>Additionally, members of the program receive priority placement and “richer brand expression” in chat conversations, and their content benefits from more prominent link treatments. Finally, through PPP, OpenAI also offers licensed financial terms to publishers.
This is what a lot of people pushing for open models fear - responses of commercial models will be biased based on marketing spend.
Was anyone expecting anything else? AI is going to follow a similar path to the internet -- embedded ads since it will need to fund itself and revenue path is very far from clearcut.
Brands that get it on the earliest training in large volume will have benefits accrued over the long term.
It's not a fear, it's a certainty. The most effective and insidious form of advertizing will come hidden inside model weights and express itself invisibly in the subtleties of all generated responses.
A llm is biased by design, the "open models" are no different here. OpenAI will, like any other model designer, pick and chose whatever data they want in their model and strike deals to that end.
The only question is in how far this is can be viewed as ads. Here I would find a strong backslash slightly ironic, since a lot of people have called the non-consensual incorporation of openly available data problematic; this is an obvious alternative option, that lures with the added benefit of deep integration over simply paying. A "true partnership", at face value. Smart.
If however this actually qualifies as ads (as in: unfair prioritisation that has nothing to do with the quality of the data and simply people paying money for priority placement) there is transparency laws in most jurisdictions for that already and I don't see why OpenAI would not honor them, like any other corp does.
This is why I hope open-source model fine-tuners will try and make models 'ad averse', to make them as resistant to being influenced by marketing as possible. Maybe the knowledge gained while doing this can be used to minimize other biases that models may acquire from content in their training data as well.
It doesn't have to be this way I feel. You don't have to distort the answer.
You use LLM to get super-powered intent signals, then show ads based on those intents.
Fucking around with the actual product function for financial reasons is a road to ruin.
In the Google model, the first few things you see are ads, but everything after that is "organic" and not influenced by who is directly paying for it. People trust it as a result - the majority of the results are "real". If the results are just whoever is paying, the utility rapidly drops off and people will vote with their feet/clicks/eyeballs.
fear ? This is 100% the driving force on both sides.
The behemoths want exactly this to drive ad spend.
Open source people can smell this from a mile away, have scar tissue from the last 3 decade. They have seen how this gets played. They know the best defense is to have a choice in the market. They are actively building tools and sharing knowledge to have strong community around building models so we humans don't have to suck up to ad driven bastards gatekeeping our future
choices.
> "its purpose is to help ChatGPT users more easily discover and engage with publishers’ brands and content."
What end user actually wants this? I've never in my life woke up and said, "You know what, I'd love to 'engage' with a corporate brand today!" or "I would love help to easily discover Burger King's content, that would be great!" The euphemisms they use for 'spam' are just breathtaking.
I only ever see this speak from people on the sending end of marketing campaigns. I can't think of the last time I saw someone say anything positive about corporate content. Personally, I go out of my way to not buy anything that I see marketed towards me.
I love when people say stuff like this. When people read “interact with brand” they automatically assume it is some dumb, low value garbage like chatting with Burger King.
You “interact with brands” all of the time. You are literally posting this on YC’s public forum, an asset which YC uses to foster a community of the consumers of its investment portfolio’s products. You are interacting with the brand.
With publishers' brands. This is not about getting Burger King ads in your ChatGPT responses, it's about getting NYT and Ars Technica's content into (and linked from) ChatGPT responses.
If I can multiselect my favorite programming authors and adjust their influence on my team's work I'm all in. If they do it for me or because someone pays them too, I'll gippity right off this train.
Another angle here is: it is going to be very valuable to some companies to ensure that their datasets go into the LLM training process. For example, if you are AWS, you really want to make sure that the next version of GPT has all of the AWS documentation in the training corpus, because that ensures GPT can answer questions about how to work with AWS tools. I expect OpenAI and others will start to charge for this kind of guarantees.
This sort of advertising feels a bit like the original AdWords from Google. They were text-only and unobtrusive and pitched as basically just some search results related to the content you were viewing, so they were sure to be relevant to you. And they pretty much were, for a little while. Then they morphed into full on annoying ads
People here seem to treat this like advertising, because it kinda sounds familiar to advertising. I’m as critical of ClosedAI as the next guy, but let’s think that idea through: OpenAI are the ones paying the content provider for exposure, not the other way around. In return they get training data.
The only reason for OpenAI to do this is if it makes their models better in some way so that they can monetize that performance lift. So I think incentives here are still aligned for OpenAI to not just shill whatever content but actually use it to improve their product.
