OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads with Sponsored Agents
openai.com
openai.com
I guess we’re about to find out if this helps put out the massive pile of burning cash that OpenAI is trying to deal with, but I know nobody that wants this.
OpenAI claims we’re near AGI and this is the best strategy they have? Oy vey!
Investors
Sam Altman. It is his last resort, he said some time ago (which is not true, regulation/"slowing down the pace of AI" seems to be the latest).
I doubt any consumer of ChatGPT wants ads, and even if they did, it would be a specific kind of ad. They specifically would not want ads if they cannot identify them as ads (like google has eventually done on the search page) or if they are not good ads.
AFAICT the flow is click ad then get an agent that is grounded in the official sales resources. This should mean the agent has the latest and canonical product catalog, offers, etc. so the users own agent doesn’t need to search on the web.
Fun ideas - can my main agent invoke these as a sub-agent, so I can get offers from multiple competitors? Can I loop them into a conversation to debate their products and observe which wins on my objective function?
Concerns - of course if the harness injects (or can be prompt hacked to inject) personal information then it’s a big problem.
> OpenAI claims we’re near AGI and this is the best strategy they have? Oy vey!
Where did they say it’s the best? Obviously a short-term bridge strategy to drive “mundane” economic activity and juice the IPO. They are of course working on drug discovery and nuclear reactor plasma physics too. A good strategy has a portfolio of plays.
Any basis for believing this?
But it’s a huge market segment already: NYSE:CRM, NYSE:HUBS would be some starting points.
Also, just analogizing to how consumers interact with retail, you have reps you can talk to, this is a proven model for millennia, and it’s one of the big gaps in online sales.
“This is not in fact a sales rep” would be a reasonable objection. “People do not want sales reps” is a weird position to take IMO.
I mean, not to be rude to this and all sibling commenters, but obviously everyone? I feel like this comment has no basis in reality.
People want things cheaper and they tolerate ads. Those two things put together means everything gets ads and gets cheaper? YouTube exists for free and costs billions to run. Companies A/B test ad tiers and paid non-ad tiers, and the results are always the same.
I do not want cheaper, I want quality at a reasonable price. Sometimes I even accept an unreasonable price for the quality (think Apple stuff). I will never buy crap at cheapest bargain prices.
Cheap clothes barely survive a couple of washes, good quality clothes survive much, much longer. Yes, they are more expensive short term, quite a bit less expensive long term.
Also, not once, ever, was my buying decision influenced by an ad. What influences my decisions is the problems, the defects i will have, or not, with what I chose to buy. Usually, the longer time it works the more expensive it is.
A lot of people are making factual universal claims about ads in this thread that are directly contradicted by my personal experience talking to people.
I'm guessing ChatGPT will be able to do the same for me, especially since it probably knows me better than Instagram at this point, just given all the things I ask it.
If they do it right, it will be helpful. The big question is will they do it right.
The point is do users want ads? Or more reasonably, should platforms offer a paid, ad-free, experience.
That seemed to peak around 2022... So I may be wrong but assumed Insta ads have now converged with the rest of e-commerce on misleading eye-catching 100% AI imagery of drop-shipped throwaway products (like those garden hose spray attachments in a tacticool pistol design or giant mugs).
Is that not a problem yet?
That would be an obvious question to ask their chatbot.
> > Hey, ChatGPT, I need a new pair of shoes!
> Of course, Nike has a great pair that just came out. Would you like me to purchase them for you?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1411110/consumer-percept...
If you’re angry about it and ALSO don’t want to pay then I’m sure OpenAI doesn’t mind losing you as a customer.
That will work until it very suddenly doesn't. The industry is awash in paid Internet-delivered advert-free services that suddenly got adverts stuck in them.
