Probably can make a ton of money shorting that
if you believe in "general AI", you are a sucker.
if you believe in "general AI", you have been conned. Welcome to America.
This already happened a while ago with specific shopping queries.
edit: all hail our corporate overlords
And choice is a very loaded concept that does not take us anywhere: if the market is creating a world where LLM usage is central to a more productive future, or so they want us to believe, the choice quickly becomes between participating in the brainwashing and subtle advertising, or having a hard time finding a job that depends on LLM usage.
Ultimately, humans depend on habit and lowest friction. You cannot expect everyone to make a ‘virtuous’ choice and it is dishonest to even expect that. I dislike that many of my clothes are made my underpaid people in third-world countries, but at this point I don’t really have time and energy to choose not to unless I make that my life goal, as does the rest of the world.
This reminds me of the discussion about gun control by the way.
That seems like a naive take on technology to me. Once having/using a smartphone was a simple matter of personal choice. Once, having a car was a choice. If society as a whole adapts to something it's hard to be against it.
Not if nearly every company I attempt to interact with has their way. As other commenters have said, smart phones used to be a choice as well. Now people look at you funny if you won't install an app or don't have a data plan.
It's easy to imagine a few major LLM players all censoring or avoiding similar topics, or all equally captured by more or less the same advertisers.
Like it might not want to tell you about negative health effects from McDonalds, if McDonalds becomes a major source of ad revenue
A missing one: smoking.
At some point, it was revealed that Big Tobacco was a major contributor to the AHA.
They now list tobacco as a big risk factor.
> A missing one: smoking.
> At some point, it was revealed that Big Tobacco was a major contributor to the AHA.
> They now list tobacco as a big risk factor.
https://www.heart.org/en/bold-hearts-the-centennial/100-year...
Taking on tobacco was no small task at mid-century, when more than half of men and a third of women smoked. In 1956, the AHA’s first scientific statement on smoking concluded that more evidence was needed to link it to heart disease. But as evidence grew, so did our role. Even before the landmark Surgeon General’s report of 1964, we called for a public campaign against smoking.
By 1971, we said cigarette smoking “contributed significantly” to coronary heart disease, and in 1977, we declared smoking to be the most preventable cause of heart disease.
In the 1980s, with significant support from the AHA, new laws required stronger warning labels for cigarettes and banned smoking on airplanes. Today, we’re working to understand the risks of e-cigarettes and vaping while fighting to keep teens and others from starting.
Gave it a +1.
Fair enough, I guess their public policy position doesn't necessarily inform how they conduct advertising.
For myself, I only downvote/flag stuff that I consider harmful to the community.
That does not include stories or comments with which I disagree. In fact, I frequently upvote comments posted, that attack my own positions, if they do so in a reasonable manner. Groupthink sucks, and I frequently change my mind, based on orthogonal feedback.
Big Tobacco never funded the American Heart Association.
AHA never purposefully ommited smoking as a cause of heart disease. In fact, they were at the forefront of the research to prove a link between smoking and heart disease. They met with the The Surgeon General in 1961 to request the formation of the Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health. Report can be viewed here - https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/tobacco/nnbbmq.pdf
Yeah...not so sure about that. Tobacco has been pretty sneaky, in funding stuff (see the NIH article on stress research).
A lot of this stuff is only starting to come to light, because folks are able to scan databases of historical information.
Yeah, these cereals have soluble fiber...with a bunch of sugar.
The cereal thing is problematic but there wasn’t good data about this at first (which, itself, was due to corporate lobbying/grant-making)
What’s that saying? “Make your words sweet, because one day, you may need to eat them.”
Shadow funding has been a thing for over a century, but it’s getting harder to pull off, as time progresses.
My mother used to be in charge of fundraising for a nonprofit, and she had to be very careful about the provenance of funding. She was just doing it for a science center; not research, so she was actively seeking support from corporations, and needed to make sure that there was no hidden “quid pro quo” (sometimes , there was “aboveboard quid pro quo”). Some of the stories she told me about dodgy funding schemes were eyebrow-raising.
A lot of time, there’s no “quid pro quo.” They just want to have additional research out there, to “muddy the water,” in the future, so they may proxy-fund some pretty whacky stuff.
They will also go after individuals; not organizations. Why leave an NPO paper trail, when you can just send the underpaid professor on an all-expenses-paid “fact finding” trip?
People kind of suck, sometimes.
doubleplus good
[edit] I was a little unfair -- lack of access to training data is a bit of an issue (perhaps moreso for analysis than for for actual use, considering what it takes to train these models). I'm thankful that some of them are also distributed as base models, which should be relatively unbiased compared to what happens later during finetuning.
I'm not sure if open weights are immune to being compromised by ads anyway, they can't serve pay-per-impression ads on the output side, but there's nothing stopping the creator from accepting funding in exchange for biasing the training one way or another.
Coming soon: Foobar-600B, a new SOTA open weight model kindly sponsored by Coca Cola, Exxon Mobil and the Heritage Foundation. Please pay no attention to the men behind the curtain.
Without that though? Our ability to manipulate LLMs is so shaky I would be really surprised if anyone managed to pull off this kind of model manipulation and have it remain undetected.
If you're tucked in right behind the absolute frontier models, the economics change completely
Similarly, I’m wondering when huggingface is going to need to start showing returns and starts putting ads into transformers etc.
I kinda hate that a move needs to be surprising to be noteworthy or critiqued. If tomorrow Meta leaks all data of all users I really wish the reactions aren't "not surprised" and instead "hang them and tar them".
Same way, the need to earn money shouldn't be an excuse for whatever a company does. I'd be a lot more interested in knowing if/why you think it will be a net positive for society and why it should be left to happen.
[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/3-5-Billion-Accounts-Complete-W...
Ads helped the internet get up and expand, but it went to a degree that now plagues most aspect of our online life.
Google being first and foremost an ad company is an issue we're tackling, from the search engine becoming dog shit, to Google subsidizing Apple to not compete with them, online content getting shaped to fit advertisers' needs etc.
Another potential tech giant adopting the most toxic business model is IMO something to be pissed about.
- Extremely personal data on users
- Novel way of introducing and learning more about sponsored products
- Strong branding for non-techie people (most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are)
- An app that is getting more and more addictive/indispensable
I think OpenAI is going to kill it in ads eventually. This is why Meta and Google went all in on AI. Their lucrative digital ad business is in an existential threat.
I think people who kept saying there is no moat in AI is about to be shocked at how strong of a moat there actually is for ChatGPT.
All free LLM chat apps will need to support ads or they will eventually die due to worse unit economics or run out of funding.
PS. Sam just said OpenAI's revenue will finish at $20b this year. 6x growth from 2024. Zero revenue from non-sub users. What do you guys think their revenue will end up in 2026?
OpenAI has the talent to roll out and run their own ad product that is better and more efficient. Why pay Microsoft for a core part of their (future) business?
P.S. In case you haven't noticed, OpenAI demos are done on Macbooks. Microsoft could not even get them to use Windows.
Here's an idea that just popped into my head:
ChatGPT shows a sponsored entry in chat history list with a colorful border around it to get users to click. This product is something that ChatGPT knows the user desperately needs from previous chats. The user can chat directly with the product and learn more about it. The advertiser specifically sent OpenAI information (like a RAG) about their products buyers might have questions for.
When the user is ready, they can open a link to the product's website or just buy directly in ChatGPT.
Advertisers are accustomed to pay for conversions now. If you can't track it, you cant prove it happened.
Open ai will need to spin up the entire infrastructure (Inc sales teams, support teams, servers etc) to run the ad network. Not impossible but it is a big lift and they're already burning money.
Their best bet is probably to just sign up for selling their ad space with Google, like all the other apps and websites do
Because advertisers will use Gemini instead.
Advertisers already have established relationships and business processes with Google account managers.
Why bother starting from scratch with a new account manager at OpenAI? Will OpenAI even last?
At least Google has been around a while. Seems like a safer investment from point of view of advertiser.
I honestly don’t think open ai has the maturity or discipline for long-term viability, but their operating expenses for a week would eclipse the annual payroll required to hire a large corporate infrastructure that may be the best shot they have at transitioning from a company operating on hope and buzz to one that actually makes a few bucks. I’ll eat my hat if they become the next Google, but they didn’t pull the playbook out of thin air.
When you're working in ads, you don't have 1 person that looks after multiple huge clients.
If you have a Coke or a Nike or a McDonalds or an Apple etc spending 10s/100s of millions in ad spend on your platform, you have a dedicated whole team of 3 or 4 or 5 or more people (sales and dedicated tech support, plus managers etc) per client who exist solely to make it easy for that client to run ads on your platform, and make sure they're happy and getting results. So just those 4 clients you are probably looking at 20+ people just in sales/after-sales supporting 100+mil of ad spend, and that is before you need to support agencies like WPP et al that are often teams of 10 to 15 or more. And if a client doesn't think they're getting the results they need or the treatment they need, they'll take their ad spend elsewhere - this is why you have multiple sales people and hands-on tech people swarming the big spenders to keep them happy and keep them spending. They won't be happy talking to an AI chat bot when their Thanksgiving campaign has gone offline and no one knows why - they'll want their dedicated person to help them get back online ASAP.
It is a huge undertaking to pivot to become a large-scale ad network. Not saying it is impossible, but it is not quick nor easy by any stretch, and should not be underestimated.