> People here seem to treat this like advertising, because it kinda sounds familiar to advertising.
Because it is.
Whether or not OpenAI pays the publisher or the publisher pays OpenAI, it's still an agreement to "help ChatGPT users more easily discover and engage with publishers’ brands and content". In this case, the publisher "pays" in the form of giving OpenAI their data in return for OpenAI putting product placement into their responses.
I am in favor of AI companies trying to source material responsibly, and if I'm reading this right OpenAI will actually be compensating the publishes to use their content. So this isn't adspace yet.
That said, giving publishers "richer brand expression" certainly injects financial incentives into the outputs people trust coming from ChatGPT.
They are paying to the bigheaded ones, what about the rest? Will they get money for people consuming their content through ChatGPT or, since you are too small, thanks for your data, now F off? LLMs already only show you just a selected few sites' content when doing search on the web. It's a gargantuan bubble.
That's an interesting thought. I think a lot of people who are upset about this are not truly upset at the type of partnership being described in the article, but rather adjacent programs that might be developed further down the line. Personally, I don't think they're wrong to predict something closer to true advertising being incorporated into LLMs; I wouldn't be surprised if the industry does take that sort of turn.
For the time being, though, I think you're right that this seems to be something a little more innocuous.
Is there any recent research on training LLMs that can trace the contribution of sources of training data to any given generated token? Meta-nodes that look at how much a certain training document, or set thereof, caused a node to be updated?
I fear that OpenAI is incentivized, financially and legally, not to delve too deeply into this kind of research. But IMO attribution, even if imperfect, is a key part of aligning AI with the interests of society at large.
You will eventually succumb to peer pressure. Just like it's hard to participate in society without using a smartphone nowadays, in the future I bet you will for example have trouble doing any job, let alone get one, without using these AI assistants.
And given that society has decided that only the big entities get to win, the only viable AI assistants to use will eventually be the ones from big tech corpos like google and microsoft... in the same way you can't use a smartphone unless you enslave yourself to google or apple.
I really wish society in general figured out how bad it is to bet everything on big corporations, but alas here we are, ever encroaching on the cyberpunk dystopia we've fictionalized many decades ago :(
> You might be surprised to learn that I actually think LLMs have the potential to be not only fun but genuinely useful. “Show me some bullshit that would be typical in this context” can be a genuinely helpful question to have answered, in code and in natural language — for brainstorming, for seeing common conventions in an unfamiliar context, for having something crappy to react to.
> Alas, that does not remotely resemble how people are pitching this technology.
Slanting this towards a specific brand doesn't change that much. Some yes, but not that much.
The majority of internet users still use Google and these days it’s just a page full of sponsored links and products that are (purposely) hard to discern from the actual results. The content in the carousels for the sponsored products is richer than the content in the actual results.
Given that, I don’t think people would change their ChatGPT usage habits much if ads were introduced.
> Additionally, members of the program receive priority placement and “richer brand expression” in chat conversations
This sounds particularly bad since it's the polar opposite of what Sam Altman himself pretended to want in his recent Lex Fridman ITW (March 17):
> I like that people pay for ChatGPT and know that the answers they’re getting are not influenced by advertisers. I’m sure there’s an ad unit that makes sense for LLMs, and I’m sure there’s a way to participate in the transaction stream in an unbiased way that is okay to do, but it’s also easy to think about the dystopic visions of the future where you ask ChatGPT something and it says, “Oh, you should think about buying this product,” or, “You should think about going here for your vacation,” or whatever.
> (01:21:08) And I don’t know, we have a very simple business model and I like it, and I know that I’m not the product. I know I’m paying and that’s how the business model works.
I love seeing this. This is where the pudding is made. Invention, development, training and inference is all very expensive. Past generation AI assistants (Alexa, GHome) failed to find a way to monetize, and the balance between utility and privacy was simply not there, which meant that they didn't make for a decent long term business, so they all had to downsize like crazy. Right now only Infrastructure folks have a sustainable business here, and the fact that OpenAI is pitching to publishers this early (still beginning of the 'S curve') means that they are serious about making this a sustainable long term business. As 'early adopters' move into something new (look ma, a new toy!), it will be fascinating to see how OpenAI (and others?) keep a balance between paid customers, top of funnel (free + ads?) and opex.
OpenAI gets the data it needs, and publishers get prominent placement in the product:
"PPP members will see their content receive its “richer brand expression” through a series of content display products: the branded hover link, the anchored link and the in-line treatment."
