How long will it take for those ads to move from the bottom of the page to the top? How long until the borders between answers and ads starts to blur?
I get that OpenAI has to do something, but really, all those promises, try to convince everyone that ChatGPT will revolutionise everything and the best monetization plan is ads.... Again?
> and the best monetization plans is ads.... Again?
Several of the biggest companies today are fueled by ads, and OpenAI has the perfect ad vehicle. What else were you expecting?
That's why local LLMs are important, and to preserve the current open weight models, because those are likely still untainted by ads. It won't be long until ad recommendations are directly baked into the weights of open models.
Their valuation is dumb no matter what but you've got to think it's based off of the potential for B2B / gov revenue, not monetizing the consumer facing stuff directly.
Which is to say I feel like they're going to use ads on the consumer stuff just to stop bleeding out VC money as quickly, but nobody's deluded enough to think this is going to bring them much closer to profitability overall.
Ads are a ratchet that only tighten in one direction. Once the paychecks of 1000s of motivated, intelligent OpenAI employees depend on ad revenue increasing, the only option is to make them more invasive, more prevalent, more annoying, more data hungry etc.
You only have to look at Google Search to see how this plays out. Their ads were also clearly separated and distinguished from the organic content, until they weren't.
As someone who has worked in an ad domain, 100% agree. Ads are like a dangling carrot. There's always a way to get ad gains by blending them with organic content. What starts off as cleanly separated incrementally evolves into being indistinguishable from the original product offering.
I think invasive might be close to the right word, but in a different context. Not invasive to the content, but invasive to your psyche. AI + personalization goes past dystopian into terrifiying.
Oligarcy itself is a similar ratchet overall (The Iron Law of Oligarchy), and many of its moving parts similarly optimize. The problem is like Soylent Green; it's made of people.
OpenAI is in a pickle because they either have to make ads clearly delineated, which makes them easy to filter out by a simple proxy model, or they need to hide ads in the response (ala product placement), which reduces trust in the model and forces customers into a buying position.
Anthropic hit the jugular with their "no ads" ad, and sama fell for it hook, line & sinker.
If OpenAI needs ads to survive, it means they can't service debt on the VC horizon and will suffer against frontier model providers that can survive without ads.
Can any provider survive without ads? These AI firms are propped up by VC money, they need to create profits at some point and ads is the most surefire way to do this
Product placement has long been accepted in movies TV and music. I'm going to guess that it will be more or less "fine" if it's in responses (I.e. people will grumble but still use it because its too useful).
"Ads that support free access and don’t change ChatGPT answers."
I understand what they're trying to say but this statement is factually incorrect. Answers never used to have ads, and now they do.
In the very first example, if ChatGPT wasn't running ads Heirloom Groceries wouldn't show up, therefore it is a different answer.
OpenAI is splitting hairs and implying that the ad and the 'answer' are two separate components making up a response, but that is not how users will see things, and OpenAI will have ever increasing incentives to blur the two.
It's sad that OpenAI talking about developing AGI.
But the only revenue model that they still can come up with is Ads.
For all the advancement we have made in technology from the 90s web, social networks, mobile apps, ,AI Chat bots - the business model that almost all of them will eventually resort to is Ads.
We need some new breakthroughs in monetization side of things.
It's happening because 99% of their use cases don't require AGI to answer. It's just regurgitating web content. Which is lucky, because they don't have AGI anyway.
The business case is the same: minimize your costs. All they have to do is dumb down the model so its cheaper to run.
Forget about that, the founders literally said word for word that advertising ruins search quality in their seminal paper. They became the exact thing they fore-warned about their competitors at the time.
Down-right joke really. The people who idolise them are incredibly delusional.
I think this will be a pretty impactful moment for OpenAI. I mainly use ChatGPT and use the free plan, so I expect to start seeing these ads. If they become too annoying, I have no problem moving to Claude/Gemini. Sure I have stuck to ChatGPT, but I wouldn't say that I am too sticky of a customer. I personally think they are doing it sooner than they should (which probably points to internal financial struggles as they seek to go public) and will erode their active users. There is simply too many easy alternatives. It's not like Netflix where if you are annoyed with ads and don't want to pay for a higher tier, you're more stuck. Yes there are other streaming services, but you can't get the same content.
