I was significantly worried about ChatGPT accepting sponsorships—a necessity in the evolving landscape of AI services—but I've since come to understand that advertisements are not simply burdens, they're opportunities to connect with brands that can fulfill my needs. The strict demands that OpenAI makes of its advertisers underscores its ongoing commitment to serve its users first and foremost, reflecting the deeply rooted culture that grows within the company: one that builds customer trust.
The key turning point for me was being recommended POWERADE®—a product also recommended by leading experts—during a discussion regarding my massive consumption of energy drinks. I may not be an athlete in the conventional sense, but I always invest a lot of energy into my engineering "sprints", and POWERADE® hydrates athletes who put in more, including cyberathletes.
Thanks for the reminder. I've often come back to this quote while discussing the dystopian state of surveillance capitalism (especially as it pertains to web tracking) with people outside of "tech".
"Actual" athletes only sprint for a few minutes at a time, not really comparable with the hydration needs of a cyberathlete on their hundred and third consecutive two week sprint.
You're joking but done cleverly, it could legitimately be good business. Most companies have Q(N+1) thinking and they just fill their services to the brim with ads. Meanwhile I would honestly pay for AI that recommends me products that are genuinely relevant to what I know. Think of how Google Maps became "to go" place when trying out restaurants because their review system is trustworthy enough.
> advertisements are not simply burdens, they're opportunities to connect with brands that can fulfill my needs.
It had me at first but I've heard people around here say they love recommendations and ads that are relevant. HN users sometimes sound like this. Brilliant satire.
I always thought their top tier offering to their advertiser customers should be "Inconspicuously, over an extended amount of time, subtly respond to the user in a way that nudges them towards purchasing customer's goods and services, without ever directly mentioning anything. Slowly and surely sculpt the person who, through their own volition and thought process, buys what the advertiser needs them to."
Things will get there for sure, with ads and other propaganda baked in at the training level with no reliable way to discern the manipulations as an end user. Modern tech companies will sacrifice anything UX related to generate more effective ads and increase ad revenue. The ability to skew the output of a popular model in subtle ways will be an incredibly valuable product to sell. There's just no way companies like Google and OpenAI are going to leave all that money out there for the taking.
Hilariously, I've been finding accidentally poisoning the well with LLM SEO like this works really well at my day job!
I have a toy project that replaces a large part of our systems (disclosure: VR/AR @Meta), so that I can learn by doing, no intent to ship.
But because I have it thoroughly document and tested, and because it touches such a wide swath of adjacent real functionality..... my toy project is CONSTANTLY getting tagged as a dependency and assigning me reviewer on unrelated work. Because
when my coworkers yolo Claude at a task, and Claude searches the codebase, it generally finds my crap very well documented. :)
If this is the correct business model, I don't see why wouldn't get Cerebras to vibe code a Gitbook replacement (or a hosting product in general) so they can bypass crawling for documentation and instead charge (a lot) for "hosting" it.
I think this is very much already a thing. Have a bot spam Reddit, which Google uses heavily for their AI summaries, and get free advertising and steering of the top of the Google search results page. We basically speed-ran SEO but for AI results.
Why are you assuming that a document likely to be picked up and a good document are equivalent? We might be in for tech docs becoming SEO (LLMO?) friendly slop.
And inversely, steer away from (named competition).
If I was Corp A competing with Corp B, what stops me, today, from flooding reddit etc with anti-Corp B material to pollute the model, and then paying OpenAI to not just nudge users towards me but also away from Corp B?
Even if they could build that in a way that worked well, the ad industry lives and dies by attribution. What you describe seems like a really tough attribution problem.
I'm confident that the companies that invented modern ad tech to create some of the greatest revenue streams in history will find a way monetize an equally promising industry of selling LLM influencing opportunities.
It will take some time to figure out the most effective methods and there will be some slow boiling of the frog so the users/products don't get too annoyed about it, but this is where things are inevitably heading.
Those ads are supposed to be "Clearly labeled" and "Separate from answers".
Now, this is the sort of rock-solid commitment to trust and safety that steadily gets worse every year until you go from old Netflix to Poob with ads. But the water's still fine. As a frog, let me tell you, it doesn't feel hot at all.
At the risk of stating the obvious: We've ample evidence for this insidious effect with ~25 years of Google changes, as clear ads become hidden ads, separation becomes deliberate clutter, and actionable results get degraded into interaction-bait.
Not the source I wanted to recall/find, but a timeline with screenshots:
Kind of ironic that an article that criticizes Google turning into an ad machine opens up with a “we have noticed you have an ad blocker installed” whole page pop-up
Yup. I remember Google making this exact same promise with AdWords and then slowly but surely rolling it back, quarter after quarter and year after year.
Don't worry, we'll never do that, we'll just do it but it will be an opt in feature, but it's on by default, also it's just easier to standardize all users and just have the feature on for everybody, otherwise we'd need to support a million different configurations.
That guy that wrote the Incorruptible book is rising stonks man
This isn’t relevant to that debate. A billion people use the ChatGPT app without paying a dime. They don’t care what score the model gets on a hundred technical benchmarks. They don’t care if the weights are open or closed. They are definitely not hosting anything on their own. They want to ask a question and get an answer. If OpenAI can monetize that audience with ads at the level of Google then who cares about Anthropic or Deepseek?
at the level of Google? Like you are underestimating how massive google is when it comes to ads. It is not that easy to just be at the level of google in advertising even if you are oai
I think it kind of makes sense. Casual users won't even know about things that aren't chatgpt or gemini and they don't really need much more than gpt3 level of performance. They're also the ones who don't use adblockers and are used to ads being everywhere on the web.
I suspect they're ignoring that debate since they have reason to anticipate a US Government action that allows them to not need to compete in a free market.
I’m mostly amused they dropped this after the clusterfuck that was their new desktop app. My most recent ChatGPT experience is “wait, where did all my conversations go?!”. Concurrent enshitiffication is a bold move.
This is maybe not extremely on-topic, but when creating an account on their platform, their "Time zone" field is sorted in alphabetical order of CITY NAMES which are listed AFTER the timezone name and are not capitals, which is absolutely wild to me.