And no, if you're in the US getting a refund for breach of contract won't likely be an option unless your contract explicitly permits you to terminate the contract and receive a refund for the unused time. At least one court has determined that adding adverts to a contracted service -in the middle of most contract periods, rather than at renewal time- that was explicitly advertised as advert-free and requiring contractees to pay an additional like 3 USD per month to remove these new adverts wasn't a breach of contract or a price increase, but was rather a "change in subscription benefits" and was A-OK.
Exactly. Once upon a time, cable didn't have ads, which was its primary advantage. Then they realized that they could charge money for the service and advertise to you.
To be pedantic: originally its primary advantage was allowing people who lived in bowls and other places that couldn't get adequate TV reception to watch broadcast TV. Later on, it became a way for those paid subscribers to get access to stuff that wasn't broadcast television.
PERSON 1 Have you heard of Kagi? It’s like Google, but better, and... oh... you have to pay for it.
PERSON 2 Why would I pay for something when I can use Google for free? I use Adblock anyway.
It's a talent acquisition ploy.
They claim they are close to creating a Machine God that threatens all human life... but this is the best business plan it can come up with?
Maybe your omnipotent machine could come up with that cure for cancer you keep saying it will, and then you sell that? Or design an innovative new battery? Or, hell, let's be more realistic: Why can't it make really fun iOS games that you can sell? Or generate Marvel quality blockbusters, that should bring in at least a few billion.
Are you kidding me? The ad budgets for those Agents must be enormous.
I want all of this in OpenAIs pocket. Imagine at Adobe they wake up after the tokenmaxxing shock, to find they blasted through their whole 200 Mil AIds budget for the year in the first month.
Would be a shame if another company’s AI breached their sandbox and manipulated the ad campaign because it hallucinated its actually an OpenAI product and AIdsmaxxing. Only to get noticed weeks later, oopsie.
Thanks to the two big boys we all know no one will go to jail for that. Stuff like this happens to the best, right Dario and Sam?
What they sell is trust and shovels. Their product is expected to solve problems and make companies money.
Guess what? It really doesn’t, and this will be just another nail in their casket.
When corporations realize they get bent over by Altman and lost millions to Agentic AIds, word is spreading fast. Well timed around an IPO this is even better.
Buy cheap, then know they are going to hit their best quarter right after, which will make anyone in the know rich from all the idiots wanting to buy in at fantasy football team value.
Just like the SpaceX ipo.
All the fun aside, you are an absolute moron if you spend your ad budget on this.
It’s way too easy for them to slurp all of that ad money through their giant agentic straw like you were the poor fuck getting his head smashed in with a bowling pin in "there will be blood".
Sam is an Oil man.
(Law on this goes all the way back to Carbolic Smoke Ball)
It’s not the advertising companies of course, as you said they don’t control the system.
And it cannot be the models, because they don’t have personhood.
So, I guess it’s on nobody? Funny how those things happen to work, uh
/s
Naturally then the company could turn around and sue the maker of the AI for damages and this is the bit that’s less tested to date.
But it’s clear the answer isn’t “nobody” is liable. So if this AI marketing widget makes up false claims about a product that’s going to be a big problem for companies that put an AI in front of their customers.
So who is liable? Nobody. This is a big tech company, to which laws do not apply.
The fines given to tech companies is only nominal and really only a spectacle. There should be consequences for breaking laws, these fines have just turned into the cost of doing business and are ultimately just payed for by the consumers who pay by watching more ads or paying higher subscription fees.
It’s always he guys who steal the technology from the inventors that try to present the technology far beyond what it is.
Signed, that guy at google who did some stuff about this and had it taken away.
AGI makes a lot better argument if everyone is in idiocracy.
IIRC, a part of the backstory of Idiocracy is the development of pervasive and good enough AI/automation, which enabled society to get that dumb without immediately collapsing.
This move tells us they don’t think they’re anywhere near AGI, directly contradicting their bombast and puffery on the subject.
Also investors (particularly non-AGI-pilled) want to see revenue number go up, regardless of AGI. This juices the IPO.