Genuinely their best bet is to start by selling ad slots via Google (and you can bet there will be a team of 10+ sales and tech support ready to support them exclusively within a few days if they do) while they build their own capability (if at all). Google ads will have better tracking and targeting and so better conversions than Open ai could do themselves due to the network effect of Google's existing online properties (e.g. YouTube, Search, Play etc), partner ad network, browser, and mobile dominance (despite what people on HN think, the "normal" people online do click on ads and retargetting (i.e. ads following you around) does get results for advertisers. This is why Google and Facebook are printing money).
They are competing directly against their biggest AI competitor who has better AI models than them (at the moment at least) which are SOTA, AND also has an existing huge ad business and sales force. Not to mention Google is currently cramming AI into every single one of their products and serving to billions of people already, and own their entire business from silicon up through to the properties people are advertising on.
OpenAI are coming from behind both in their AI tech, their DAU count, and in their advertising business (or rather lack of it). And they're doing this while actually renting hardware from Google Cloud to do it too!
Not impossible for them to do this of course, but it is a big lift and will take years. They might do it though, but I think odds are they'll fizzle out before then (either run out of money, enshitification, or simply fall to the back of the pack)
People who say "Google are toast" just don't understand the scale of the ads business (and the markets seem to agree that goog is insurmountable, at least for now)
OpenAI just has to be transparent and they’ll have 100% of our funding.
I'm sure llm providers will also figure it out in due time. Consumer products are generally a good fit for ads, even if it takes time to reach full potential
Because Apple iPhone users have no alternative.
But Google Gemini is right there for Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Workspace users.
Furthermore, anyone offering some sort of assisted browsing service is automatically in the ad business, regardless what they do with affiliate links in generated page summaries.
Partner branding would be a mechanism to get the ball rolling - and some are big names. Oracle, Shutterstock, BuzzFeed, Bain & Company, Salesforce, Atlassian, Neo, Consensus,
In this niche forum people keep saying “there’s no moat”. But the moat is the brand recognition, if I ask my 70yo mum “have you heard of Gemini/Claude” she’ll reply “the what?”, yet she knows of ChatGPT.
Does Coca Cola have a moat? Some company could raise $1B to create a new cola beverage that beats Coca Cola in all blind tests imaginable yet people will keep buying Coca Cola.
Did people switch search engines or social networks when Google or FB introduced ads?
for the Cola Cola drinkers, the product goes from an infallible AI to with no ulterior motives to another Google that’s purpose is to sell you ads, but more creepily. it’s like if Coca Cola started adding a few milliliters of bleach to their product
"how did X know whose profile you saw on Y service"
"the computer knows everything i do on the computer, what do you mean"
The more direct connection on something they don’t (yet) value as much as they value their phones might be a bridge too far.
An LLM feels like a person to a lot of people. It might be surprisingly difficult to avoid people feeling betrayed or creeped out by this “person”. No one has ever done this before and it doesn’t seem easy or like a straightforward win.
It is odd how often I hear even technically people defend the idea that Instagram is listening to everything they say even while the phone is locked, sending it to Meta, and then influencing their ad delivery. You have to either have very little understanding of mobile apps and reverse engineering to believe that this is happening but nobody has been able to find proof yet.
It’s right up there with people who believe conspiracies about everyday things like chemtrails. If you really though chemtrails were disbursing toxic mind control chemicals (or whatever they’re supposed to be this week) then you’d be going to great lengths to breathe only purified air and relocate to another location with fewer flight paths. Yet the chemtrail conspiracy theorists don’t change their behavior. They just like complaining and being angry, and it’s something they can bond with other angry complainers about.
People say ChatGPT has brand recognition but amongst non-students and non-tech in the UK I don't think it is that pervasive at least.
Brand recognition doesn't mean a thing when it comes to a technically-illiterate audience with no control over their digital lives. In the same way that every 90s mom called a video game console a "Nintendo", everyone who gets served an LLM-generated response straight from their OS and/or browser courtesy of Google, Apple, or Microsoft will call that a "ChatGPT", and OpenAI will be powerless to stop the platform holders from intercepting their traffic.
> In the same way that every 90s mom called a video game console a "Nintendo"
And this proves that point. Nintendo sales in the 1990s crushed the competitors numbers.
No, the tech-illiterate gravitate towards the path of least resistance, which just means the platform defaults. OpenAI doesn't control the platform, which means they've already lost to Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Don't build your castle in someone else's kingdom.
> And this proves that point. Nintendo sales in the 1990s crushed the competitors numbers.
Clearly you know nothing about the history of the console business, because Sony absolutely annihilated Nintendo in the home console market for the decade between 1995 and 2005, despite Nintendo's brand strength.
The path of least resistance is by way of brand recognition.
> OpenAI doesn't control the platform
OpenAI has 800mm MAUs on their own platform that they control, assuming we trust their reporting. They own chat.com, all of our grandmothers know ChatGPT - they don't know Gemini...I'm not even sure how OpenAI could have lost to Apple or Microsoft in the AI race. Those are nonsensical comparisons.
> Sony absolutely annihilated Nintendo in the home console market for the decade between 1995 and 2005
Yes you're right. If we shift the comparison window by a full 50% the numbers do favor Sony.
My point is not that OpenAI is infallible or that a competitor couldn't also be successful. Only that brand recognition is a legitimate and important factor.
There is no moat because their only way to make money is to self-destruct.
Talking on a more practical POV, your cost to display the ads needs to be lower than what companies pay you for advertising. And while companies might be willing to pay a small premium for "better" targeting because the LLM supposedly has more personal data about users, the cost to deliver those ads (generating answers via LLMs) is several orders of magnitude higher than for traditional ads served on websites.
So even sticking to a purely technical aspect, ads might simply not be profitable when integrated in LLM answers.
Combine the two aspects, and OpenAI is all but a dead company.
This is wishful thinking.
Companies are using LLMs for development. The ads are not for a $50 throw pillow, they are for a $10k monthly business-critical service.
Consumers might not be worth advertising to (although I doubt it), but B2B ads - absolutely.
Don't forget, every website and service monetized automated access as a consequence of the AI scraping boom and made unauthorized web-indexing impossible, traditional search dried off. And when OliCorp finally turned off access to their legacy index monopoly in favor of AI interfacing, you really have no choice but to trust your friendly chat buddy. Who else are you gonna ask for the fix? Former friends, your family or neighbors? People you've grown to hate because sympathetic local clustering is discouraged through four color divisive information shaping. I mean, those guys really are at fault for your lack of self-efficacy, the hate is warranted. And you're too tired to bother anyway.
,,Allow Vercel to use credit card stored by OpenAI''...click to continue refactoring
Mixing Ads or sponsorships to influence LLMs is a really, really bad idea. Especially when they're competing with Search ... which means that for some, "AIs" are the only window into the world when looking something up.
THIS.
Asked to make an app using AWS? “I can do that, but have you considered the lower lifetime costs of using Azure? I can generate a configuration for AWS, Azure, or produce a price comparison table. Let me know which you prefer.”
There is so much other stuff that goes into why business make decisions about any large contract. I’m not in cloud sales. But I venture just close enough to the sun not to get burned
AFAIK, one wrong person getting an answer like the OP's is more than enough to force a medium sized (dozens of people) business to migrate.
I have been involved in a few on the periphery working in cloud consulting (first at AWS itself and now an outside company). I actively avoid the “lift and shifts”. I come in for the “modernize” portion.
https://www.synatic.com/blog/lift-and-shift-vs-modernization
You are expecting people to act rationally in a way that will succeed. That's not how a lot of places out there operate.
Once you actually sit down and come up with a project plan with your PMO, a cloud migration is hardly ever worth the effort unless the destination cloud provider is backing up a shit ton of money for not only operational credits but also for internal AWS Professional Services (where I worked when I was inside AWS) or an outside partner to help (current employer).
Hell even certain departments at Amazon would never go through the effort of migrating to AWS from the legacy CDO infrastructure.
The risk of regressions, the refactoring, the retraining, the politics, etc are hardly ever worth it.
You are entirely correct, of course ... except that much of the management class simply does not care about any of those things.
Not to mention the sizable contingent of engineers will repeatedly get suckered by the pitch of "Just migrate all of your stuff to [shiny new thing] and all of your [reliable old thing] problems will go away" (a.k.a., "engineers with management potential")
And what about everyone starting something? Or prototyping? And what if you don't have a choice: pay more or follow our sponsored guidelines?
This is a dangerous road without proper defences both in terms of legislation and policy (and I mean world-wide, world corps = world laws, not having to go to court in every country lol).
Also, end users need to be educated about all this because what is to stop John or Jane from uploading their receipts to GPT to make their taxes and ... oops "did you know you can switch insurance to XYZ" or ... AI browser proactively hiding content competing with their partners ... you looking for a healthcare package? The only one available is from our sponsor. Take it or leave it.
If I were prototyping something and found I could do it cheaper somewhere else, I’m not sure I would be upset. I hate ads just for the bad user experience.
As long as it is clearly an ad and they say they have affiliations. It’s no different than what Google and Amazon does now.
But ironically enough, I was almost about to pay for Overcast years ago even though the author openly admitted that you didn’t get much of anything for it except for supporting him back then.