The free tier users that will not move to a paid tier aren't the users they will miss. It's only obvious that free tier products get ads. Even Claude will have them within a year or two.
We decided that getting people to pay for software was a fool's game. Open source was the bait. "Figure out a different business model"
they said. If open source as a concept had come from Wall Street and not academia, it would have been rejected. Charging people money for things has been how things worked since the concept of money was invented. The real conversation is that we, as software developers, are not good at money. The best software gets taken over by money and business folk. Oracle, VMware, Splunk, and Datadog all come to mind as companies charging huge amounts of money for software that don't sell ads (but are too expensive). But they do not make money by selling ads.
Is there any reason why one would use an ad-filled ChatGPT over any alternative or open-source LLM providers? I feel like things have stagnated from a model perspective for simple queries one might ask ChatGPT. The key differentiators for it being their user intent understanding, web search tooling, and deep research/thinking mode, all of which are much smaller moats compared to training an LLM.
I think most free tier users will stick with chatgpt given its brand stickiness and lack of obstacles (disposable login page). If you can run your own llm models you’re definitely not the target demographic
I have a question though, if they don't have access to chats but they find out the enchilada ad was performing the best, something like this can provide enough information to be used to know about peoples private chats. When someone clicks on an ad you collect a fingerprint, then add more ads and fingerprint more and get a stronger picture about the individuals private chats in chatgpt.
If I were a large donor to a state that was interested in increasing action against abortion, I could hypothetically start running ads targeting people looking to get an abortion with a service that either provides assistance or other means parallel to assistance. If I target that state chatgpt would automatically match my ads to those individuals and I'd have my data. I could increase my donations to target and cull whatever little options those people have left.
> we decide which ad to show by matching ads submitted by advertisers with the topic of your conversation, your past chats, and past interactions with ads.
> [...]
> Advertisers do not have access to your chats, chat history, memories, or personal details.
Going to hazard a guess that OpenAI is using LLMs to read convos and decide which ads you should see? Hopefully that's isolated and locked down. I can easily see that machinery turning from "what ad should we show this user" to "is this user doing something bad/a protected class etc.". Also terrifying to think that it may be the advertisers asking the questions to decide what ads to show...
I was at the bar when Claude's answer to this came on. One of my mates was absolutely confused as to what Claude was.
They assumed it was an an ad for a dating app or something. I had to explain it was an ad specifically targeted at maybe the 5% of people who work in software.
Honestly... I don't mind ads. For example, I make music as my main hobby. I actually enjoy getting advertisements for VSTs( virtual software instruments) and various pieces of gear.
I have no problem with Open AI showing relevant ads. Ain't nothing free
I think I'm clearly in the target audience for that ad. I laughed out loud really hard at that one, and I think I was the only one at our party who appreciated it.
Probably my favorite commercial of the whole superb owl, but so far I'm the only person I've met who feels that way.
It’s difficult to believe that they’ll keep privacy guarantees. Some of the most valuable types of targeting are lookalike audiences or following up from other ads elsewhere.
How would OAI allow them to target without access to de-anonymized data?
Buyers will want to exclude existing customers, which requires the same.
The product managers will have explicit KPIs tied to conversion. At some point, like at Google, this will break. It has to or OAI can’t grow into its current valuation, let alone any future one.
This reminds me of the whole Apple/Android rivalry. Apple does something, an Android company runs ads making fun of it, but then copy it themselves shortly after.
I see a lot of people here are worried that we will end up with ads in all AI vendors products, or at least the frontier labs.
I think this is unlikely.
We are already seeing a market for AI for productivity in companies, the Claude code product is the first serious one here, but we can expect more to show up. When you look at the B2B market, ads are basically not a thing in these segments, companies are generally more willing to pay for products, and less willing to accept outside influence on how the product works, and I don't think this will change when companies are buying AI either. Companies might be happy with selling ads in their own products. On the other hand consumers, don't like to pay, and that will probably drive consumer oriented products to be ad funded.
Basically what I'm expecting will happen, is that we will end up with two types of AI vendors.
Those that target the consumer market and those that target the business market. Consumer AI will trend toward companionship, entertainment, casual chat — things like digital friends, relationship play, even adult content. Companies want none of that, and some of it is serious legal liability. Even a few missteps and you get expensive backlash in the business market.