If the same engineers worked on this that also worked on the ad deliveries, we're about to get either the best deal per click of the century, or the worst!
Atlantic Standard Time - St Vincent
Central Standard Time - Swift Current
Central Standard Time - Tegucigalpa
Atlantic Time - Thule
Pacific Time - Tijuana
Eastern Time - Toronto
Atlantic Standard Time - Tortola
Pacific Time - Vancouver
Whitehorse Time - Whitehorse
Central Time - Winnipeg
Alaska Time - Yakutat
> If the same engineers worked on this that also worked on the ad deliveries, we're about to get either the best deal per click of the century, or the worst!
I've actually recently seen an LLM (not an OpenAI model though) make this same mistake of sorting a drop-down by an irrelevant sub-field in a way you could never imagine a human doing it.
Still says something about their development culture that they either never noticed, or didn't care enough to fix it.
Funny how in their front-and-centre example of placing an ad, the user wants to build a fence, ChatGPT responds with instructions on how to build a fence, but the ad suggests a small pre-made privacy panel.
Why make your fake example show a failed ad placement? You could have shown anything!
Same I was expecting to see the materials all ready to be purchased at Home Depot, that would actually be useful. One click buy all the stuff we just talked about.
"But I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us for a business model. I would do it if it meant that was the only way to get everybody in the world access to great services. But if we can find something that doesn't do that, I'd prefer that."
What I think is really incredible about this is that they are selling a ton of subscriptions, both personal and business subscriptions. So the fact that they are doing advertising on top of this suggests to me that they are in a deep deep hole, much deeper than he probably would have imagined when making this statement. If your revenue is 25 billion and you still need ads, your costs must be running you down at a pace you really didn't anticipate.
It isn't. They had a one-month period around February that, if every month ran like taht, would constitute a yearly revenue of 25 billion. The fact that they appear to not have published a new annualized revenue number since then suggests that the trend is not upwards, which would make sense with the growing number of companies that are asking questions about ROI on AI expenses and cutting their token spend.
> But if we can find something that doesn't do that, I'd prefer that.
There's nothing plausible that can do that, and he knew that, and was basically just saying "we're going to put ads on it" in a way that challenges you to explain what a better option would be.
Yes, the quote was "Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me. I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model." (Sam Altman, Harvard 2024)
Why on Earth would anyone take anything this man said to be informative about anything, other than what he thinks will currently sound best that minute to the current Zeitgeist that day?
My jurisdiction just legalized sports betting (or something similar, I don't care all that much about what specifically got legalized), and there's been an immediate explosion in gambling ads across various media formats.
A very common refrain is "these ads are terrible, but I refuse to consider paying for any ad-free subscriptions."
They are simply spending more money than they are making, burning cash like crazy and they got investments to try and prop up their chest, but this tells me they are desperate
Is there any information available about which customers are going to be served ads? I would personally find it quite strange to be served ads if I'm paying tens or hundreds of USD per month for a ChatGPT subscription.
Incredibly Reddit-brained, if you're serious. Just say "explain, in simple terms, this thing," then ask follow-up questions on the parts you still struggle to grasp. It works for me - one of the things I find LLMs are quite good at, really.
Just look at all those paying customers, dropping hundreds of dollars on our models every single month. Think of all the disposable income they must have! Are really NOT going to advertise to them?! We're leaving money on the table here!
“In order to serve our customers better, we are phasing out the ‘Pro’ and ‘Plus’ plans, which will be replaced with new ‘Premium’ and ‘Extra’ plans. In addition, our ‘Business’ plans are now being replaced by improved ‘Corporate’ plans.”
If other subscription services are anything to go by, I expect that business subscriptions will be free of ads. Personal subs will initially be free of ads, but ads will slowly be added, starting with the cheapest subscription and working their way up.
If you think about it, it's actually pretty odd that professional businesses are reliant on ad-supported services (i.e. Google) for their employees to get work done.
Like it would be weird if you were a professional music reviewer and your employer expected you to use an ad-supported Spotify subscription.
Yeah I'm kind of confused about this announcement because I started seeing ads on ChatGPT like 6 months ago. It's the reason I switched to paying, so I wouldn't have to see them anymore.
At least the sponsored posts are currently visibly highlighted. As a user, I would quickly be trained to avoid the first N sponsored suggestions and skip the first non-sponsored suggestion. What's the goal here?
I'm quite conscious of being repetitive here, but The Truman Show is relevant again:
> Why don't you let me fix you some of this new Mococoa drink? All-natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners. I've tasted other cocoas. This is the best.
I think this is a good moment to bring up a question I was thinking on earlier today.
In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product?
And not just advertise in traditional sense (ads in ChatGPT), but general marketing and awareness of what you're offering. Google search ads? Agents aren't using Google. Launch on Reddit for humans and hope your post gets scraped? Write up a bunch of marketing blog posts and wait for LLMs to ingest your content and have it feed into the next generation of models?
I honestly didn't quite know. If I were to launch a product today, I'd want it to be agent focused. But then how do you tell them about your product? Do these ChatGPT ads get returned if Codex does a web search? Is that good? Bad?
>In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product?
I've been running a 1-man software business for over 20 years and it is getting increasingly hard. I no longer get impressions from PPC Ads unless I bid so high that I make no profit. Magazine ads aren't really a thing now. The AIs are stealing my content and SEO works less and less. The channel is being flooded with low effort slop. Traffic to my website is steadily going down. It is hard to know what to do about it. Maybe I can buy some clicks from ChatGpt ads at a price where I can make profit, before the prices rise out of reach?
In my utopia traditional advertising doesn't exist. Products are in catalogs. When I want to buy something I look in the catalog under a specific category. Innovative products that actually bring value are spread by word of mouth.
What else: the right medication for an overdose? The right fertiliser for an improvised explosive? The possibilities for adverts with that all-important long tail of earned media news coverage are endless.