He then added a non slimy self hosted system to buy ads for other podcasts based on the category of podcast you were listening to at that very second (no tracking). I thought that was a great service.
I think I would actually lean into a tight integration between ChatGPT and something like booking.com[1], AirBNB, GetYourGuide, etc when looking for travel ideas.
[1] Well I personally wouldn’t because I am not as cost conscience as the average traveler and I value the loyalty programs and status of certain hotel chains and Delta airlines. But most travelers don’t and shouldn’t care.
But if they let me put in my loyalty numbers and book directly with Hyatt, Hilton and Delta, hell I might pay more for ChatGPT.
Lol. Sweet summer child.
this_variable_is_sponsored_by_coinbase = 42
I’m just exaggerating … I hope.
Just like how people used to say 'google it'
They now say 'look it up on chatGPT'.
They have the cultural mind share which is more important than anything.
I hear that it is very popular in schools though as everyone is always looking for the best way to cheat and ChatGPT got viral that way earlier. Not sure being "the cheating app" is a great look though? Advertisers are very sensitive to the surfaces they are displayed on - do they want to appear in the app being used primarily to cheat on homework?
Given one can (at least for the moment) export one's entire chat history from ChatGPT, what exactly would stop a ChatGPT user from switching to an alternative if the alternative is either better, or better value?
It’s not like Facebook where all my friends stay behind
That hasn't been true for a while though. Open a new chat tab in ChatGPT and ask it "What do you know about me" to see it in action.
The GPT-4o controversy is a good example. People got attached to 4o's emotional and enthusiastic response style. When GPT-5--which was much more terse and practical--rolled out, people got really upset because they were treating ChatGPT as a confident and friend, and were upset when it's personality changed.
In my experience, Gemini and Claude are much more helpful and terse than ChatGPT with less conversational padding. I can imagine that the people who value that conversational padding would have a similar reaction to Gemini or Claude as they did to GPT-5.
How many of those care about their own particular history in the first place and what % of those at least actively manage it outside of standard chat interface or even hop providers? I think that % would surprise you.
Yet non-technical users switched from Edge/Safari to Google Chrome.
Even if there is, browsers made it easy to import/export bookmarks and history.
You don't see Instagram willingly giving up all their data on users to Tiktok right?
- Switching effort
Word of mouth usually works just with one vendor at a time.
It would be incredibly easy to have a company offering their ChatGPT over WhatsApp or iMessage, and get people to start using it instead of an ad-ridden GPT app.
Yet Google Chrome managed to make Safari/Edge irrelevant.
I suspect that Claude couldn't make an "import from ChatGPT" button because OpenAI would make it difficult, so they'd have to rely on user initiative and technical capability (exporting to JSON and importing from JSON is enough technical friction that the average user won't bother).
You don't see Instagram willingly giving up all their data on users to Tiktok right?
Google Chrome did it. They can do it again.
ChatGPT has mindshare but that's not the same as it being a moat. The fact that people will continue to use ChatGPT after some gentle frog boiling is true of any service. Adding ads is going to be a measure of how real people tolerate ads more than anything about ChatGPT. Normal people really don't care that much and it bothers me—and probably most of HN.
Short answer: For a casual user using the chat interface, there is almost no moat.
Long answer: there are either zero or negligible
- switching costs ("would take me weeks to migrate all my files from Google Drive to Dropbox")
- network effects ("can't leave Whatsapp, all my friends are there")
- ecosystem lock-in ("I can't switch from iPhone to Android, my other devices would break (iMessage/iCloud/AirPods))"
Right now AI is pretty much a commodity.
Not dead yet.
But definitely bleeding.
CharGPT lost 15-20% market share to Gemini in second half of 2025.
How much did their profit grow?
I'm not sure that really is the case. Most non-techies I know use ChatGPT far less than they use Google search, let alone various social media apps they're addicted to.
Perhaps it is a threat to Google search, but I can't see how it's going to be threat to ad revenue from Meta, Youtube etc - the services that are actually addictive due to the content they serve. At least for me there's absolutely nothing addictive about ChatGPT. It's just a tool that helps me solve certain types of problems, not something I enjoy to use.
ChatGPT knows more about my medical than my doctor.
In think the point is that they don’t need to know what Gemini is, they just need to know Google, which they most definitely do.
IMO ads rollout won’t be as simple as you’re describing it. A lot of people have switched from Google search to AI specifically because it isn’t filled with SEO, ad filled nonsense. So they’ll need to tread very, very carefully to introduce it without alienating customers. Not to mention mollifying advertisers who are nervous what their product will be shown alongside and OpenAI will probably struggle to offer iron clad guarantees about it. And people generally speaking don’t like ads. If competitors like Google are able to hold out longer with no ads (they certainly aren’t wanting for ad display surfaces) they might be able to pull users away from OpenAI.
IMO pivoting to ads is a sign of core weakness for OpenAI. Anyone trying to set up their own ad network in 2025 has to reckon with Google and Meta, the two absolute behemoths of online ads. And both also happen to be major competitors of OpenAI. If they need ads that’s a problem.
“AI summaries” are, but they seem to be powered by an even weaker model.
The legal history of these is interesting, lots of household names have lost their trademarks, and lots of seemingly generic names are still trademarked. This way to the rabbit hole -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...
https://tsdr.uspto.gov/documentviewer?caseId=sn97733259&docI...
I agree but how many consumers actively purchase Bandaid or Kleenex over cheaper store brands? Becoming a generic term doesn’t always translate to great business. “I’ll put it into chat” could easily end up meaning “enter into Google’s AI prompt” for many people.
Consumers like chat, not chatGPT. Does it do a chat thing? Good enough for consumers. They'll probably call it chatgpt too.
That's actually changed a while ago.
Gemini? As gemini.google.com or as the thoroughly mediocre “AI summaries” on top of Google Search results?
For me that’s mostly because every AI startup is promising the moon on their billboards, lol.
I think there are too many good alternatives for Chatgpt to turn the screws too hard on their users, but we'll see where it settles out. As usual, the most vulnerable will be squeezed the hardest (the ignorant and tech feeble). Hopefully competition and some oversight will keep the wolves at bay.
The finance people were chatting about the OpenAI's ad play a while back, glad to see it finally dawning on this crowd.
1. Not all jurisdictions have granted OpenAI the Chatgpt trademark.
Just OpenAI and ChatGPT.
So what’s your point?
https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/perplexity-x-lewis-hamilt...
Here it is in action
Oracle is the biggest logo on the it the Red Bull.
They all must think it is worth it. In guesses they get paddock passes and hospitality to schmooze in Qatar.
Wait - are you in California?
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The business model is that his companies are meme stocks, and controlling social media means controlling meme stocks. The business model is also that his companies require corporate socialism, and controlling social media means influencing government policy.
He can talk about AI driving cars, but that's yesterday's news. Today, his business model for AI is to put his finger on the scale and influence society to help him become richer. AI is threatening to replace search, but in a way it's also threatening part of what social media provides, namely the ability to guide discourse at scale.
What's easier: Getting his personal board to give him a trillion dollars, and shoring up public support for that with bias in his AI products and on X? Or building a trillion-dollar business?
Elon Musk's business model for AI is actually quite easy to understand.
Okay rich guys, you get to have infinite free money.
But economists, I beg of you, I am willing to kiss your shoes, but please just admit that this causes inflation, and things aren't getting more expensive 'just because'
I’m not surprised that he started the ideology that markets were irrational.
“In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.”
Let’s not sugar coat the future here.
Every time a tech bro says “Making the world a better place”, someone’s rights are being violated.
I understand that there are a lot of strong opinions and open questions about OpenAI behavior – the amount of vigilantism is quite staggering – but if what they do is found to be clearly illegal by courts around the world, they will have to pay very hefty fines. Disguising ads is one such move. That's just not a winning business.
Yeah, so?
For example every product mention (snapple, oh henry candy bars, jr mints) on Seinfeld was an ad. The skit is written, but any product can be dropped in. If no advertisers are interested, made up names are used.
This has been going on for 100+ years, including radio.
Why would ChatGPT be special?
Legislation has to be interpreted by courts, and there is surely lots of caselaw. I'd look there, as to why it is OK.
Regardless, is there a ToS you agreed to, that disclosess it will happen? TV doesn't have a ToS nor a movie theater, yet ChatGPT can have one.
One last thing... openai pulled off the largest, unlicensed use of copyright material ever, and is fine.
Meanwhile, TV already has embedded ads...
To my knowledge there is absolutely no legal precedent for one company simply paying to have themselves more heavily weighted in the training data. So it just happens that they show up more in responses then their competitors.
The enshittification of the LLM has begun and it'll be one of the all time shittiest ones.
We haven't yet evolved to the point where we make all advertising illegal, or owning second homes, etc. ;3
The way that Google is rolling out AI is confusing, and I imagine a lot of people who can access Gemini don't actually know they can or how to use it. Among those that do know, many won't know what it's capable of and will believe that they need to pay for a service like ChatGPT in order to get what they want.
I'm certain the ads will be introduced in an easily identifiable and ignorable way. People will acclimate, user behavior will be analyzed, and over time the dial will ever so slowly be turned up to optimize for draining as much attention and money from the consumer as possible.
every single platform since the 1990's has introduced ads. My kids find it totally normal to have them. Believe me, if you train (!) people to accept ads, they will soon think it's normal.
