OpenAI will start testing ads in ChatGPT free and Go tiers | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI will start testing ads in ChatGPT free and Go tiers

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21 pointsjcfrei13 comments

> Responses in ChatGPT will not be influenced by ads.

> Your conversations are private from advertisers

But presumably your requests and ChatGPT’s responses will guide what ads users see. Whilst conversations might be private from advertisers - the products that are suitable for the user would be shared.

If a user asks ChatGPT “what oil should I put in my Honda civic”. ChatGPT can search for suitable products but the page will also be showing ads for motor oil - presumably Honda civic motor oil.

I’m using Amp as my main coding agent (outside of work), and they have free mode with ads. It used to be that free mode let you used it with lower cost models like GLM, Kimi K2, etc. but recently they they switched that to a daily $10 limit but with Opus 4.5.

Was curious whether ads would cover the cost of inference, so a bit of napkin math.

They seem to display ~3 ads per minute, on tech products, presumably with pretty good signal and intent based on recent chat history. Not the most up to date on CPM but based on some basic searches we assume $30 per thousand impressions, that’s about 9c per minute and ~$5 per hour. Of course users aren’t always looking at the agent coding, but averaged out over say 3 hours of usage per day, that kinda covers the cost. The $10 per day limit is probably related to average daily session use.

On ChatGPT showing an ad per conversation with good signal and intent audiences could have pretty high CPM or CPC too, easily $0.01 to $0.10 per conversation? I think that’s easily sufficient to cover the API pricing for ChatGPT 5.2 instant or mini thinking for the majority of users queries.

OpenAI is desperate to recover the billions of dollars they've spent.

They shouldn’t have turned away Apple then!

The only acceptable response to this was to delete my account. AI is free if you know where to look and build your own models.

They’re in a tough spot. Stuck between free open-weights models and competitors with deep pockets and access to customers.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649577

Enshittification seems to be accelerating. Humanity will reach an advertising singularity long before a technological singularity.

Come on man, putting ads is not enshittification. Haven't you used the Internets 20 years ago? It was a decent way to live for the webmaster in those good old times when most of the traffic was from humans.

> Come on man, putting ads is not enshittification.

Sure man, until ads became unbearable and intrusive. The good old times are gone. This is the future.

There are a lot of examples of enshittification. Putting advare was never enshittification, no matter how intrusive they are. They are never unbearable. There are a lot of thing tangential to ads which is enshittification, for example dark patterns.

But if the alternative of ads is communism it is not enshittification.

My dude adding ads to a free product after locking people into using it for free is LITERALLY the example used by Doctorow in his original article[1] that COINED the term “enshittification”. It couldn’t be more accurate if you tried.

[1] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai

is this why elon want take over openai?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com