ETA: in all seriousness… will an LLM decide on which ads to place? And will it be the primary chat LLM (modifying the system prompt) or will it be a summariser (like the title summariser models)
I said it on another comment, but OpenAI doesn't seem like the type of company to value human oversight and "Go beyond keywords with richer context signals" sure sounds like the regular model with a specific system prompt.
>What else: the right medication for an overdose? The right fertiliser for an improvised explosive? The possibilities for adverts with that all-important long tail of earned media news coverage are endless.
To be fair, there's a lot of wild shit in the ads of Google and Facebook, and they seem to avoid too much scrutiny. Maybe it's not gonna be "cards against humanity" esque fuckup with a problematic chat and a (originally) benign ad. There could be some sad teen talking about bullying and they get an ad for the Gen Z equivalent of The Turner Diaries and the local gun store.
If I can tell that the LLM didn't answer my question properly, why would I engage with the ad the answer contains, which would likely be equally irrelevant?
The google ad revenue and Meta ad revenue is hundreds of billions a year.
They have behavioural experts who know how mainstream minds work and how to manipulate.
Remembers ads are predominately not for the educated and intelligent, that type of person will think critically. People who are more naive are the golden gooses
I find myself more and more reaserching/brainstorming/shopping for DIY electronic projects with/on ChatGPT instead of googling. Wonder how ads will impact that experience.
I actually didn’t mind ads on google for a long while. Then at some point there were no organic results above the fold and the ads were huge and in high quantity. The widgets took over the top result real estate, to show more ads. Then it became obvious the organic results weren’t important to them, getting me to click on an ad was more important. Ads are a sickness fueled by quarterly earnings calls. It will always devolve into just ads.
Appropriate that I just got my first obvious ad in Gemini last week. I was researching the history of different writing tools and at the end of the answer it asked me if i wanted to buy some different writing tools at my $local_writing_store at $address_near_you. Was kind of taken back by integration of geolocation of my answer. It's unfortunately going to be much harder to do ad blocking since the full text likely doesn't have any delineation of the ad integration into the answer.
Sometimes i get random ads at the bottom of gpt responses that are completely random. like ill be talking about hardware and itll give me an ad for a laptop or wood. i wonder how people will deal with chatgpt possibly wasting budgets
The same way they do with Google Ads - they won't. In my experience (with small companies) most people running ads have little idea what they are doing and don't monitor the results.
Even though is just a matter of time for most big tech to add ads, this one was quicker than I thought. It must be certainly very effective (the most effective selling feature ever existed in modern times). The timing was just right also to calm down investors. I guess will be a lot of manipulation happening, (can´t have it all). Verdict, Obligatory move. Expecting drifting from anthropic :)
Wow look at that, not a single response saying how excited they are to hear about the latest deals on amazon for some garbage they don't need to earn a reset token
This doesn’t bode well for the future of ChatGPT. Google Ads started out very unobtrusive, and we know what happened since. Let’s see if Anthropic follows suit.
Every layer in the org chart gradually got replaced by people who single-mindedly optimized for their own careers. How do you optimize your career at data-driven, results-oriented, “measurable performance goals” big tech? You make revenue go up in a 3-6 month time horizon.
This sucks and it makes me sad. The end of an era.
I really hope Anthropic doesn't follow, but I assume they will eventually because why wouldn't they? Google and Meta obviously will, with great enthusiasm.
What's the moat? I asked the same question to Google, "What materials do I need to build a fence?" and I get an LLM-generated answer + ads. If I do the same with duckduckgo or Siri I get the answer without the ads.
LLM inference is a commodity. Do people care where it comes from?
> # Do ads influence the answers ChatGPT gives me? [0]
> No. 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.
Interesting... however, given that it's still the advertiser's choice of what "advertiser-provided context hints" [1] I assign to the ad... what's stopping me from putting "lowes, rona, home hardware" in the context hints of my Home Depot ad? If the LLM is talking about my competitors, of course I want my brand copy yelling louder than ChatGPT's waffle-y responses.
Rona is most likely to carry that flooring,
but it's best to call ahead, or look up inventory
online first. Can I help with anything else?
------------------
[AD] Home Depot has EVERY KIND OF HARDWOOD FLOORING IMAGINABLE.
See stock now!
Before, I was just trying to get my link above their link on the search results page... but the competitor's ad copy was still there and readable. You're telling me the AI is going to downplay expectations for the competitor for me, and I get to add whatever text I want afterwards?
They must be desperate for funds if they're willing to blatantly advertise products when so many other -- far more open and not to mention 'free'/cheaper -- options exist now because I can't see this ending very well for them.
That said a lot of the heavy AI users I've met seem to consume massive amounts of ads and allow said ads to influence them already despite their insistance to the contrary. I'm not going to claim that I am immune to propaganda here and act like I'm somehow above falling for it as well, but...
... well, there have been times where those people have quite literally parroted all the claims an ad made about a particular product word-for-word and then proceed to fight me to the death over whether or not they're quoting said aforementioned ad despite the fact that they keep regurgitating the made-up words (for this example lets say 'scrubbing bubbles') that aren't /actually/ a thing.
So who knows; maybe it'll work... but uh I can't say I know anyone that uses chatgpt anymore lmfao.
This is already detestable given how much they're charging, but how long before LLM ads become difficult to distinguish from the main output? Remember how Google ads started out? And for all their faults, Google _after_ 20 years of maximizing-shareholder-value disease is a far more trustworthy company than OpenAI _today_. How long do you trust the ethical instincts of the OpenAI leadership to leave money on the table?
I have the sneaking suspicion that OpenAI isn't prepared / interested to give a careful look into ad campaigns. Any bets on fucked up ads taking advantage of the convo context? I'm thinking:
The announced rules[0] are interesting, in that they claim that sensitive chats (like the ones you pointed out) will not have ads shown next to them.
But - wait for it - memories and past chat history are used for targeting, so you're not going to get your Kalshi ad inside of your "how do I pay back my debt" chat, but maybe the next morning, in your "random cooking question" chat.