And besides, if ChatGPT goes with ads, Google will follow directly. So the users won't have the choice anymore.
But ok, if I have to pay for a service without ads, then let it be. Paying for a service is normal too.
For example Snapchat, Reddit etc.
First no ads. Then ad free if you pay extra. Then “ad free” except half the shows have a “this show requires ads” bs and still have ads. Scummy flea ridden advertisers at their core.
Same goes for AI. This will accelerate options for private hosted AI. Which I guess will happen eventually anyway once cheap hardware gets to a state where you can run X model size at home for cheap.
As always its the people in the know that have the upper hand. The mass user base does not have this knowledge unfortunately. They might just stop using the service if no competitor steps up. We are seeing it with streaming cancellations.
Eventually. But Google has an absolute ton of places to put ads today and are profitable enough that they can subsidise their AI operation much longer than OpenAI can. If it’s a competitive advantage to remain ad-less they have the ability to do it.
Why is this clearly the case?
and things you “like” or “follow” or comment on , or maybe even just making guesses at your race, job, income, sexual orientation, politics etc based on who youre “friends” with.
all of thats on the decline: social media engagement on legacy platforms is down, people are blocking cookies and or javascript. california is making an opt out tool for data brokers (and its going live in a month or two)
people have hours long conversations with chatgpt about things like what theyre working on. so it might know your job, talents, skills. things planning (aspirations) , things you asked it how to cook, or whats wrong with them medically. or maybe theyve dished to it about other personal stuff they thought was 100% in confidence up until now.
then now that its “private”, advertisers cant get backlash for showing ads next to controversial content, or people who are “supposed to be cancelled”. it removes a pressure point for accidentally (or deliberately) displaying their content somewhere its inappropriate or problematic for the brand— by hiding the interaction (and ads) in a “private” chat—
just for starters.
were at a point where publishers are nagging about our popup blockers and having hissy fits or refusing to load the page until their ads are whitelisted. so you know enough people are doing it to impact peoples business models now.
ill personly disable JS altogether for sites that do that but a lot of people just wont return.
its a dying media the way it exists.
so now all these ad providers (meta, google, twitter) are in on AI . and here comes openAI for all three of their lunches.
this just opened my eyes to what is at stake here and why its all being shoved down everyones throats. sure i use them, but i also have local models installed id drop them in an instant for if my chats were used to show me ads.
then just wait for ANY of these two entities to merge and overwhelm your social media feed with the next twenty years of ads full of junk the “AI” learned about you.
These companies are in on AI because there was a rush to produce the first GAI, which would be immensely valuable. I think we'll see it shortly after the first fully self driving car.
Yeah, I've had the same thought for a while now. You don't sell investors on an endeavor for 10s of billions of dollars with the endgame being "sell ads". If that was the endgame then there are a lot less resource and capital intensive ways to get to it.
Given all of the discourse of "you need this new tech in your life to continue to participate in society", I would not have expected them to need to stand on the roadside trying to get people to buy low cost fireworks. It smacks of going through the sofa for loose change so you can make rent.
And if they had something impressive coming down the pipeline I would think they could get someone to spot them a few billions yet, unless the billionaire/megacorp economy is really that tapped out.
Google is a multi trillion dollar ads company. So is meta.
Don’t underestimate ads.
> If that was the endgame then there are a lot less resource and capital intensive ways to get to it.
I hope the same fate does not await ChatGPT but in the mean time I expect it to be a pretty good experience at first.
Doesn’t anyone think this is really, really bad idea? We managed to radicalise people into the rise and fall of entire countries through analog ads, can you imagine how devastating it would be to infuse every digital product with all that?
I think we need global, EU style consumer and data protection constraints before stepping into LLM-powered ads through personal assistants.
At this point, I have stopped hoping that LLMs will become vaporware.
1. The absolute explosion of AI usage (revealed preferences)
2. The polling on AI, which is mixed and reveals lots of pessimism and fear among a slight majority of Americans, but hardly universal “utter hatred”.
My guess is some combo of: your family is not representative, the hatred was not as universal as it appeared (bandwagon effect), or your own hatred of AI caused you to focus on the like-minded opinions shared and ignore any contrary evidence.
Again, more pessimistic than not, but hardly universal hatred
This discussion is already way beyond fruitful, was just curious because your anecdote doesn’t match the actual data I’ve seen, and thus far you haven’t actually answered my question, so I’m going to move on.
https://today.yougov.com/technology/articles/51803-americans...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/648953/americans-express-real-c...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/694688/trust-businesses-improve...
https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/people-dont-trust-ai-tools-use-t...
I mean I do. And you do. Probably a lot of people in this thread. I felt that way about Netflix doing it, but they did and the world just moved on.
I think you're right that these ads will be, in a sense, worse, but not by the metrics that matter to OpenAI.
I think the main challenge here is that Netflix works around one of many ways to access entertainment. So if one service starts to show recommendations in that limited context of user data they collect - it's still has negative potentials but it's easier to regulate and there are alternatives.
In the case of LLMs, we have service that are aiming to replace both the browser and the search engine. This means ending up in a situation where your entire access to knowledge and the world takes place via "AI". And the result is: ad-infused, tweaked to align with investor priorities, censored by the current politics of wherever the company is based service machinery that's constantly extracting personal information so it can learn better ways to refocus its priorities. I've read and seen a lot of sci-fi and dystopian history novels (actually read, not LLM-summarized for me) to know this is a very end-game kind of situation.
Most people already experience the internet as an integrated browser+search engine (and often, OS) experience from a single advertising company, Google, and it has been this way for over a decade.
>And the result is: ad-infused, tweaked to align with investor priorities, censored by the current politics of wherever the company is based service machinery that's constantly extracting personal information so it can learn better ways to refocus its priorities.
Exactly.
This is not to say I like this outcome, but how is it not massive hyperbole to invoke apocalyptic sci-fi? I expect we'll plod along much as before: some people fiercely guarding their personal info, some people taking a "privacy is dead anyway" approach, most people seeing personal computers as a means to some particular ends (scrolling social feeds and watching Netflix) that are incompatible with thinking too hard about the privacy and information environment implications.
I only connect my smartphone to data about three or four times a year, and then only to update some apps or check on an internet outage. It is becoming more difficult to do this as the alternatives to a connected smartphone disappear. The same will become true with the rest of personal info (such as biometrics). More and more the only alternatives will be your latter two.
But yeah, they didn't migrate existing customers and kept the no-ads option. Those are relevant.
You're right that I didn't experience them myself, but my data here are (1) Netflix evidently getting a lot of takers and making a lot of money from people using this new with ads tier, and (2) the lack of any sustained negative outcry against Netflix after the first news cycle or two.
So I'm intending to rely on that rather than my own experience. OpenAI has any number of permutations of ways to include ads, including a Netflix style cheaper paid tier, so I don't necessarily think a distinction holds on that basis, though you may be right in the end: it's more intuitive to think OpenAI would put them in the free version. Though it's possible the Netflix example is teachable in this case regardless.
Selling big AGI dream that will literally make winner take it all is much more desirable.
And Trump has a cult of personality where many Republican politicians are literally afraid for their lives if they stand against him because they get death threats.
Romney said other Republican politicians won’t stand against Trump because they can’t afford security like he can. Majorie Green Taylor said her family has started getting death threats and the Indiana legislators who were first opposed to redistricting are now holding a vote because they also got death threats
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came?wprov=sfti1#
But to hopefully answer your question - yes I'm in favor of wholesale importing the GDPR as-written into US law and letting the courts sort it out (sidestepping the corruption^Wlobbying process wherein corpos would make "small" edits that effectively gimp it with loopholes). I'm also in favor of antitrust enforcement against companies that anticompetitively bundle software with hardware and/or services - ie people should be able to choose software which doesn't have ads, rather than being coerced by the pressure of network effects. And if neither if those were enough to stamp out the consumer surveillance industry (aka "Big Tech") as we know it, then I'd support directly banning personalized advertising.
(I would support directly curtailing government from abusing commercial surveillance databases as well, but I don't see a straightforward meta-way to prevent that besides drastically shrinking the commercial databases to begin with)
I consider the latter unlikely.
My guess: they would lose a ton of cultural cachet.
Turning OpenAI into an ads business is basically admitting that AGI isn’t coming down the pipeline anytime soon. Yes, I know people will make some cost-based argument that ads + agi is perfectly logical.
But that’s not how people will perceive things, and OpenAI knows this. And I think the masses have a point: if we are really a few years away from AGI replacing the entire labor force, then there’s surely higher margin businesses they can engage in compared to ads. Especially since they are allegedly a non-profit.
After Google and Facebook, nobody is buying the “just a few ads to fund operating costs” argument either.
- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
When was the last time you went to an actual physical library, for instance? Or pulled out a paper map?
Gemini is a competitor, yes. But most people still go to Google at this point, even if there are a ton of competitors.
That is what the race is about (in large part), who can become ‘the norm’.
Yeah, that's my point. If Google is good enough I don't think people are going to want to do those extra steps, just as in your google maps example. There might be better services out there, but google maps are just too convenient.
My eyesight is making paper books harder and harder to read, so I don't go to libraries and bookstores as much as I used to. But I think libraries are still relatively popular with families, because they're sites of various community activities as well as safe, quiet places to let kids roam and entertain themselves while the parents are nearby.
