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Comment by rm445 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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.

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