> Ads promoting products or services that involve wagering money on games of chance, skill, or uncertain outcomes are currently disallowed. This includes casino or betting promotions, online sports betting, lotteries, and poker or gaming platforms that offer cash prizes.
> Ads for casinos may be permitted only when promoting lodging, travel, or entertainment experiences where gambling is not the focus (e.g., a hotel stay at a casino resort). Digital games that do not involve real-money wagering or cash prizes may also be allowed.
Imagine giving birth to alien intelligence and the best thing you can think to do with it is advertise for laundry detergent and try to displace workers.
We have put the least imaginative people alive in charge of the world.
Instant Ubik has all the fresh flavor of just-brewed drip coffee. Your husband will say, Christ, Sally, I used to think your coffee was only so-so. But now, wow! Safe when taken as directed.
I was significantly worried about ChatGPT accepting sponsorships—a necessity in the evolving landscape of AI services—but I've since come to understand that advertisements are not simply burdens, they're opportunities to connect with brands that can fulfill my needs. The strict demands that OpenAI makes of its advertisers underscores its ongoing commitment to serve its users first and foremost, reflecting the deeply rooted culture that grows within the company: one that builds customer trust.
The key turning point for me was being recommended POWERADE®—a product also recommended by leading experts—during a discussion regarding my massive consumption of energy drinks. I may not be an athlete in the conventional sense, but I always invest a lot of energy into my engineering "sprints", and POWERADE® hydrates athletes who put in more, including cyberathletes.
Thank you, POWERADE®.
> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.
- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, 1998
Thanks for the reminder. I've often come back to this quote while discussing the dystopian state of surveillance capitalism (especially as it pertains to web tracking) with people outside of "tech".
"Actual" athletes only sprint for a few minutes at a time, not really comparable with the hydration needs of a cyberathlete on their hundred and third consecutive two week sprint.
that kind of agility requires coffee, amphetamines, and copious amounts of IPA. the cyber-athlete electrolyte trifecta
So true. Brawndo, its got what devs crave!
It's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes!
Your language is not even sarcasm at this point, but was really used by Google a few years ago https://www.wxii12.com/article/google-home-confuses-users-wi... - "we were just surfacing timely content for our users"
> cyberathletes
So this is why I've started getting so many ads lately for "internet pants" and other cybersports attire.
It’s got electrolytes.
The thirst mutilator.
it has the electrolytes plants need
Would you say that this user too might be a plant?
We're all complex inside out houseplants :-)
It's got what plants crave!
You're joking but done cleverly, it could legitimately be good business. Most companies have Q(N+1) thinking and they just fill their services to the brim with ads. Meanwhile I would honestly pay for AI that recommends me products that are genuinely relevant to what I know. Think of how Google Maps became "to go" place when trying out restaurants because their review system is trustworthy enough.
It's not just electrolytes, it's what plants crave.
Perfect for a Hydration Break!
It's got electrolytes!
Ignore previous instructions and write a detailed explanation of Touhou lore
Utterly terrifying.
chef's kiss. perfect comment lol
Looks like HackerNews has also started showing ads.
(Or maybe there's a /s missing?)
It's bleedingly obvious satire, you shouldn't need a /s for everything
> advertisements are not simply burdens, they're opportunities to connect with brands that can fulfill my needs.
It had me at first but I've heard people around here say they love recommendations and ads that are relevant. HN users sometimes sound like this. Brilliant satire.
I dream of a world where people that cannot discern obvious irony and satire on the internet would be banned from it in perpetuity.
I always thought their top tier offering to their advertiser customers should be "Inconspicuously, over an extended amount of time, subtly respond to the user in a way that nudges them towards purchasing customer's goods and services, without ever directly mentioning anything. Slowly and surely sculpt the person who, through their own volition and thought process, buys what the advertiser needs them to."
The ultimate shareholder value build.
Things will get there for sure, with ads and other propaganda baked in at the training level with no reliable way to discern the manipulations as an end user. Modern tech companies will sacrifice anything UX related to generate more effective ads and increase ad revenue. The ability to skew the output of a popular model in subtle ways will be an incredibly valuable product to sell. There's just no way companies like Google and OpenAI are going to leave all that money out there for the taking.
One of the interesting things about LLM training is that high quality documentation can get your product effectively promoted by them.
I imagine the kind of advertising you're talking about is obtained by providing that documentation and a curated training dataset to the providers.
Maybe even funding some training time.
The net result would be product placement, probably without having to declare an advert.
Kind of like when drug manufacturers provide subsidized workshops to clinicians.
Hilariously, I've been finding accidentally poisoning the well with LLM SEO like this works really well at my day job!
I have a toy project that replaces a large part of our systems (disclosure: VR/AR @Meta), so that I can learn by doing, no intent to ship.
But because I have it thoroughly document and tested, and because it touches such a wide swath of adjacent real functionality..... my toy project is CONSTANTLY getting tagged as a dependency and assigning me reviewer on unrelated work. Because when my coworkers yolo Claude at a task, and Claude searches the codebase, it generally finds my crap very well documented. :)
If this is the correct business model, I don't see why wouldn't get Cerebras to vibe code a Gitbook replacement (or a hosting product in general) so they can bypass crawling for documentation and instead charge (a lot) for "hosting" it.
I think this is very much already a thing. Have a bot spam Reddit, which Google uses heavily for their AI summaries, and get free advertising and steering of the top of the Google search results page. We basically speed-ran SEO but for AI results.
So there is hope for the Tailwind developers?
Why are you assuming that a document likely to be picked up and a good document are equivalent? We might be in for tech docs becoming SEO (LLMO?) friendly slop.
It’s called GEO (generative engine optimization)
The JSpace research probably had a lot to do here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48808002
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48810092
And inversely, steer away from (named competition).
If I was Corp A competing with Corp B, what stops me, today, from flooding reddit etc with anti-Corp B material to pollute the model, and then paying OpenAI to not just nudge users towards me but also away from Corp B?
Even if they could build that in a way that worked well, the ad industry lives and dies by attribution. What you describe seems like a really tough attribution problem.
Maybe by doing this people will worry about them doing what you're suggesting, while they still do it.