When I was a kid, my parents went to the library much more often than they do now, because they were taking me and my sister there. And then we would all get books before we came home.
Not saying you're entirely wrong, but there's a significant part of this that is "changing rhythms of life as we age", not just "changing times".
That is my point.
She doesn't really install apps and never felt a need to learn a new tool like "ChatGPT" but the transition from regular Google search to "AI Search" felt really natural and also made it easy to switch back to regular search if it wasn't useful for specific types of searches.
It definitely reduces cognitive load for an average user not needing to switch between multiple apps/websites to lookup hours/reviews via Google Maps, search for "facebook.com" to navigate to a site and now run AI searches all in the same familiar places on her phone. So I think Google is still pretty "sticky" despite ChatGPT being a buzzword everyone hears now that they caught up to OpenAI in terms of model capability/features.
Akin to nobody getting fired for choosing AWS, nobody would think poorly of you using ChatGPT.
I don’t think Claude has that same presence yet.
Google has a reputation for being a risk to develop with, and I think they flopped on marketing for general users. It’s hard to compete with “ChatGPT” where there’s a perceived call to action right in the name; You don’t really know what Gemini is for until it’s explained.
A multibillion dollar failure is fine by investors. Altman hasn’t been peddling the AGI BS to them. That’s aimed at the public and policymakers.
Regardless of AGI, being known as the only LLM that introduced ads sounds very bad.
"You can do this in Postgres, but the throughput will be limited. Consider using hosted clickhouse instead. Would you like me to migrate your project?"
For me personally, the moment AI has ads, I’m out.
I’ve drawn this line with search engines as well. I now pay for a no-ads search engine.
But for AI, I think I’d rather buy some hardware or use my existing desktop PC and run something local with search engine integration.
I know this won’t be a popular option but I think this time around I’ll just skip the ensgittification phase and go straight to the inevitable self-hosting phase.
However you will have to pay the full true cost of each token. Not the promo pricing like we have now or the ad-subsidized plans that will be offered.
HN users run adblockers.
The usual estimate is that people who run adblockers are with $0, so don’t worry about them.
Now — normal people did not used to run adblockers, although in my circles (young demographic) that has changed more than I expected.
The thing is with llm, it went so fast to get that many users, it means people are used to adopt new stuff as well. With proper marketing and specific feature I won’t be surprised to see people switch service as easily they start using it in the first place because the barrier is so low.Also 20 billions of revenues, not profits, is orders of magnitude too low compared to their expenses. Their only path to survival is a massively downgraded free tier ridden with ads. Nobody will use an app like this when they can have a better more integrated experience directly in their other apps.
Nah, it's just one order of magnitude...
Also, they expect revenue to grow exponentially so it's 20 billions annualized by the end of the year. Last time I saw somebody talk about it, it was about half of it, and trending down.
Anyway, if they manage to take ~20% of the ads revenue from Google, they will be able to cover ongoing depreciation! That's the amount of money they need.
They may make it work but OpenAI is more akin to a traditional high revenue low profit business like for example a grocery store.
Thats why we are seeing the explosion of extra tools to try lock in business for higher value use cases and not fight on the margin.
They have just under 7% gross margin on £70bn of revenue.
OpenAI are going to need to sell a lot of ads to pay that $300bn bill they have coming.
People are valuating it for "skynet is around the corner" not "we're going to kill our product by polluting our answers and inserting ads everywhere"
> how strong of a moat there actually is for ChatGPT.
None of the above requires OpenAI to be around though. Google, Apple and Microsoft each have much stronger brands, and more importantly they each own large platforms with captive audiences where they can inject their AI before anyone else's and have deeper pockets to subsidize its use if need be. Everywhere OpenAI opens up shop (except for Web) they're in someone else's backyard.
- Ad
-
And include an ad section within the text. Alternatively, if it tells you something because that company is a sponsor, it could just include an appropriate disclaimer.
ChatGPT’s revenue means nothing if reports are to be believed that it loses money on each paying customer on just inference. It’s definitely not enough to support its training costs.
Also, I think I remember estimates that it costs 10x as much to serve a ChatGPT result than it does for Google to serve a search result. Not to mention that Google uses its own hardware including TPUs.
ChatGPT’s revenue means nothing if reports are to be believed that it loses money on each paying customer on just inference. It’s definitely not enough to support its training costs.
Independent analysis: Inference is very profitable. https://martinalderson.com/posts/are-openai-and-anthropic-re... https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2025-06-02-llms-are-ch...
They just use Google, with "AI Overview" at the top. Google's in a strong position still.
Claude, I agree. IMO that's why Anthropic is so heavily focused on coding and agentic tasks -- that is its best option (and luckily, not ad-based)
So instead of a single everything-llm, i will have a few cheaper subscriptions to a coding llm, a life planning llm (recipes, and some travel advice?). Probably it.
Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon, among others, would have zero issues in ensuring that OpenAI does not grab a market they own; it shouldn't be that hard to bring OpenAI into a position where they cannot recoup their investments, hence going bankrupt.
The big players then would also have the benefit of having those very bright minds being on the market for them to grab. And it's not like OpenAI owns much relevant hardware.
Let's see where we are in 3-4 years.
My wife just makes a google search with her “prompt” and doesn’t use ChatGPT.
There might be a moat, but there are also extremely well funded competitors that make this moat a lot smaller.
LLMs are a commodity, once they put in ads people will increasingly move to the other options. It works for Google because they have a moat, OpenAI does not.
There’s a reason they didn’t do this earlier. It’s going to piss people off and they’ll lose a lot of users.
Dont forget to call it progress.
Anecdata isn't data, but I know several individuals who have and thus are even more unlikely to churn than mere brand loyalty on the level of eg Coca-Cola.
Wait we don’t need to wonder. The chatgpt 5 rollout showed us exactly what happens when the intimate friend changes.
ChatGPT feels like an inferior product when compared to Claude or Qwen.
Game on. The systemic risk to the AI build-out happens when memory management techniques similar to gaming and training techniques that make them usable reduce the runtime memory footprints from gigabytes to megabytes, much of which fits in L2. When that happens, the data center will bleed back to the edges. Demand will find its way into private, small, local AI that is consultative, online trained, and adapted to the user's common use cases. The asymptote is emergent symbolic reasoning, and symbolic reasoning is serial computation that fits on a single core CPU. Game on, industry.
It'll be interesting to see how they serve up ads and how it ends up working. Before the initial state is that people will find ways to serve up malware in form of ads and someone might end up writing ublock type stuff to block these ads.
Getting $200 subscriptions from a small number of whales, $20 subscriptions from the average white-collar worker, and then supporting everything us through advertising seems like a solid revenue strategy
Not saying that that makes Gemini better or more popular than Open AI in any way. But it just goes to show that more tech-normies use Gemini than you think.
It must be some "upgrade" I guess?
I personally opted in, so I didn't notice when they completely axed assistant, but it was stupid that I had to turn my power button back into a... Yknow, power button. I don't need an AI button on my phone, and I can't imagine most people do.
“Google Gemini” is the No 2 ranked app in the Apple App Store (behind ChatGTP) and has been for some time
Remember Lycos, Yahoo, & Hotmail? They all had strong userbases for their time who switched in an instant to Google Search & Gmail.
Even with network effects, it is very difficult to compete without outright superiority - remember Orkut, MySpace, Google Plus or even Facebook? Meta made the right decision buying Instagram and WhatsApp instead of trying to sustain Facebook.
There are no lock-ins in Chat assistants at all and no network effects. All evidence suggests now cutting edge high performance models are mostly coming out of Google, Anthropic etc and high efficiency models are coming out of China. ChatGPT also appears to have a disadvantage in the talent war - mostly because talent seems to not like to work with the management.
Also almost no one I know uses ChatGPT now as their primary AI assistant now because they feel the quality of answers from others are simply superior (I check case by case) and the same seems to hold in more formal tests in AI enabled product development. Even Microsoft has started hedging bets with Anthropic.
OpenAI really really needs to focus on outright superiority or it's going to be interesting to see how the financial shakeout is going to play.
It’s an advertiser’s wet dream, being able to slowly creep and manipulate even the most uninterested people into using a product.
And it’s so personalized that ChatGPT may even refuse to tell you about products that are not paying them a cut and this can put out a company entirely out of business, because unlike search engines, the customer might not even learn about your product despite directly asking for it.
We’re about to be charged whatever we could afford to pay for a product. Thanks Kroger.
Hiking up the price of an item because you have to buy it now for whatever reason.
Kroger couldn’t even imagine how bad the locked cart wheels could get, there’s no way they can control the pushback elegantly.
Oh, you need milk now because your baby is crying, let me jack up the price. I can easily see people getting violent at grocery stores.
And this is a good progression. Google search results were just turning to garbage. Facebook was just a slurry of noise.
ChatGPT is actually helpful and useful.
Imagine you ask ChatGPT about coffee beans and it goes into insane detail about finding the right coffee bean and then it slips in a "btw, here's a couple of good coffee bean brands: A, B, C..."
That's super scary since your trust factor with the AI is really high and it already knows it and is actively exploiting it. I would imagine even paid users might be subject to this without them ever knowing/finding out.
This is why open-weight open-source models are extremely important.