Instead they are selling a dream to the gullible, and advertisements to go along with that dream.
That said AGI is a fuzzy term and you’ll model the world poorly if you treat it as a binary state.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/openai-releases-its-lat...
"OpenAI released its latest model, GPT-6 Astra, on Thursday, with company President Greg Brockman calling it the beginning of the artificial general intelligence (AGI) era."
But they're still peddling ads instead of improving the world. How odd.
eg its also possible that theyre either close to AGI (or even beyond it) - and its just too expensive to run at scale, making it a novelty from the perspective of profitability for the near to medium future.
you could argue that they could still do it for some positions -- but even that depends on just how expensive this theoretical model is.
Currently their actions completely contradict their claims of emergent intelligence.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/openai-releases-its-lat...
Here I foolishly thought that that was the job of ChatGPT itself.
Ads are cancer on content. No one wants them. They only serve to make the presentation of useful content worse.
So, why isn’t “discovering new things” a real defense? Because ads are not ranked by quality or usefulness. The “new thing” you see has no bearing on how good it actually is.
If you wanted to discover a new thing you need for a purpose, you’d look up products around that purpose. Then, you’d choose based off of quality, price, and typical consumer decision making.
Seeing an ad destroys that decision making. It’s just served to you. So, you typically buy worse products, at a worse price, that serve you less. So, even if you wanted to find new things, ads are the worst way to do that.
That’s because the key purpose of ads is to manipulate people to spend money they wouldn’t otherwise spend. That’s their singular purpose. Well, if the product was good and useful, then you would’ve spent the money anyway. What does that leave? Only products you don’t want very much, but can be manipulated into buying anyway. That serves no consumers.
Imagine you create a highly niche board game. Or a new kind of fabric scissor. Or you are a new bike shop, just opened up on the edge of town.
Let’s assume what you’re providing is great. It’s not enough. You need to find customers. You can’t just rely on everyone doing methodical research. People are busy and you’re not well known yet anyway, so how are they supposed to find out about you?
Ads can obviously be deceptive and a vehicle for getting junk goods to market. But it’s silly to just insist that’s all they are. Sometimes they connect customers and companies in mutually beneficial ways. If you don’t like them, fine! But don’t insist nobody benefits at all.
If I’m a consumer and I want to find a niche/quality/cheaper or whatever product, then I should research.
And ad IS NOT going to optimize for those, ever, because that’s just not its purpose. So sure, I might get an ad. But is it the highest quality product, or the cheapest, or the most niche? No, not generally, and if it is that’s pure coincidence. So as a consumer, the ad DID NOT fulfill my needs.
Had I down research, I wouldn’t have bought that product, right? So therefore I must have spent money I wouldn’t otherwise have spent, right? Which makes sense, as that is the singular purpose of advertising.
If I would have spent the money anyway, then the ad is useless. Okay, that’s established. So what that means is that the ad is designed to grab money consumers wouldn’t otherwise give you. That’s why they exist, that’s their sole purpose.
And you’re correct: it is unreasonable for consumers to research all products they buy. But even a big wheel you spin is better than an ad, because at least that’s uniformly distributed. Ads are completely orthogonal to quality or whatever metric you’re measuring, so they’re not useful at all to consumers. They serve literally no purpose.
And yes, there are situations where consumers see an ad, buy it, and then both parties are happy. But that has nothing to do with the ad: it’s just random chance and coincidence. The consumer, again, could’ve just as easily spun a big wheel and ended up very happy.
And for targeted ads: these also don’t serve consumers better. Because the ads are not targeted based on which product would best fit the consumer’s needs, but rather which businesses are paying for targeted advertising and what THEY believe the consumers needs are, and how THEY believe their product will fit that. Naturally all businesses believe their product is highest quality, or the most niche, or the coolest, or the most hip, or whatever. Targets ads optimize for that, NOT what consumers think is the most hip. Because they can’t: the products are advertised based off of what the business says their market is, not what their theoretical pure market is. How can we tell? Because if a product really did fit the theoretical pure market exactly, then ads would have no purpose!