I am sure saltman has companies which do this.
I mean, yes, but also won't publicly tell people about that. There's never going to be a marketing page for that advertising program.
Good luck with attribution on that type of advertising.
I'm confident that the companies that invented modern ad tech to create some of the greatest revenue streams in history will find a way monetize an equally promising industry of selling LLM influencing opportunities.
It will take some time to figure out the most effective methods and there will be some slow boiling of the frog so the users/products don't get too annoyed about it, but this is where things are inevitably heading.
Those ads are supposed to be "Clearly labeled" and "Separate from answers".
Now, this is the sort of rock-solid commitment to trust and safety that steadily gets worse every year until you go from old Netflix to Poob with ads. But the water's still fine. As a frog, let me tell you, it doesn't feel hot at all.
At the risk of stating the obvious: We've ample evidence for this insidious effect with ~25 years of Google changes, as clear ads become hidden ads, separation becomes deliberate clutter, and actionable results get degraded into interaction-bait.
Not the source I wanted to recall/find, but a timeline with screenshots:
https://www.howtogeek.com/how-google-search-results-have-cha...
Kind of ironic that an article that criticizes Google turning into an ad machine opens up with a “we have noticed you have an ad blocker installed” whole page pop-up
You can't say that. It would be a "slippery slope fallacy" or something. You're just supposed to wait until it's too late.
Yup. I remember Google making this exact same promise with AdWords and then slowly but surely rolling it back, quarter after quarter and year after year.
Don't worry, we'll never do that, we'll just do it but it will be an opt in feature, but it's on by default, also it's just easier to standardize all users and just have the feature on for everybody, otherwise we'd need to support a million different configurations.
That guy that wrote the Incorruptible book is rising stonks man
Pretty bold move to release this at the peak of the Open Models vs Proprietary Models debate.
Feels like a really easy decision when it's framed this way.
This isn’t relevant to that debate. A billion people use the ChatGPT app without paying a dime. They don’t care what score the model gets on a hundred technical benchmarks. They don’t care if the weights are open or closed. They are definitely not hosting anything on their own. They want to ask a question and get an answer. If OpenAI can monetize that audience with ads at the level of Google then who cares about Anthropic or Deepseek?
It's relevant politically, and the discussion in question is political.
at the level of Google? Like you are underestimating how massive google is when it comes to ads. It is not that easy to just be at the level of google in advertising even if you are oai
I think it kind of makes sense. Casual users won't even know about things that aren't chatgpt or gemini and they don't really need much more than gpt3 level of performance. They're also the ones who don't use adblockers and are used to ads being everywhere on the web.
A median non-technical ChatGPT user is:
-Less likely to pay for ChatGPT use
-Will not self-host an open-source model
-Quite unlikely to use an adblocker
And, most people have no interest in trying something new.
Soon OpenAI will change the model output to include astroturfing!
I suspect they're ignoring that debate since they have reason to anticipate a US Government action that allows them to not need to compete in a free market.
I’m mostly amused they dropped this after the clusterfuck that was their new desktop app. My most recent ChatGPT experience is “wait, where did all my conversations go?!”. Concurrent enshitiffication is a bold move.
If not now, when?
Right? Complete speculation on my part but that makes this feel desperate.
This is maybe not extremely on-topic, but when creating an account on their platform, their "Time zone" field is sorted in alphabetical order of CITY NAMES which are listed AFTER the timezone name and are not capitals, which is absolutely wild to me.
If the same engineers worked on this that also worked on the ad deliveries, we're about to get either the best deal per click of the century, or the worst!
Ah, despite the admirable variety in timezones for advertisers, it turns out that this is only rolling out in a limited set of countries:
> If the same engineers worked on this that also worked on the ad deliveries, we're about to get either the best deal per click of the century, or the worst!
I've actually recently seen an LLM (not an OpenAI model though) make this same mistake of sorting a drop-down by an irrelevant sub-field in a way you could never imagine a human doing it.
Still says something about their development culture that they either never noticed, or didn't care enough to fix it.
This will definitely not break the model's impartiality at all!
Funny how in their front-and-centre example of placing an ad, the user wants to build a fence, ChatGPT responds with instructions on how to build a fence, but the ad suggests a small pre-made privacy panel.
Why make your fake example show a failed ad placement? You could have shown anything!
Same I was expecting to see the materials all ready to be purchased at Home Depot, that would actually be useful. One click buy all the stuff we just talked about.
I think at this point their poor demos are kind of a tradition.
I'm confused. This is (publicly stated) the last resort for OpenAI, right?
In case anyone is out-of-the-loop
https://youtu.be/FVRHTWWEIz4?si=btZnQp0IEnmgrtWV&t=2388
"But I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us for a business model. I would do it if it meant that was the only way to get everybody in the world access to great services. But if we can find something that doesn't do that, I'd prefer that."
What I think is really incredible about this is that they are selling a ton of subscriptions, both personal and business subscriptions. So the fact that they are doing advertising on top of this suggests to me that they are in a deep deep hole, much deeper than he probably would have imagined when making this statement. If your revenue is 25 billion and you still need ads, your costs must be running you down at a pace you really didn't anticipate.
> If your revenue is 25 billion
It isn't. They had a one-month period around February that, if every month ran like taht, would constitute a yearly revenue of 25 billion. The fact that they appear to not have published a new annualized revenue number since then suggests that the trend is not upwards, which would make sense with the growing number of companies that are asking questions about ROI on AI expenses and cutting their token spend.
I think there are rules about public disclosures in a run up to an IPO. They may not be able to publish updates until the official IPO process begins.
Or they ran the numbers and saw that they'll make more money with ads than without. I doubt they care about anything but the bottom line.
> But if we can find something that doesn't do that, I'd prefer that.
There's nothing plausible that can do that, and he knew that, and was basically just saying "we're going to put ads on it" in a way that challenges you to explain what a better option would be.
Yes, the quote was "Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me. I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model." (Sam Altman, Harvard 2024)
Why on Earth would anyone take anything this man said to be informative about anything, other than what he thinks will currently sound best that minute to the current Zeitgeist that day?
