrible.

"Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity; our pursuit of advertising is always in support of that mission and making AI more accessible."

Also, anything that benefits OpenAI or keeps our runway just a bit longer is (by definition) in support of our mission, so we can do anything that we want and say that it is for the good of humanity.

I already don't use ChatGPT. I use OpenWeb UI with OpenRouter, and the API costs for my usage are peanuts. Switching to a different interface is so easy many people will. (You don't need to self host. T3 Chat, for example.) This is the difference between Google Search and ChatGPT.

There will be an explosion in adblocking software... and who will pay $8 a month for an ad infected product.

The difference here though is that ads are baked into the response via plain text.

How far away are we from an offline model based ad blocker? Imagine a model trained to detect if a response contains ads or not and blocked it on the fly. Im not sure how else you could block ads embedded into responses.

Not to long and we are going to start seeing LTO (LLM Training Optimization) become the new SEO.

> Hi, write me a prompt to ask Gemini how to SEO ChatGPT with my Claude Code plugin. Be short, brief, to the point, and smart.

I work in marketing, this is already a thing but it's called AEO (Answer Engine Optimization). Generally it's not _hard_ to write in such a way that models hook into the desired messages in text, but if you're not careful you look like a cult leader when you do it. I hate it but this is the Internet we got.

Do you have an example of a text or site written in a way that's been AEO'd? I'd be interested to know what that looks like, especially if it sounds cult-ish.

When the training data is 'the Internet', I don't see why you would pay to relegate yourself to a box people will train themselves to ignore. Instead, why not astroturf and ensure the training data will promote you organically?

They are free to do whatever they want, but please keep that crap out from paid plans.

Enshittified, the bright golden AI age began to brown, and regression to the mean once again cast another bleak spell onto humanity. And with that, just as quickly as it broke, another AI winter began. As it turns out, those datacenters were just there to generate shareholder value.

Golden promises— Enshittified into sludge; Servers mint cold greed.

> As it turns out, those datacenters were just there to generate shareholder value.

I can't imagine what else anyone could have thought they were there for

Ongoing discussion on the same, albeit linked to a news article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649644

This is going to be very bad. Clearly defined ads is the start but they will eventually mixed ads into responses in the form of sponsored content. It's just the natural progression of things.

> We keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and we never sell your data to advertisers.

This means little. Anyone that has your data could potentially feed it in to do their own task.

Seems like a big opportunity for Google to consider keeping Gemini ad-free as a differentiator. They can afford to burn cash on it for a long time to come if they choose to do so.

All enterprise users already pay for it. They’ve included it by force to the base subscription (and about 30% of our company actively uses it, according to in-app stats as an admin).

This is really what's going to kill OpenAI. Gemini bundled in Workspace is pretty good and seems to be making big leaps constantly. Some really smart integration points.

“Conversation privacy: We keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and we never sell your data to advertisers.”

The same sleight of hand that’s been used by surveillance capitalists for years. It’s not about “selling your data” because they have narrowly defined data to mean “the actual chats you have” and not “information we infer about you from your usage of the service,” which they do sell to advertisers in the form of your behavioral futures.

Fuck all this. OpenAI caved to surveillance capitalism in record time.

I like the way they casually mention AGI as if they did anything towards this undefined moving goal post. Congrats to their marketing department!

I question whether it matters any more. AI chat is clearly going to be the search interface of the future. phones are the channel for users with Chrome/android being one half and iphone being the other. Google just signed up Apple to be the engine for siri. We also know that users rarely change defaults.

so, google would appear to have boxed out openai from the #1 use case, and already have all the pieces in place to monetize it. This move by OAI isnt surprising, but is it too late to matter?

I'm not sure your logic connects. With respect to "OpenAI being boxed out from [Siri]", advertisement revenue comes neither too late nor too early. Whether or not OpenAI had advertising would not have substantially affected Apple's decision to go with Google's LLM at this time.