There's some similarity to the search business model
> Additionally, members of the program receive priority placement and “richer brand expression” in chat conversations, and their content benefits from more prominent link treatments. Finally, through PPP, OpenAI also offers licensed financial terms to publishers.
> A recent model from The Atlantic found that if a search engine like Google were to integrate AI into search, it would answer a user’s query 75% of the time without requiring a clickthrough to its website.
If the user searching for the information finds what they want in ChatGPT's response (now that they have direct access to the publisher data), why would they visit the publisher website ? I expect the quality of responses to degrade to the point where GPT behaves more like a search engine than a transformer, so that the publishers also get the clicks they want.
Average user will NOT CLICK on those links. Anyone who ever had a news site and did some research how people interact with the content knows this. You show the source, but only a tiny amount of users click on those links.
It's similar to what google would have done (paying for placement in search results) if they didn't have the whole dont be evil thing.
OpenAI doesn't realize that while it brings in revenue it opens door for a competitor who returns the results users asked for instead of what you get paid for.
Just a matter of time before anyone can buy ad placements like Google Adsense and a walled app garden allows a customer to price match their car insurance when they type in “how do I get cheap car insurance?” into ChatGPT and openAI takes 30%. The future is here! I guess?
I had this same exact startup idea, and I think this can effectively work to change the landscape in ad-driven publications.
Ads are the notoriously culprit of this clickbaity and emotion-seaking journalism this model can effectively change the incentives for publishers and it will push for a more high quality writings as they will be rewarded back in reads from the LLM proposing the content more.
Is anyone working on something like this, or is this something only foundational models owners can try to achieve?
[+] [-] samfriedman|1 year ago|reply
This is what a lot of people pushing for open models fear - responses of commercial models will be biased based on marketing spend.
[+] [-] boringg|1 year ago|reply
Brands that get it on the earliest training in large volume will have benefits accrued over the long term.
[+] [-] treyd|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] noman-land|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tgsovlerkhgsel|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jstummbillig|1 year ago|reply
The only question is in how far this is can be viewed as ads. Here I would find a strong backslash slightly ironic, since a lot of people have called the non-consensual incorporation of openly available data problematic; this is an obvious alternative option, that lures with the added benefit of deep integration over simply paying. A "true partnership", at face value. Smart.
If however this actually qualifies as ads (as in: unfair prioritisation that has nothing to do with the quality of the data and simply people paying money for priority placement) there is transparency laws in most jurisdictions for that already and I don't see why OpenAI would not honor them, like any other corp does.
[+] [-] acka|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mattlondon|1 year ago|reply
You use LLM to get super-powered intent signals, then show ads based on those intents.
Fucking around with the actual product function for financial reasons is a road to ruin.
In the Google model, the first few things you see are ads, but everything after that is "organic" and not influenced by who is directly paying for it. People trust it as a result - the majority of the results are "real". If the results are just whoever is paying, the utility rapidly drops off and people will vote with their feet/clicks/eyeballs.
But hey, what do I know.
[+] [-] gofreddygo|1 year ago|reply
The behemoths want exactly this to drive ad spend.
Open source people can smell this from a mile away, have scar tissue from the last 3 decade. They have seen how this gets played. They know the best defense is to have a choice in the market. They are actively building tools and sharing knowledge to have strong community around building models so we humans don't have to suck up to ad driven bastards gatekeeping our future choices.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rpastuszak|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] seydor|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 39896880|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] willcipriano|1 year ago|reply
"You should Snap into a Slim Jim!"
[+] [-] ryandrake|1 year ago|reply
What end user actually wants this? I've never in my life woke up and said, "You know what, I'd love to 'engage' with a corporate brand today!" or "I would love help to easily discover Burger King's content, that would be great!" The euphemisms they use for 'spam' are just breathtaking.
[+] [-] icepat|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] eightysixfour|1 year ago|reply
You “interact with brands” all of the time. You are literally posting this on YC’s public forum, an asset which YC uses to foster a community of the consumers of its investment portfolio’s products. You are interacting with the brand.
[+] [-] pgwhalen|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sorokod|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mvkel|1 year ago|reply
It's not what users want, it's what users will accept. Many precedents have been set here, unfortunately.