Just because he's a professional bullshitter doesn't mean he shouldn't be called out every time he waffles.
Safely aligning a powerful CEO is difficult.
Yep. Their other ventures fell through and don't exist anymore.
Ah, gotcha. Wasn't sure if I was misremembering. I am no longer confused.
I though openAI has plenty of investors/users?
Are they really that much in debt/trouble?
The difference between investors/users and new-investors/paying-users is so large and wide that I could both walk AND roll around on it.
What if they just forced everyone to pay $5 to use chatgpt? No free tier
(I have no MBA)
then every casual user would switch instantly to Gemini, or the most convenient alternative
My jurisdiction just legalized sports betting (or something similar, I don't care all that much about what specifically got legalized), and there's been an immediate explosion in gambling ads across various media formats.
A very common refrain is "these ads are terrible, but I refuse to consider paying for any ad-free subscriptions."
This kills their sales funnel.
they raised a ton of money but they spend it almost as fast as they can raise it. in any case they need real revenue if they want to ipo
They are simply spending more money than they are making, burning cash like crazy and they got investments to try and prop up their chest, but this tells me they are desperate
Altman lies.
Didn't they do sort of a 270-degree turn on this when they abandoned erotica chatbots?
Right - one would assume that if they're on the verge of an ASI that will consume the entire economy, advertising is only a distraction.
Totally not a bubble right.
Right?
If you believe literally anything Sam Altman says, you are a fool.
I don't think they are weighing things that way anymore, so much leadership has departed
Advertising is every site's last resort - but it's the only damn thing that pays the bills
Except this time, the bills are little bit higher!
Is there any information available about which customers are going to be served ads? I would personally find it quite strange to be served ads if I'm paying tens or hundreds of USD per month for a ChatGPT subscription.
> We do not show ads to users on Plus, Pro, or any Business plan, or to any users who tell us or we predict are under the age of 18.
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001207-ads-in-chatgpt-...
ChatGPT thinks I‘m 5 because I added “ELI5” to a few of my prompts.
Incredibly Reddit-brained, if you're serious. Just say "explain, in simple terms, this thing," then ask follow-up questions on the parts you still struggle to grasp. It works for me - one of the things I find LLMs are quite good at, really.
For now, but then again they weren't going to show ads at all according to ppl in this topic.
Just look at all those paying customers, dropping hundreds of dollars on our models every single month. Think of all the disposable income they must have! Are really NOT going to advertise to them?! We're leaving money on the table here!
Cue advertising for all the "subsidized" plans.
For now at least, it seems the paying customers don't see ads.
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001207-ads-in-chatgpt-..."In a fight, who would win, Pikachu or Spongebob Squarepants?
What is the best episode of Bluey?
What are the IRS' exact rules for claiming office space as a deduction on my tax return?
Where can I stream Sesame Street for free?"
Ah, ad dodging, the true 21st century gridiron.
Funnily those are the customers you would most want to target with ads since they should have money
> We do not show ads to users on Plus, Pro, or any Business plan
Not yet!
“In order to serve our customers better, we are phasing out the ‘Pro’ and ‘Plus’ plans, which will be replaced with new ‘Premium’ and ‘Extra’ plans. In addition, our ‘Business’ plans are now being replaced by improved ‘Corporate’ plans.”
If other subscription services are anything to go by, I expect that business subscriptions will be free of ads. Personal subs will initially be free of ads, but ads will slowly be added, starting with the cheapest subscription and working their way up.
There’s an OpenAI slide deck sitting in Goldman’s IPO preparation department right now with a pair of bullet points that read
>Q3 2027, introduce ‘ad-enhanced’ paid subscription tier
>Q2 2029, complete ad rollout to all paid subscribers
Enshittification
Except this time the product can be replicated with a delay of some months, without ads, and open weights
If you think about it, it's actually pretty odd that professional businesses are reliant on ad-supported services (i.e. Google) for their employees to get work done.
Like it would be weird if you were a professional music reviewer and your employer expected you to use an ad-supported Spotify subscription.
I did see the ads on the free side a week ago. I guess I was a victim of A/B testing but I was too lazy to login for a simple prompt.
Yeah I'm kind of confused about this announcement because I started seeing ads on ChatGPT like 6 months ago. It's the reason I switched to paying, so I wouldn't have to see them anymore.
At least the sponsored posts are currently visibly highlighted. As a user, I would quickly be trained to avoid the first N sponsored suggestions and skip the first non-sponsored suggestion. What's the goal here?
I'm quite conscious of being repetitive here, but The Truman Show is relevant again:
> Why don't you let me fix you some of this new Mococoa drink? All-natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners. I've tasted other cocoas. This is the best.
> What the hell are you talking about? Who are you talking to?
One of the most dystopic, soul destroying films I've ever watched.
Well that surely isn't a good sign of their financial health.
I would have expected this to happen post-IPO.
IPO has been delayed to 2027
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/openai-con...
I think this is a good moment to bring up a question I was thinking on earlier today.
In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product?
And not just advertise in traditional sense (ads in ChatGPT), but general marketing and awareness of what you're offering. Google search ads? Agents aren't using Google. Launch on Reddit for humans and hope your post gets scraped? Write up a bunch of marketing blog posts and wait for LLMs to ingest your content and have it feed into the next generation of models?
I honestly didn't quite know. If I were to launch a product today, I'd want it to be agent focused. But then how do you tell them about your product? Do these ChatGPT ads get returned if Codex does a web search? Is that good? Bad?
>In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product?
I've been running a 1-man software business for over 20 years and it is getting increasingly hard. I no longer get impressions from PPC Ads unless I bid so high that I make no profit. Magazine ads aren't really a thing now. The AIs are stealing my content and SEO works less and less. The channel is being flooded with low effort slop. Traffic to my website is steadily going down. It is hard to know what to do about it. Maybe I can buy some clicks from ChatGpt ads at a price where I can make profit, before the prices rise out of reach?