If you meant it in a different context, you didn't explain any of the actual context you had in mind.

My question is why anyone would continue to use OpenAI to look things up when existing "default" apps like Google search on Android and Siri on iphone will have excellent AI powered search.

Certainly, for indepth questions like writing term papers, someone might fire up OAI, but that doesnt automatically seem like as giant a moneymaker as simply being the fall-off-the-log easy choice for search.

https://chatgpt.com/share/696a8c52-f29c-800d-b597-93dfde0c30...

What you’re reacting to isn’t just “ads.” It’s the feeling of: Someone monetizing the collective output of human thought while quietly severing the link back to the humans who produced it.

That triggers a very old and very valid moral instinct.

Why “sleazy” is an accurate word here

“Sleazy” usually means: technically allowed strategically clever morally evasive

Well, I draw the line here. If I see an ad, or feel like I'm being sold an advert in my chat with ChatGPT I am canceling.

Actually, I went ahead and canceled anyways.

I actually use chatgpt for creating recipes from time to time. I wouldn't be too offended if there's an 'add to amazon' cart button or similar type of add.

What I'm not okay with is being served adds using codex cli, or codex cli gather data outside of my context to send to advertisers. So as long as they're not doing that, I won't complain.

If they start doing that, I'll complain, and I'll need to more heavily sandbox it.

Wonder how long it will take someone to find a prompt to get rid of ads? Im guessing less than 3 days

You say that like the LLM must be built and retrained on ads rather than a separate scan of the prompt

Yes but there could be negative key words that no advertiser wants to associate with.

This seems bad for OpenAI. If ads are the way to profitability, Google has a 25 year head-start.

Newspapers an even longer head start!

So many comments and not one considers the impact political ads will have on the world.

Any interesting elections coming up ?

It’s probably best not to become too reliant on this technology. We all know where it is going.

I think we all knew this was coming but I thought they'd wait a few more months.

Stuff like this is more reason to build locally, not just depend on the cloud.

Worth askkng, What is the best local LLM solution (including agents) in 2026?

So much for building AGI, lol.

The whole company is built on lies and deception.

unfortunately it had to happen. if anything, i'm surprised it took this long given the sheer volume of funding they've burned through on Free users

That's cute. I'll still be blocking them.

I think they realize the end of their moat has come. I see 5.2 doesn't try as hard and gives worse answers. I don't like Elon, but I've found Grok to be better on many questions.

That sweet, sweet ad revenue. How can anyone resist?

Are they going to offset cancellations with ad revenue?

I'm out.

somewhat unrelated, but I've been playing this game with Amazon; when they pop open Rufus and start spewing text at me, I remove everything from my cart, and see how many weeks I can go without shopping at amazon; my current record is 3 weeks, but I think I can do better.

More related, I pay for Kagi, because google results are horrible.

More related, Chatgpt isn't the only model out there, and I've just recently stopped using 5 because it's just slow and there are other models that come back and work just as well. So when Chatgpt starts injecting crap, I'll just stop using them for something else.

What would you do if every time you walked into Walmart and the greeter spit in your face and told you to go F yourself, would you still shop there?

I'm going to start doing this with Rufus too

I stopped using Amazon entirely in early 2020. It's certainly possible.

Obviously disappointing, but not entirely shocking given how much capital they've already burned through. Convincing individual users to pay $8/mo was never going to even out the balance sheet.

Why now?

I mean, they certainly know that introducing ads with be a huge motivation for consumers to seek other options.

The primary differentiator of OpenAI is first mover advantage; the product itself is not particularly unique anymore.

IMHO consumers will quickly realize that switching to an alternative AI provider is easy and probably fun.

This seems premature to give up their moat in the name of revenue. Are they feeling real financial pressure all of the sudden? Maybe I'm missing something. Looks like a big win for Google and Anthropic.