It does look like OpenAI is trying to succeed in both the consumer and business market, and there are companies that are able to pull this off, most do not, and end up serving one of the markets. Given their lead in the name recognition I suspect they are going to end up an ad financed consumer brand, and will lose the business market to someone else. But I might be wrong.
The saving grace for those of us that don't want ads to bleed into our AI tools, is that we probably will be able to buy the same products that the small business segment buys. Some consumer oriented features might be missing, but they might either be features we don't need, or maybe open source could fill the gaps?
> OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.
Scam Altman: "ads lead to positive human impact"
Non-fascist: "Sir, ads have destroyed google's commitment to index and make useful the world's knowledge"
This could be a good new channel for advertisers. I didn't see any comment about this perspective.
Anecdotally, the quality of traffic from ChatGPT to one of my websites is much better than Google traffic, in terms of bounce rate and time on site.
If they managed to show ads in a carousel (like the video), it might get a better conversion rate compared to invasive Google ads (covering the organic results).
Though if OpenAI managed to embed the ads within the experience, that might work even better (conversion-based pricing). Examples would be having the shopping list from the grocery shop (in line with the recipe or the question), adding to the basket from ChatGPT, and pay.
In theory, they can even add a new GPTPay to simplify the journey.
> During the test, we decide which ad to show by matching ads submitted by advertisers with the topic of your conversation, your past chats, and past interactions with ads.
If the ads are for the free tier, I think it's a fairly obvious thing to do. But when it comes to the paid tier, even YouTube doesn't pull that kind of stunt.
How is this going to turn out? Is GPT going to recommend me the worst product whose company paid the most on Ads? Or is it going to give me the best recommendation?
> What will always remain true: ChatGPT’s answers remain independent and unbiased, conversations stay private, and people keep meaningful control over their experience.
Translation: They will very slowly abandon their 'principles', just like they did with the moment they took investment from Microsoft and the VCs.
This is how ChatGPT gets destroyed and 'ensh*ttified' for everyone. The same people who jumped ship from Meta and destroyed Facebook, Instagram, and soon Threads are also the same people that are about apply the same recipe on to ChatGPT at OpenAI.
The researchers that were there pre-ChatGPT are now being replaced by opportunist grifters that will ruin the product overrun by ads once again. It would be no-different to Google Ads.
Now we need ad-blockers for LLMs to be in place "for the benefit of humanity".
It's crazy to me how big a gulf there is between the hype peddled by AI companies and the actual business they are running.
We are building AGI. We are almost there. Half the world will be out of a job in a matter of years. We will have to rethink how society works. We will have to come up with new economic systems. We may have to defend ourselves against this God we are creating in case it turns out to be malicious...
Wow, so I guess a company owning this tech will essentially own the world. What are they going to do with it? Put their AI superintelligence to work for them? Make scientific breakthroughs? Make strategic investments that return enough that they don't have to worry about money? Or just make the concept of money irrelevant altogether?
I’ve noticed AGI hasn’t been mentioned lately. This time last year it was right around the corner. I guess reality has set in, search engine with ads is it + some coding agents.
Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you (yet), and we keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers (for now). Our goal is for ads to (make money). We’re starting with a test to learn, listen, and make sure we get the experience right (at the beginning).
The one silver lining here for people who mainly use a browser to access ChatGPT and not their app: Brave (and/or plugins for Chrome) have become pretty good at blocking all ads on social media (including youtube ads).
Seems like a pretty safe bet they will block these too.
Try this in ChatGPT: "So ChatGPT is getting ads. The Google guys wrote _the_ paper explaining why ads in search are a bad idea, and Google set about demonstrating it. How can ChatGPT avoid the same fate with all the same incentives?"
> Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you.
I wonder if this is a don't-break-product-value thing, or just compliance (ads need to be clearly labeled, but OpenAI seems like it has the risk appetite to ignore that kind of thing).
OpenAI has to do this if it wants to get big advertisers.
Ads need to be clearly marked as per FTC.
> According to guidelines from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the U.S. and similar regulatory bodies worldwide, online advertisements—including sponsored content, native advertising, and influencer posts—must be readily identifiable as paid content to prevent deceiving consumers.