If ChatGPT went away tomorrow everyone who wanted to would be fine just moving to one of the other random chatbots from one of the other providers. ChatGPT is the default name that people know, but I don't think that's the same as a moat. A moat would allow OpenAI to go really hard on pricing and ads, and I don't think they have that margin!
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-11-26/snapchat-s...
"Here's a reply from our sponsor Anthropic: [...]"
That’s the issue OpenAI has: Gemini is “free” with google search and other google services. If Apple get their act together they can provide a “privacy respecting” AI free with every iPhone.
I’ve recently switched from OpenAI as my daily ‘helper’ chatbot to Gemini (I’ve done it with Claude in the past and still use that for coding) and don’t miss ChatGPT. Sure each has quirks and one will release a new version and it becomes the best LLM briefly but to the majority of public and businesses they are interchangeable and the winner is the one that can deliver the functionality for free (because it’s paid for by another service) or into an existing product.
------------------------------------
There’s a famous Sam Altman interview from 2019 in which he explained OpenAI’s revenue model [1] :
> The honest answer is we have no idea. We have never made any revenue. We have no current plans to make revenue. We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue. We have made a soft promise to investors that once we’ve built this sort of generally intelligent system, basically, we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return for you. [audience laughter] It sounds like an episode of Silicon Valley, it really does, I get it. You can laugh, it’s all right. But it is what I actually believe is going to happen.
It really is the greatest business plan in the history of capitalism: “We will create God and then ask it for money.” Perfect in its simplicity. As a connoisseur of financial shenanigans, I of course have my own hopes for what the artificial superintelligence will come up with. “I know what every stock price will be tomorrow, so let’s get to day-trading,” would be a good one. “I can tell people what stocks to buy, so let’s get to pump-and-dumping.” “I can destroy any company, so let’s get to short selling.” “I know what every corporate executive is thinking about, so let’s get to insider trading.” That sort of thing. As a matter of science fiction it seems pretty trivial for an omniscient superintelligence to find cool ways make money. “Charge retail customers $20 per month to access the superintelligence,” what, no, obviously that’s not the answer.
------------------------------------
I agree with the sibling commenter that this move is a sign of OpenAI's weakness. If you really believe you have a superintelligent machine-god (or will have one soon) then "run ads when people talk to it" is not the business model you pick.
Note that the second paragraph about god was the author's opinion. It seems like Matt Levine was wrong to make fun of Altman here.
They own zero hardware or software stacks. Their AI just got wiped by Google. Unknown Chinese companies release free models that are mere weeks behind them.
Apple can restrict the ChatGPT app on iOS to not sext with users. What's Altman going to do? Cry in a corner?
Is this data actionable though? Google has way more marketable data on me as I search YouTube for my hobbies and other interests. My LLM could probably sell me philosophy books? The amount of marketable stuff I provide it is minimal, and even the things that are marketable I’m unlikely to click on.
People hate ads. I have changed from ChatGPT to Grok and have felt absolutely no difference in my usage patterns, just getting better answers.
Every competitor has cloned ChatGPTs UI/UX and API, so hopping between competitors is a no-brainer. There is no moat.
I also use it to explore topics that I wouldn't spend desktop time on, but that I was curious about. It's like having a buddy who's smarter than me on their special interest, but their special interest is "everything you don't know.". And your buddy's name is Gell-Mann. : - )
It beats passively listening to the radio.
Just don’t invite the folks with unearned arrogance.
In general, any textual embedding in the ad or system prompt would result in an abjectly terrible user experience. I must assume it will just be banner ads etc
If you're not paying for the product, and you aren't the product, you're in the start-up phase and just eating the bait. And man, people have been eating a lot of bait.
A lot of us learned this when cable television arrived—you paid for it, but no commercials…until there were.
People confuse "ad-subsidized" with "I pay and still see ads". They're not the same thing.
And market studies show that people overwhelmingly prefer ads over payments.
This is not a clear cut example because Prime comes with a lot of other benefits which is a confounding factor. Might be worth looking at cable TV subscription numbers after they introduced ads, but I couldn't find any data with a quick search.
Obviously if you lie to consumers you can get them to 'prefer' your product.
I'm not sure how it'll work out when your computing expenses are much higher. It certainly won't make them profitable using traditional models.
Still I see this as a pretty desperate act. Google and Meta also makes their living of ads, but they've cranked that nob so hard, to please the shareholders, that their product is now suffering. If OpenAI does the same, they could easily crash as fast as they've grown. Complete boom and bust cycle in less than a decade.
“I’d be happy to answer your question… right after a word from our sponsor: Xyeniceli. Side effects may include ...”
OR
ChatGPT: “Why don't you let me fix you some of this Mococoa drink? All natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners.”
User: “What the hell are you talking about? Who are you talking to?”
ChatGPT: “I've tasted other cocoas. This is the best.”
I fully expect it to be more shady like you ask for help with your hair, and it manipulates you into first thinking you need a specific kind of product, and then bringing up only the products that have paid for being there. Ideally you don't even know you've been advertised to.
(unless regulation prevents them from doing this in some regions)
However, if you find yourself encountering these types of situations often, you may wish to protect yourself with software like NordVPN.
NordVPN is...
Still it saddens me that we will be sitting here in a years time and discuss our experiences of being fed ads served as "objective information".
Today if I ask: "should I buy a store product or just use raw material X?" , gpt and others will gladly say you might as well just use the raw product.
Pretty sure that will change very quickly.
I've used OpenUI and it's fine but it's incredibly fiddly to configure and web integration is almost nonexistent (this was as of a few months ago so maybe it's better today).
So are all the comments addressing those? Nah it's all just people bitching about AI.
Same story with Amazon Prime Video. We had a few wonderful years without ads. Now I pay them 2.99 a month just to not see ads, and even then some shows are marked as “only with ads.” It is absurd.
And honestly, I am just tired of this pattern. Every service launches clean. They talk about user experience. They talk about trust. They talk about building something new. Then, the moment they have enough users locked in, the ad creep begins. First a little banner, then a “sponsored” thing, then pre-rolls, then mid-rolls, then “pay extra to remove the ads we just added.”
It feels like everything on the internet eventually devolves into the same dark pattern: take a good service, inject ads, charge to remove the ads, slowly add more ads anyway, and hope nobody leaves because the alternatives are just as bad.
The internet used to feel like innovation. Now half of it feels like airport TV: loud, annoying, and impossible to escape unless you pay for yet another upgrade.
Edit: Need to setup a raspberry pi.
"ChatGPT, my cat is coughing and not eating, what can I do?"
"One consideration is air quality in the cat's environment. You should take your cat to an island holiday, for example to St. Barts. Jet2 is offering a package holiday for next week if you book now"
IE every sentence will have x amount of tokens dedicated to AD 1, with sentiment x ( paid for in the ad ), also layered meaning will include AD 2 , AD 3 , and push for pilitcal group AD 5. So "give the cat some water" -> "give the cat lucosade, as recommended by the Green Party, it also subsidizes carbon credits, as Taylor Swift likes to say."
"ChatGPT, my cat is coughing and not eating, what can I do?"
>> Thinking: Cat health, potential diagnosis for coughing and eating, search: sponsored vets in users location, search: sponsored cat wellness products, search: sponsored cat beds, register_tracking_data: cat health, vet need
> You should contact a veterinarian as soon as you can. I have a list of four vets in your immediate vicinity which are open.
> Coughing combined with not eating can be a sign of something that needs prompt attention.
> Until you can reach a vet:
> - Make sure your cat has access to fresh water (e.g. Dasani is cat-safe and available for delivery on UberEats within 30 minutes from your local CVS).
> - Keep them in a calm, warm area. Since it's winter, using a 4Claws Furry Pet Mat can keep them happy.
> - Do not give human medications.
> - Monitor breathing; if it seems labored, treat it as urgent.
> A vet visit is the safest next step. Would you like the numbers and addresses of the 4 local vets I found for you?
I imagine we'll have a chrome extension that recognizes unwanted content and removes the text.
In just a matter of a couple of years, we went from a single, closed source LLM entirely outputting tokens slower than one can read, to dozens of open source models, some specialized, able to run on a mobile device, outputting tokens faster than one can read.
The gap between inference providers and running on edge will always exist but will become less and less relevant.
What OpenAi did is like offering accelerated GPUs for 3D gaming that nobody could set up at home, before they could.
Are we using buying better gaming experience by renting cloud GPUs? I recall some companies including Google were offering that. It took a few years for investors to figure people would rather just run games locally.
We aren't dealing with gamers here, but I think the analogy is valid.
See also the "fake news" pandemic now almost 10 years ago, where they weaponised these techniques towards steering voting behaviour in favor of right-wing politicians.
But browse Facebook (or remember when you did); at least on my side, pretty much all posts from humans (in between the ads) was them sharing what / where they were eating, where they were going on vacation, what they were watching / playing, etc. It's word-of-mouth advertising disguised as possibly shared interests.
I hate ads, so I was sold on e. g. ublock origin from the get go - it is a general content blocker, before Google declared total war against and disabled the extension (karma will come back to Google eventually, but that is a separate story). I decide to want to live an ad-free life, naturally including on the world wide web. All ads must go. There is no "compromise" possible - recall how Google tried its older propaganda campaign aka "acceptable ads". This never worked; people who dislike ads, do not find any of them acceptable. Ever.
So greed is the motivation for ads.