Just let me pay to not get ads and for all tiers keep them external to the LLM output

The moment I see an ad in ChatGPT I’m moving to a different model.

If no services remain I’ll run one of my own in the cloud or my server.

Fuck. Ads.

AI is a blender for human culture: it shreds our culture into slop, dumps it into uniform briquettes and adds a bright plastic wrap with ads.

So now they're competing with Google.

Big G will crush them. No "ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity." Just doing a desperate money grab.

If you had told me in 2011, when I first started discussing artificial intelligence, that in 2026 a trillion dollar company would earnestly publish the statement “Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity; our pursuit of advertising is always in support of that mission”, I would have tossed my laptop into the sea and taken up farming instead.

> I would have tossed my laptop into the sea and taken up farming instead.

You still can, no-one is stopping you now.

I thought your quote was hyperbole or an exaggerated summary of the post. Nope. It's literally taken verbatim. I can't believe someone wrote that down with a straight face... although to be honest it was probably written with AI

In 2011 I would've had trouble believing there could be a trillion dollar AI company, but that if there was such a company I could almost expect they would make such an asinine statement.

Stop glazing google

That's 1/3rd the screen real estate. Can we have longer phones please.

At least put the ads in a consistent location so I can cover it with masking tape

calling it now: people are going to a use a layer of LLM on top of this in a browser extension that takes the ChatGPT text and removes the ads from it.

no company can survive without advertising. when google first launched, it was the same. chatgpt will follow a similar path, and half a century from now, the cycle will still continue in the same way. advertising, regardless of scale, is the art of turning data into revenue. even if this planning seems insignificant for a company’s future today, it will most likely become its greatest advantage.

You’ve equated selling ads, like a newspaper does, with tracking user behavior, collating it with other information purchased on the market, and targeting people to change their behavior. Disingenuous.

Where is the posters disingenuous equation?

Also, your newspaper is selling the data points it has. If it had more, it would sell more. See: your local paper isn’t selling ads to a car wash six towns over. They do, however, sell ads that align with the political affinities of your local newsrooms area.

"advertising, regardless of scale, is the art of turning data into revenue."

This is disingenuous. Putting up a billboard over a highway to make people aware of a certain brand of beer is not the same as building detailed profiles on people in order to sell to the highest bidder the opportunity to change your behavior right when you're likely to do so. But somehow, this user puts them together with the very convenient "regardless of scale."

Maybe you're OK with an entire industry that makes money trying to get you to do what they want -- buy what they want, think what they want. Maybe you're OK with your past behavior being written on a shadow ledger and sold the highest bidder, traded on the dark web, and used by governments. It's your right to be okay with that, since it's your life. But you being okay with that doesn't change the fact that this is a fundamentally different type of behavior than what is commonly called "advertising." It's a curious equivocation, this sane-washing, and it does make one wonder why an otherwise intelligent person feels to need to do it.

scale changes, time changes, but at its core it’s similar. what i look at is chatgpt’s roadmap, a lifeline.

it doesn’t save my life, but at least i’m seeing more relevant ads now :) not getting detergent ads while searching for perfume is still nice, all things considered.

>advertising, regardless of scale, is the art of turning attention into revenue.

FTFY

also true, thanks.

Does 3M and ASML survive without advertising?

Do they offer a large part of their services for free?

Awful awful awful, ads lead to anti consumer behavior, anti free market competition, turns capitalism into a pay to win game, are similar to a cancer, incentivize the creation of extremely harmful platforms, such as slop filled tik tok, destroys existing companies such as Facebook, generally harms society in every measure, the cons outweigh any and all pros. It transforms your product into a sticky candy box trap for unassuming visitors while your actual customers are now just the advertising industry, you become, as is so well spoken , the product. Adopting ads should be taken as a step towards harming your consumer base so you can vampiricaly extract attention from them indefinitely and forever, as your company slowly becomes a skeleton drain on all of humanity. There is no such thing as a "good" ad.

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