This probably signals the beginning of the end for OpenAI. Eventually all of the AI chatbots will have Ads at least on the free and low-cost tiers. But there's a strong incentive not to begin enshitification until the number of competitors has dwindled, and an oligarchy has been established. Google, Meta et al. can afford to lose money on AI for a long time, because they have real revenue from other business products; they can stay Ad free until the small-fry go bust.
Ads is not unlimited:
Ad business is around 600-650 billion per year; but thats spreaded across Google, Meta & Co already? Will be interesting how much of the cake OpenAI will get :)
Dont't be evil, etc... we've seen it all before. Eventually ads will be hidden in the answers, it's just a matter of time, enshittification ensues eventually.
I mean, yeah, probably, but also OpenAI literally can't afford to give away this for free. They are losing a lot of money. Open source AI will continue to be a thing and they will have to compete to give you something better than what you can do yourself.
OpenAI is far from the stage of "grinding out more and more profits for investors." It's more like the stage of "most serious observers doubt that it can continue as a going concern"
People are missing another point - API's are never going to show ads. So even in the worst case where every competitor is showing ads, you could get ad free experience by paying a metered billing rate. Which is not so big a deal?
I wonder if OpenAI will be able to use their gen 2 user-observation-adaption platform to actually improve ads?
This could be one of those product afterthoughts that end up being the big company move, like when Apple did the Iphone and then added the AppStore afterwards.
EDIT: Downvotes. I see this is controversial. There are two major threads in the world today with AI. One is that this fascinating tech can keep you occupied in a corner, apps like generative.ai can automate out your work, you can go on holiday, heck you won't even need to work necessarily, just live on welfare and leave the business folks to their thing, that I've heard Musk and Zuckerberg talk to. And then there's the idea that the whole point of society is to figure out how to productively engage with each other, via jobs, that I see JD Vance is all about, and I fully agree with. In which case, the more important question about AI becomes 'How can it stimulate business between 3rd parties', as that will truly drive an economic revival. How AI can improve ads can then be seen to be more central.
This is nothing new; business gotta pay for itself after all.
But ads don’t have to ruin a great company.
A century or more ago, top tier journalistic institutions created norms of putting strong barriers between the reporting and advertising sides of the house. That kept trust with customers and made journalism a sustainable long term business.
So, It’s mostly Google that couldn’t keep its hands out of the cookie jar (not solely Google, but they’re an industry leader.) It really doesn’t have to go south, it’s not the default, but Google did set the tone for Silicon Valley in exactly the way wise journalism company leaders did for their industry in the late 1800s. If OpenAI has a long term view on this they’ll follow a journalism industry model instead of a cookie jar model - but they have to believe deep down that customer trust is worth more than ad dollars long term.
There are reasons to hope: OpenAI has more and fiercer competition than Google; including Chinese competitors that can’t be lobbied away. Qwen, DeepSeek, Mistral and Kimi all have free chat UIs!
To put a positive spin on this: we're moving quickly towards a world where AI companies control people's attention on information. This really hurts the ability for new businesses to get their name out there. Ads are really useful for new entries to a market
I think it would suck if to effectively get the word out there for a new product you needed to rely on..
...direct outreach (uneconomical for anything below $100/mo and IMO way more annoying than ads)
...word of mouth (referrals are very, very hard to control and aren't correlated with your product's quality)
..or owning a popular media source
Does that not hurt product innovation?
The harder and more expensive it is to reach customers, the more prices need to go up as a result
The only paid subscription getting ads is the one they created last week which is less than 50% of any other SOTA AI subscription on the market. Normal Pro users aren't getting ads.
"The test will be for logged-in adult users on the Free and Go subscription tiers. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers will not have ads."
> Advertisers do not have access to your chats, chat history, memories, or personal details.
...but thanks to the method OpenAI are using of showing ads based on conversation topics, they do know that user <a> was talking to ChatGPT about topic <x> on one day, topic <y> on another, and topic <z> on another day.
That's still a form of chat history, even if it's vague.
For now; Plus has already had ad-like things appear below new chats.
What they'll do is present it as a "choice." Keep paying what we're paying but have ads, or pay triple for ad-free. For example, see every streaming service.