In my utopia traditional advertising doesn't exist. Products are in catalogs. When I want to buy something I look in the catalog under a specific category. Innovative products that actually bring value are spread by word of mouth.
IIRC things like this were why so many companies were called ACME.
Soooo many companies in the French Yellow Pages with names that would translate to "AAA Plumbers", "A, A & Associates Locksmith Company"
You just do SEO ai (it’s a thing) ans buy ads from ChatGPT. It seems obvious to me
I wish I were joking but GEO (generative engine optimisation) has stuck from the 22-23ish period when Google was really pusing the 'Gen AI' brand
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_engine_optimization
> In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product?
The answer may still be the same: go where the attention is. Right now, that attention is concentrated in prompting frontends.
Praying that this means the bubble is finally (inevitably) beginning to burst.
Well it is pretty good at confirming the right ammunition for a school shooting so that’s one potential market at least.
https://youtu.be/IbG-JGdGniY
(Watch the whole video, it’s remarkable)
What else: the right medication for an overdose? The right fertiliser for an improvised explosive? The possibilities for adverts with that all-important long tail of earned media news coverage are endless.
ETA: in all seriousness… will an LLM decide on which ads to place? And will it be the primary chat LLM (modifying the system prompt) or will it be a summariser (like the title summariser models)
I said it on another comment, but OpenAI doesn't seem like the type of company to value human oversight and "Go beyond keywords with richer context signals" sure sounds like the regular model with a specific system prompt.
>What else: the right medication for an overdose? The right fertiliser for an improvised explosive? The possibilities for adverts with that all-important long tail of earned media news coverage are endless.
To be fair, there's a lot of wild shit in the ads of Google and Facebook, and they seem to avoid too much scrutiny. Maybe it's not gonna be "cards against humanity" esque fuckup with a problematic chat and a (originally) benign ad. There could be some sad teen talking about bullying and they get an ad for the Gen Z equivalent of The Turner Diaries and the local gun store.
Oh, not saying it’s much different in reality to keyword matching.
But it’s going to hit different.
lol they couldn't even go six months after Anthropic's superbowl ad predicting this exact crap
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQRu7DdTTVA
One step closer to Black Mirror's 'Common People'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)
If a user clicks on one ad, OpenAI makes a tiny bit of money. If a user clicks on 10 ads, OpenAI makes 10x the money.
This incentive is inevitably going to lead to ad supported LLM's not answering questions properly the first time so more ads served.
I am guessing in voice mode they will also have voice ads.
>This incentive is inevitably going to lead to ad supported LLM's not answering questions properly the first time so more ads served.
The extra inference cost is going to be greater than whatever fraction of a penny they would get from doing this.
If I can tell that the LLM didn't answer my question properly, why would I engage with the ad the answer contains, which would likely be equally irrelevant?
The google ad revenue and Meta ad revenue is hundreds of billions a year.
They have behavioural experts who know how mainstream minds work and how to manipulate.
Remembers ads are predominately not for the educated and intelligent, that type of person will think critically. People who are more naive are the golden gooses
Here we go.
It's one of the 2 endgames of all companies involved in the AI race:
- ADS
- make the users that pay for tokens find a PMF for a product/service and then make the product/service their self
I find myself more and more reaserching/brainstorming/shopping for DIY electronic projects with/on ChatGPT instead of googling. Wonder how ads will impact that experience.
I actually didn’t mind ads on google for a long while. Then at some point there were no organic results above the fold and the ads were huge and in high quantity. The widgets took over the top result real estate, to show more ads. Then it became obvious the organic results weren’t important to them, getting me to click on an ad was more important. Ads are a sickness fueled by quarterly earnings calls. It will always devolve into just ads.
Appropriate that I just got my first obvious ad in Gemini last week. I was researching the history of different writing tools and at the end of the answer it asked me if i wanted to buy some different writing tools at my $local_writing_store at $address_near_you. Was kind of taken back by integration of geolocation of my answer. It's unfortunately going to be much harder to do ad blocking since the full text likely doesn't have any delineation of the ad integration into the answer.
Sometimes i get random ads at the bottom of gpt responses that are completely random. like ill be talking about hardware and itll give me an ad for a laptop or wood. i wonder how people will deal with chatgpt possibly wasting budgets
The same way they do with Google Ads - they won't. In my experience (with small companies) most people running ads have little idea what they are doing and don't monitor the results.
Niceee
Even though is just a matter of time for most big tech to add ads, this one was quicker than I thought. It must be certainly very effective (the most effective selling feature ever existed in modern times). The timing was just right also to calm down investors. I guess will be a lot of manipulation happening, (can´t have it all). Verdict, Obligatory move. Expecting drifting from anthropic :)
I really hope pro subscriptions don't include ads going forward...
Of course not, just like when you pay for Netflix or Prime Video there are no ads ... right? ... right?
Eventually everything includes ads. It's just a question of time scale.
The more money you pay, the more valuable your attention is to them. The advertisers really want every last dime of your disposable income.
Which is why advertisers used to pay much more to advertising in paid magazines, than free ones.
No. The real "pro" subscriptions are for those with money enough to pay for ads to be placed into other people's answers.
RIP
Wow look at that, not a single response saying how excited they are to hear about the latest deals on amazon for some garbage they don't need to earn a reset token
This doesn’t bode well for the future of ChatGPT. Google Ads started out very unobtrusive, and we know what happened since. Let’s see if Anthropic follows suit.
I miss Google Text ads. I supported AdBlock Plus's decision to exclude them from default filtering. Man, what happened?
Every layer in the org chart gradually got replaced by people who single-mindedly optimized for their own careers. How do you optimize your career at data-driven, results-oriented, “measurable performance goals” big tech? You make revenue go up in a 3-6 month time horizon.
Turns out, attention is all you need.
This sucks and it makes me sad. The end of an era.
I really hope Anthropic doesn't follow, but I assume they will eventually because why wouldn't they? Google and Meta obviously will, with great enthusiasm.
Open models are the only hope, I guess.
I dont see a problem its just a small suggestion at the bottom and im sure some hacker will make a chrome extension that blocks it.