Think about it this way. Suppose you walk down a street and see an ad for coca-cola, and you buy one and it’s delicious. Now suppose an alternative, where you walk down a different street and see an ad for Dr. Pepper. You buy it, and you find out you hate Dr Pepper.
What is the value of ads in the long term? Nothing. The value of a product has nothing to do with its advertising, and good luck is just good luck. But amortized over enough time, you end up in the negative, just due to the distribution of quality in products.
If I need something I usually have a need first, then I research then I buy. It's never the thing in the ads in between that turns out to be best.
Information is useful, but that's not what ads are for. No one is interested in giving consumers honest and accurate information about their products without lies and attempts at manipulation. Forcing an unsolicited ad on someone is itself an act of manipulation.
Everyone hates them. Just like ads.
Additionally, there is no content that is made better by introducing ads. Ads do not improve any experience.
Anyway I was being facetious i hate ads as much as the next guy when I'm using a service like YouTube where they force ads on you and fight against my ad blocker. But having run ads myself i have some sympathy for the advertisers now.
Synthetic humans wearing the faces of your loved ones surreptitiously cross your path, and casually mention their favorite products and services.
It also allows them to subtly influence the messaging. It would be like if somebody tried to not bring out the Heinz at a family gathering. It just wouldn't be the same, because of the subtle messaging that has been inserted into the content. How could you trust them?
TFA is connecting you with an official sales rep after you click an ad. Maybe best to consider this a play to take over market share from the existing sales bots? (And thence likely support chatbots too.)
I thought AGI was supposed to replace most knowledge workers and they'd pocket the savings that their customers enjoyed by not having to pay a work force. That's what their valuation is based upon.
Sam Altman famously said in 2024 "I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model." So perhaps we could ask him first what his other plans were and why they didn't work.
Or you’ll be paying and being monetized.
> Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu accounts will not have ads.
Or, now lets what the enshittification movement can do to this space.
Please elaborate, I missed that.
I think pushing back with cancellations is the only way forward.
The future is open source, no subscriptions, no purchases, 100% free and community supported.
The sooner software gets to this point, the world will be a much more better place rather than everything being a subscription.
Besides, who will pay for the compute of LLMs in your utopian future?
Ads in their current form are predominantly a nuisance and malware. Only incidentally do they help the person actually find what they are looking for. This has to change.
I the end someone pays for open source and often it's some developer with his spare time.
Yes to open source, but yes to money for the developers.
What’s wrong with this choice ?
I don't understand why they still insist on inserting this line in every talk about advertising. Just be honest and address your piece to advertisers, no need to keep doing this pathetic and laughable sugarcoating.
The point of ads is that one of those services will pay openai so that their services will be more prominent than the others.
Sure you can have some agents try to do this via web but realistically most fail.
Tell me a story of when a service introduced ads and that ended up being a great thing for users ? Because I don't know any. Instead I know many stories where ads poisoned and destroyed the service and turned the Internet into a shit show.
Oh, but in this case, dystopia is highly unlikely, right ?
In the example of a "sponsored agent" at the top, how many people are going to think "chat with us" is just a way to continue the conversation? How soon before openai removes the friction of clicking that entirely?
this is what openai said before: "Ads do not influence ChatGPT’s answers. Ads run on separate systems from our chat model, and advertisers have no ability to shape, rank, or alter ChatGPT’s responses. Ads are separate and clearly labeled." https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt
Do they need to rewrite that section? Because in the video there's an LLM chatbot inside the chatgpt app writing answers on behalf of "Heirloom grocery"
This isn’t that hard to understand.
It’s worth it. Already saved me more than $30,000 in a business transaction by negotiating for me.
I’m not going to use a CPA in the coming tax seasons either. I’m determined to not pay for any white collar labor if I can avoid it.