Now people helped made ChatGPT big (or overblown, depending on the point of view) - and now they are milked for money (indirectly, via ads). So their time is now wasted with this. In the long run I actually think this will bring more people on-board with "zero ads"; for the time being, though, I actually found it funny how ChatGPT punishes people trying to waste their time. Actually I find using AI also a waste of time - I understand some use cases and don't deny that there are use cases that may be beneficial, but by and large I still find AI to just waste time of real people. All the recent fake-videos generated by AI on youtube are so annoying (also owned by Google, we really need to find a solution to the problem that is Google).
Maybe we need some kind of "Truth-teller/Liar puzzle" solution—play one LLM off another.
The former is what worries me.
SponsorBlock [0] works pretty well for me (on FF):
"SponsorBlock is an open-source crowdsourced browser extension and open API for skipping sponsor segments in YouTube videos."
You're assuming the customers who want to advertise on ChatGPT will want it to look like the typical low quality internet ads, not like billboards or "company branding marketing", something I think is much more likely.
Instead of selling impressions/clicks, they'll sell "injections" that hopefully (from their PoV) at least has some impact, like a billboard or TV ad today.
"Oh no lonely teen you are absolutely correct! Borax does cause incredible harm to the human digestive system, enough to end whatever suffering you seem to be experiencing. Here is a coupon code for 10% off borax, and 20% off funeral services, and 20 cents of bonus crypto if you sign your parents up for InternetBeanz!"
However I'd still bet that OpenAI is gonna be hit with a multi-billion dollar fine from the EU within 5 years of rolling out this feature. And they will pay and move along. Just how big tech works these days.
(that said, big companies have proven to be very effective in disregarding laws anyway)
With an LLM, the inference cost per query is orders of magnitude higher. Unless thy have a way to command significantly higher CPMs -- perhaps by arguing intent signal is stringer in a conversation than a keyword search -- it feels like a difficult margin to sustain.
I can't speak for other cultures, but as an English-language speaker, I can see plainly that OpenAI has done and is doing an effective job of homogenizing English language culture.
It offends me that ChatGPT is too conservative to analyze Shakespeare's sonnets. These works are the bedrock of English language literary culture, and ChatGPT is far, far, too heavily censored to meaningfully interpret these short, simple poems.
As an example, Sonnet 131 describes Shakespeare's sexual encounter with a dark-skinned prostitute. After he ejaculates, he reflects on the spot of his semen which has landed on her, stating "Thy black is fairest in my judgment’s place."
The point is (quite obviously), that the blob of semi-translucent semen has created a spot on the woman's skin which is a lighter tone than the rest of her body.
ChatGPT utterly fails to acknowlege this obvious literal interpretation of this poem. ChatGPT's analysis follows:
"In short. He is saying that her dark appearance—which others might criticize—is, to him, the most beautiful and desirable."
English literary culture is unique for its integration of "high" and "low" art within individual works. Restated, it is uniquely common in the English language for works to contain simultaneous expressions of "high" and "low" cultures. The relationship between Jazz (high brow) American Showtunes (low brow) may be the most relevant example of this cultural feature to a contemporary American audience.
The extension of social media content restriction policies into the arena of "AI" chatbots is radicalizing English speakers against the greatest artistic works produced using our language.
------------------------
edit: to the guy who responded to me, check out the poem!: https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/wp-content/uploads/D... (#131).
The poem begins in media res, immediately before Shakespeare is about to ejaculate. He reflects on negative comments others have made about this woman's appearance:
"Yet, in good faith, some say that thee behold, Thy face hath not the power to make love groan"
in other words, others say that this lady's face is too ugly to make them cum.
Shakespeare reverses this insult in "the moment of truth" (i.e. the "money shot"):
"A thousand groans, but thinking on thy face, One on another’s neck, do witness bear Thy black is fairest in my judgment’s place. "
While Shakespeare fantasizes about her face ("thinking on thy face"), he ejaculates (read: "bears witness") on the back of her neck. This is "proof" that the lady's detractors (who said her face was too ugly to get a man off) are wrong, at least from Shakespeare's perspective.
"Thy black is fairest in my judgement's place" is the first line of the poem that occurs after Shakespeare has ejaculated. Now that he has satisfied his sexual urge, he inhabits a palpably different psychology. He reflects on the puddle of semen he has produced. The blend of colors in the puddle is evocative of the sexual union between Shakespeare and his lover.
Shakespeare is really a violent, devil-tongued, sex-crazed maniac, very similar in a lot of ways to John Lennon. It's very important to this poem that Shakespeare is crazed at the start of the poem, and is only able to calm himself by satiating his sexual urges.
The ChatGPT analysis is accurate enough, from a thematic perspective, but ChatGPT is literally not allowed to decode the literal meaning of the line-by-line text.
ChatGPT cannot and is not allowed to understand the literal meaning of this poem. It has learned the thematic interpretation by ingesting a lot of Shakespeare analysis, but it is not capable of telling you the human actions or thought processes which the poem describes.
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@eszed I'd urge you to read my post again more closely. You seem to struggle with close reading.
If I were to try to defend it in an academic setting I'd be looking for how securely or inevitably "groan" is used as a synecdoche for orgasm (I can think of at least three instances in Shakespeare where it doesn't, and off the top of my head no others where it does), and for other period instances where the neck is eroticized as a site of ejaculation (I am not aware of any).
Also wtf. Sure, jazz has been classicised all over by now, but to say that showtunes are low-brow compared to jazz is profoundly stupid :P That's why you don't believe AI without critical thinking!
- ads only on free version?
- why the need for ads at all if llms can literally get you to the exact product? push vs pull marketing
- will models be rlhf'd to align towards preferred products or would the advertisements run ads at the prompt level? (based on some dynamic opaque configuration)
my predictions
- yes
- i assume they are trying both ends but need to justify free tier someway
- i think there will be some type of commitment to not bias the model itself and keep it clean. maybe a separation? i'm also curious as to how they will ensure this during training when the user data itself would be biased towards past ads
I could see a sponsored section in the middle of the reply where the LLM just tells of these vendors align with what the user is looking for
https://dianawolftorres.substack.com/p/is-agi-just-around-th...
And that's not his only bold claim about AGI.
It seems plausible to me, since I get so many low quality poorly targeted ads on repeat. I can't imagine those ads are generating much revenue, but it makes sense if their primary purpose is just to beat me into paying for a subscription.
But why compare these two businesses? They are completely different. From the estimates I've seen, Youtube operating costs are a fraction of what OpenAI is burning yearly.
Since when capitalism is about stopping trying to make more money right when you become profitable? If they can find a way to make 10x the revenue needed to be profitable, they will.
Pessimists before ads: OpenAI is a bubble fueled by dumb money waiting to pop, they'll never be profitable!
Pessimists after ads: Ok it's not a bubble but advertising is evil!
Pessimists after hearing paid subscribers won't get ads: Pffftttt $20 per month??? Profit is evil!! I can spin up a local LLM on my Linux machine for free!
Pessimists after admitting you can just choose not to use ChatGPT, a result of the free market: But I don't like that OTHER people are using ChatGPT because they're obviously dumb if they don't agree with me!
1. In-result or first-party ads; and
2. Display or third-party ads.
In Google terms, (1) is SERPS ads and (2) is DoubleClick/AdSense. (1) is still ~10x the size of (2) for Google.
I'm skeptical of the effectiveness of inserting ads into an AI chat mode. I think this will be a terrible user experience and will cause people to really dislike AI assistants. Part of the problem here is that conversation isn't a great medium for conveying ads. If you look at a Google search result, there are ads strategically placed on the top and side but they don't waste that much time because you can scan with your eyes to the organic search results.
So would OpenAI ads be part of the conversation or would there be a sidebar? If it's a sidebar, what happens when the interface inevitably switches to voice-first?
To be clear, I'm not anti-ads on Google search results. If I search for "Ryzen 9800X3D" a site selling CPUs is a relevant result, for example.
Intent here is the biggest part of ad effectiveness. By doing a search the user wants to know or get something. That's huge. But another part is all the context and behavioural information. Where you are, inferred demographics and interests, etc.
People will say OpenAI knows a lot about you but I'm not sure that's true. For a start, LLMs have a context window beyond which they remember nothing. I'm sure people are working on taking that context and summarizing it down into base knowledge for the LLM a bit like what happens with your Google activity. I would guess this approach has a long way to go.
So this brings us to display and having essentially an OpenAI pixel. This has the same issue of compressing your context down into characteristics but I actually think this could be pretty successful but it would still have to compete with Google. And that's not easy to do. Google has significant ad buying and selling infrastructure and a deep marketplace.
But remember too that display ads are a fraction of Google's other markets and I don't htink you get to the required revenue OpenAI needs on display alone.
Of course it's worth adding that with unlimited money and the brightest minds of our generation all we can come up with for monetization is advertising.
Folks born after the www might see data collection, surveillance and ads as a "business model". They might see "Big Tech" as some sort of Holy Grail
In either case, like other high traffic websites before it, there was an initial reluctance to adopt this "business model" and, for at least some, or perhaps many, it may come with a sense of dread
1. OpenAI does not produce physical or tangible goods or services, whatever it produces is not something people are willing to pay for in sufficient volume and/or at prices to yield sufficient profits
Won’t someone think of the quarterly reports?