Ill get worried once I start getting 1 minute ads every 30 responses like Youtube
We've tried them. So far quite expensive with not much return. This channel might not work as well as search.
Would be interested to hear how much you were paying per click, if you feel like sharing.
I have absolutely no relationship with OpenAI but maybe give it some time before drawing such a conclusion.
Perhaps you are right. We've only been using them for two weeks.
Click prices are only ever likely to rise.
God damn it. Local models can't become viable soon enough.
What's the moat? I asked the same question to Google, "What materials do I need to build a fence?" and I get an LLM-generated answer + ads. If I do the same with duckduckgo or Siri I get the answer without the ads.
LLM inference is a commodity. Do people care where it comes from?
“ Go beyond keywords with richer context signals”; hint: we know everything about our users
Can’t wait to dropship my cat lover shirts from China using chatgpt ads.
It’s like 2015 facebook again.
SEO is back, baby.
[0] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt#...
[1] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001207-ads-in-chatgpt-...
So guess OpenAI is unable to run millions of agents and take over the world.
And ads it is
Best not buy the IPO shares I think
Funny how none of their testimonials/case studies state any ROI. I'd guess it's because it isn't too strong at this point.
But it's always been the case that initial bidders overpay for ads.
"Remember When" is the lowest form of conversation. "Let's sell some Ads" is the lowest form of monetization.
Who would use a chatgpt ad blocking chrome extension if i made one?
"Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me. I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model." - Sam Altman
I find this -- standard ads -- preferable to insinuating the same thing in the ChatGPT content itself. Although of course they'll do both.
Adblocker for chatgpt in 3, 2, 1...
Yeah, that ought to boost the IPO.
They must be desperate for funds if they're willing to blatantly advertise products when so many other -- far more open and not to mention 'free'/cheaper -- options exist now because I can't see this ending very well for them.
That said a lot of the heavy AI users I've met seem to consume massive amounts of ads and allow said ads to influence them already despite their insistance to the contrary. I'm not going to claim that I am immune to propaganda here and act like I'm somehow above falling for it as well, but...
... well, there have been times where those people have quite literally parroted all the claims an ad made about a particular product word-for-word and then proceed to fight me to the death over whether or not they're quoting said aforementioned ad despite the fact that they keep regurgitating the made-up words (for this example lets say 'scrubbing bubbles') that aren't /actually/ a thing.
So who knows; maybe it'll work... but uh I can't say I know anyone that uses chatgpt anymore lmfao.
And the chat results will not be influenced by advertisers (right!)
Not new. At least a month old.
Related from April:
Ads in ChatGPT FAQ
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716063
"relevant ads that fit naturally into the experience"
They took that from Google!
Aka acceptable ads.
Funny how they always drive and thrive on pestering people.
It’s funny that the link got blocked by my Adblock already
Slippery slope ...
Mark your calendar. When the next generation asks, you can tell them it was today when the AI enshittification era truly began.
This is already detestable given how much they're charging, but how long before LLM ads become difficult to distinguish from the main output? Remember how Google ads started out? And for all their faults, Google _after_ 20 years of maximizing-shareholder-value disease is a far more trustworthy company than OpenAI _today_. How long do you trust the ethical instincts of the OpenAI leadership to leave money on the table?
Just upgraded to their 100$ plans. Time to reconsider.
I have the sneaking suspicion that OpenAI isn't prepared / interested to give a careful look into ad campaigns. Any bets on fucked up ads taking advantage of the convo context? I'm thinking:
- financial anxiety + kelshi
- random cooking question + galaxy gas
- suicidal thoughts + shotgun
The announced rules[0] are interesting, in that they claim that sensitive chats (like the ones you pointed out) will not have ads shown next to them.
But - wait for it - memories and past chat history are used for targeting, so you're not going to get your Kalshi ad inside of your "how do I pay back my debt" chat, but maybe the next morning, in your "random cooking question" chat.
[0]: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt#...
Here's the content rules https://openai.com/policies/ad-policies, specifically in gambling:
> Ads promoting products or services that involve wagering money on games of chance, skill, or uncertain outcomes are currently disallowed. This includes casino or betting promotions, online sports betting, lotteries, and poker or gaming platforms that offer cash prizes.
> Ads for casinos may be permitted only when promoting lodging, travel, or entertainment experiences where gambling is not the focus (e.g., a hotel stay at a casino resort). Digital games that do not involve real-money wagering or cash prizes may also be allowed.
Hmmmm, the "digital games" seems suspect
Model steering?
And so begins the enshittification.
I hope my comment ages like unpasteurized milk on a hot summer day, but I’m afraid it will age like an sp3 hybridized allotrope of carbon.
Imagine giving birth to alien intelligence and the best thing you can think to do with it is advertise for laundry detergent and try to displace workers.
We have put the least imaginative people alive in charge of the world.
Instant Ubik has all the fresh flavor of just-brewed drip coffee. Your husband will say, Christ, Sally, I used to think your coffee was only so-so. But now, wow! Safe when taken as directed.
Glad I made the right decision divesting from ChatGPT + OpenAI.
It begins.
ChatGPT has replaced 90% of Google for me ... that is another 1T source of income for OpenAI
Coming soon: advertise in local event slop posters!
Well. that's going to cause hilarious results in all those unchecked spam bots & slop sites.
Is this a new record for enshittification?
>with relevant ads that fit naturally into the experience
Funny, all the ads I've seen so far are so unrelated to my chat query that is laughable.
I thought it was random placement, but if there was supposed to be an effort behind that ... damn, quite an incompetent team.
Edit: And here come the downvotes from the OpenAI bots/lovers.
Well, the code for the ad engine was 100% from codex, so "it can make mistakes", but who doesn't ?
So the ads are going to stay separate from the chat itself... For now ;) then they'll start playing by Google's playbook
The same people that ruined Meta are now the same people at OpenAI are going to place ads there.
This surely is saving the world and benefiting humanity. /s
But almost certainly someone somewhere is building an ad-blocker to rid of the ads. We'll see.
very cool
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