[+] [-] swader999|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Workaccount2|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] scrapking|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] d_burfoot|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] krupan|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] _hl_|1 year ago|reply
The only reason for OpenAI to do this is if it makes their models better in some way so that they can monetize that performance lift. So I think incentives here are still aligned for OpenAI to not just shill whatever content but actually use it to improve their product.
[+] [-] jjulius|1 year ago|reply
Because it is.
Whether or not OpenAI pays the publisher or the publisher pays OpenAI, it's still an agreement to "help ChatGPT users more easily discover and engage with publishers’ brands and content". In this case, the publisher "pays" in the form of giving OpenAI their data in return for OpenAI putting product placement into their responses.
That's advertising, no matter how you slice it.
[+] [-] causal|1 year ago|reply
That said, giving publishers "richer brand expression" certainly injects financial incentives into the outputs people trust coming from ChatGPT.
[+] [-] hwbunny|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] d3w3y|1 year ago|reply
For the time being, though, I think you're right that this seems to be something a little more innocuous.
[+] [-] arsenico|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] smcleod|1 year ago|reply
When combined with their lobbying to mislead governments internationally this company makes me sick.
[+] [-] btown|1 year ago|reply
I fear that OpenAI is incentivized, financially and legally, not to delve too deeply into this kind of research. But IMO attribution, even if imperfect, is a key part of aligning AI with the interests of society at large.
[+] [-] darby_eight|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] amlib|1 year ago|reply
And given that society has decided that only the big entities get to win, the only viable AI assistants to use will eventually be the ones from big tech corpos like google and microsoft... in the same way you can't use a smartphone unless you enslave yourself to google or apple.
I really wish society in general figured out how bad it is to bet everything on big corporations, but alas here we are, ever encroaching on the cyberpunk dystopia we've fictionalized many decades ago :(
[+] [-] chx|1 year ago|reply
> You might be surprised to learn that I actually think LLMs have the potential to be not only fun but genuinely useful. “Show me some bullshit that would be typical in this context” can be a genuinely helpful question to have answered, in code and in natural language — for brainstorming, for seeing common conventions in an unfamiliar context, for having something crappy to react to.
> Alas, that does not remotely resemble how people are pitching this technology.
Slanting this towards a specific brand doesn't change that much. Some yes, but not that much.
[+] [-] skyyler|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Nicholas_C|1 year ago|reply
Given that, I don’t think people would change their ChatGPT usage habits much if ads were introduced.
[+] [-] aubanel|1 year ago|reply
This sounds particularly bad since it's the polar opposite of what Sam Altman himself pretended to want in his recent Lex Fridman ITW (March 17):
> I like that people pay for ChatGPT and know that the answers they’re getting are not influenced by advertisers. I’m sure there’s an ad unit that makes sense for LLMs, and I’m sure there’s a way to participate in the transaction stream in an unbiased way that is okay to do, but it’s also easy to think about the dystopic visions of the future where you ask ChatGPT something and it says, “Oh, you should think about buying this product,” or, “You should think about going here for your vacation,” or whatever. > (01:21:08) And I don’t know, we have a very simple business model and I like it, and I know that I’m not the product. I know I’m paying and that’s how the business model works.
[+] [-] mempko|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] superbyte|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] chasd00|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] gonzaloalvarez|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] npollock|1 year ago|reply
"PPP members will see their content receive its “richer brand expression” through a series of content display products: the branded hover link, the anchored link and the in-line treatment."
There's some similarity to the search business model
[+] [-] throwaway4233|1 year ago|reply
> A recent model from The Atlantic found that if a search engine like Google were to integrate AI into search, it would answer a user’s query 75% of the time without requiring a clickthrough to its website.
If the user searching for the information finds what they want in ChatGPT's response (now that they have direct access to the publisher data), why would they visit the publisher website ? I expect the quality of responses to degrade to the point where GPT behaves more like a search engine than a transformer, so that the publishers also get the clicks they want.
[+] [-] hwbunny|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] yread|1 year ago|reply
OpenAI doesn't realize that while it brings in revenue it opens door for a competitor who returns the results users asked for instead of what you get paid for.
[+] [-] drgoodvibe|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nerder92|1 year ago|reply
Ads are the notoriously culprit of this clickbaity and emotion-seaking journalism this model can effectively change the incentives for publishers and it will push for a more high quality writings as they will be rewarded back in reads from the LLM proposing the content more.
Is anyone working on something like this, or is this something only foundational models owners can try to achieve?
[+] [-] rrr_oh_man|1 year ago|reply
https://patents.google.com/patent/US8246454B2/en