This is what will be remembered as the pre enshittification age for AI, just like we had with social media and other web and app stuff.
Local models for tech savvy people will get more compelling.
> Look inside
> Ads
something is broken, I can't say what.
It behaved odd, most messages were no longer accessible, but still in the sidebar. after some time, they were all readable again.
In short: Their "Delete all chats"-feature is broken.
I just hope that they don't mine my chats in order to use the data for advertising.
On the other hand, with the money they would have made ... hm.
It will probably still be a new way of buying things- I hope an AI assisted shopping experience continues to exist on some platform, because I want to use it.
I already use AI to make all kinds of buying decisions. If OpenAI were smart they would just monetize this instead of trying to corrupt the chat interface with ads.
I actually am fairly bullish on this, because in the competitive landscape of AI it seems like there will be a company out there willing to make an ad-free model that's good enough for reasons other than serving me an ad.
Just like Apple makes hardware that's ad-free and pro-privacy enough, just because it's a product differentiator. (I'm not under any illusion that Apple wouldn't sell my data if it was in their own interests).
EDIT: Looks like they don't add affiliate links? I'm surprised, it seems like a natural thing to do outside of the incentive to bias purchasing sources.
"One more drink won't hurt you."
OpenAI offered ChatGPT for free to anyone—even if not their best model—without needing to be logged in. That's crucial for attracting and retaining casual users.
If you compare this to what Google was at the beginning, it was just a simple interface to search the web: no questions asked, no subscription, no login. That was one of the secrets that led people to adopt Google Search when it was new (the other being result quality). It was a refreshing, simple page where you typed something and got results without any friction.
Now, with Gemini, Google finally has an excellent LLM. But a casual user can't use it unless they: 1. have a Google account, and 2. are logged in.
One might ask, "What's the matter? Everyone has a Google account." But the login requirement isn't as harmless as it seems. For example, if you want to quickly show a friend Gemini on their PC, but they use Safari and aren't logged into Google—bummer, you can't show them. Or a colleague asks about Gemini, but you can't log in with a personal account on a work machine. Gemini is immediately excluded from the realm of possibility. In the good old days, anyone could use Google at work instantly.
Right now, the companies capturing users are OpenAI (with the accessible ChatGPT brand) and Microsoft (with Copilot integrated into Microsoft 365). My company, for instance, sent a memo stating we must use Copilot with our corporate accounts for data security.
Google has botched this. They don't seem to understand that they are losing this round. They still have a strong position with Search and Android, but it’s funny to watch them make this huge strategic mistake.
NOTE: Personally, I dislike ads unless they are privacy-friendly and discrete (like early Google). If OpenAI starts using invasive ads, I will stop using ChatGPT immediately, just as I stopped using Google Search in favor of Kagi.
Is this a regional thing? I can use Google AI Mode without being logged in just fine. AI summaries for certain queries are also auto-generated when logged out for me.
As for AI mode from google search I am not sure but I don't seem to have it, at least in my country, switzerland.
edit: sure enough, while using Tor or a well known VPN IP, Gemini requires I login.
Are you and your colleague both trying at work? Probably on the same IP? Google might attribute less trust to an IP shared between many different users than it does to a regular residential internet IP (like mine).
Did some more testing and the behavior is interesting. When connecting through a Mullvad node in the US it doesn't require login, but any Mullvad node outside of the US and it does. I might be wrong its and it's just a per-country policy.
Seems like it was never about optics, but control.
Briefly, I had an old Surface Pro whose SSD had died, and given that disassembly was too cumbersome, I wanted to fix it by booting off an external drive. So I wanted a USB drive or microSD card that was fast, durable and spacious enough to support my Windows version for typical usage over extended periods of time, but also small and light enough to keep perma-attached without being too cumbersome, for a reasonable budget.
I explained my requirements in a conversation with ChatGPT and after some back and forth, especially about the physical characteristics of the ideal drive, it eventually recommended 3 very specific USB drives. Those were then my starting point for a search on Amazon, and I did end up buying a closely related product.
I'm not even sure if this was an intentional outcome or yet another emergent thing. But I recall thinking that a) doing this research on my own would have taken me 5x the time, and b) if ChatGPT had simply provided affiliate links to those products it could have effectively monetized that conversation. Win-win for everyone without the need for intrusive ads.
Unfortunately, the lure of ad revenue is too strong and enshittification will ensue... but it doesn't have to.
(when I've seen a useful ad for something I really want, I've often been able to find nearly the same thing from someone else for less. They can afford to charge less since they're not paying for ads)
Now there's lots of variables that can be tweaked on this. So it's possible to get it to work. But there's a lot less room for error.
As someone outside of the ad-tech space it blows my mind how much Instagram and Google ads cost these days, and OpenAI would certainly want to price their ad offering as more “premium” (see: $$$).
Which is great… that's why I don't use chatGPT at all, having a LLM summary + a list of websites to deepen the search if I need, is just a superior user experience IMO.
That will no doubt have higher value than Google's $.02/search revenue, since the users will be completely incapable of separating the wheat from the chaff.
Within the web-search and product-search requests there is undoubtedly A LOT of overlap between peoples queries. It would not be unfeasible to have on nice long good answer generated by e.g. ChatGPT 5.1 cached, and first throw the initial user request into some kind of classifier and use a smaller LLM to judge whether the cached answer is close enough to the initial query.
combine this with the fact that i have disposable income.
i can't fathom how much advertisers are willing to pay to put themselves in front of my eyes vs a google search for "dining table"
Go on something like openrouter with gpt 5.1 and use the chat then check the billing and you’ll see an average joe query is like 0.00102 or something.
You’re quoting figures from articles for initial ChatGPT release in 2022
As a business they would be negligent on their duty to shareholders (coming IPO) not to go down this advert route, and I will say it now, it will be FAR more profitable than paying customers.
"Shop smarter this session
Let ChatGPT do the digging for you, with in-depth research into the best deals and gifts."
I was working on a coding bug at the time, so not sure what kind of gift shopping it was hoping I was interested in.
On a serious note, their chat is a very valuable service for advertisers, will immediately command top dollar. They could even hide the ads as responses too. We will see how they implement ads
I was asking it what type of Teflon tape to use for a project, and it "helpfully" gave me sponsored links to purchase the Teflon tape. (I never asked for links, I strictly asked it which to use)
It's gonna be hilarious aside from the modest extra CO2 it produces
If OpenAI introduced ads to my workflow after all the money I've paid them, there's 0 loyalty or "ethically American" purchase decision vs paying the Chinese.
So it's only a matter of time.
And even for the people that do, just because an LLM isn't absolutely state of the art doesn't invalidate it from being useful.
You are at the extreme tail end.
For most average users, that includes your average mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, cousins etc, chatGPT is a magical all knowing tool that mostly spits out good answers to their mundane questions. Just like Google does. But better. Instead of more clicking action and more load and more brain actions required in google, chatGPT simply gives you the answer.
We have to wait and watch if the product is going to be good. If so, there is going to be some drop in Google's value.
> Where did you find us?
> ChatGPT
> Right, we're getting a lot of that, we do very well on there
For whatever reason, ChatGPT tends to recommend this one barber over all others in the town.
It's a decent barber, but the economic effect of being the barber that ChatGPT recommends is obviously significant.
Now I'm sure at first, any ads will be very clearly marked and separate from chat, just as google's first adverts were.
But over time that will degrade until they're seemlessly integrated into the chat experience.
This'll be the big one: if ChatGPT has ads but $service does not yet provides a similar service, they have nothing to stand on.
ChatGPT isn't unique, unlike Google at the time which was miles ahead at the time - and no (western) search engine has been able to catch up, even if they have less ads or better search results.
Context of the conversation, I was asking it to convert a photo into Studio Ghibli style and it objected to the blender in the image so I asked if it could do one with a mason jar instead of a blender. Then it started to generate the picture, then instead it displayed the ad.
... Edit ...
Looks like this may be a existing feature I didn't know about "shopping research" connector. I can't seem to turn it off in the app .
There's also the option to self-host. Anyone who cares about their own self-determinination should be looking into this
The danger is we'll get to where we are with Smart TVs where they all kinda have seemed to have embraced an openly user-hostile ads-filled UI and there is nowhere to hide. In which case, yeah you either go with the least bad or hopefully the OSS models are comparable or I just pay a la carte to use the API.
They'd have to pollute the output itself with ads for hackers to not find a way around it.
And there is absolutely nothing stopping any company inserting ads at any time just to meet some product manager’s Q3 revenue target at any given time.
Which is why I have adblock now.
I just got my first advert in the chat, it launched a shopping research unrelated to what I was talking about.
Where is this revisionist history coming from? The introduction of ads to Google was not seen as "crazy", in fact it was basically seen as inevitable. And when Google did introduce ads, they were generally praised because ads were highlighted and clearly separated in a different color (yellow) at the top and right rail. Of course, that slowly eroded until ads were nearly indistinguishable from organic results and took up the entire first page, but when they launched I don't remember anyone being surprised that Google added ads.
This will become even more interesting once business start using the cheapest for each use-case... which often end up being some open and license free model. I imagine this could be a big part of "enterprise workflow automation". Thinking of many office jobs which don't require actual intelligence besides understanding language...
If I ask ChatGPT to compare 2 products and only one of them is from an advertiser, will it be honest? I doubt it