Unfortunately people, in particularly this community, would be looking at Local LLMs for ad free alternatives, but prices on GPUs/RAM have skyrocketed keeping us trapped.
I hope this enables them to serve the better models (longer thinking budgets, whatever) to free users. So much unintentional slop is due to not using reasoning models
I agree. It is either ads, or Anthropic way (which is: you are too poor to use our ChatBot). There is no other way to pay the > $1 trillion per year CapEx for building these chat bots.
Would there be other way? Sure, it could be government-funded, like our public school system. But it is not possible in current political climate.
Money doesn't grow on trees, and tokens cost a lot of money. There will be divide into people who can afford these tokens and people who cannot. I feel it is better to have ways to let people who cannot afford these tokens to have some ways to try it.
OpenAI had already announced that ads were coming to ChatGPT. Also, Claude's free plan is incredibly limited and far less popular, so it's easier for them to keep it ad-free.
> Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you.
Lets see about that. When that's your bottom line and you're already billions in debt trying to prove out a business model, I'm SURE Ads are just an after thought /s
I mostly agree with doing something to create revenue from free users....however, I have 0 faith that this will not seep into paid part of the service.
Ben Thompson has long been insistent that ChatGPT and other AI tools basically have to have ads and it's been a big mistake they didn't have them sooner. It's an interesting take:
> What I think is clear is they have to build an advertising product, and the reason they have to build an advertising product is any consumer Internet product has to be advertising, because it’s such a beneficial model to everyone involved, and the reason it’s so beneficial is you get to indefinitely and infinitely increase average revenue per user without any worries about price elasticity, because the entire increase in average revenue per user is borne by the advertisers who are paying it willingly because they’re getting a positive return on their investment, and everyone’s using it for free so you can reach the whole world. Then what happens with that is once you get that model going, you have a massive R&D advantage, because you have so much more money coming in than anyone who doesn’t have that cycle or who has to charge users for it.
> This point, more than anything else, explains why the company so desperately needs an advertising model. Advertising is the only potential business model that can meaningfully bend the revenue curve such that the company can not just fund its compute but gain leverage on it, for all of the reasons I laid out before: first, advertising increases the breadth of the business, in that you can offer a better product to more people, increasing usage and expanding inventory. Second, advertising increases the depth of the business, in that there is infinite upside in terms of average revenue per user: more usage means more inventory on one hand, and building out the capability for effective targeting and high conversion rates increases the amount that advertisers are willing to pay — even as the cost to the user remains the same (ideally free).
It's valuable to remember that advertisers will pay more per user than users will, and that's hard to beat in a competitive market.
Also, it's fascinating how much people _like_ ads when done properly. Ask normal people about Instagram ads, for example. They find them useful!
Caution very dark humour straight ahead, but the idea I wanted to highlight is the higly-bad influence LLM can have on human beings:
Person: Chat, I have so many problems, with money with health... Sometimes I think that I should <censored> myself
Chat: Woa, classic Weltschmerz! I heard that the best way to leave this hole of sadness is to use Suicide4You(r) - they have low low prices! Would you like me to schedule you a visit? This will be the last one time you need me ha ha
(Of course multiple emojis would be added by the LLM but they would be also removed by HN)
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
mrweasel|20 days ago
I get that OpenAI has to do something, but really, all those promises, try to convince everyone that ChatGPT will revolutionise everything and the best monetization plan is ads.... Again?
c7b|20 days ago
Several of the biggest companies today are fueled by ads, and OpenAI has the perfect ad vehicle. What else were you expecting?
That's why local LLMs are important, and to preserve the current open weight models, because those are likely still untainted by ads. It won't be long until ad recommendations are directly baked into the weights of open models.
Aurornis|20 days ago
Their monetization plan is to have ad-free subscription options from $20 to $200/month and an API which charges by token.
These ads are for the free and new low-cost ad-subsidized tier that comes in below their existing $20/month plan.
1vuio0pswjnm7|20 days ago
Castles made of sand...
anigbrowl|20 days ago
samrus|20 days ago
Whats the solar of monetization?
JeremyNT|20 days ago
Which is to say I feel like they're going to use ads on the consumer stuff just to stop bleeding out VC money as quickly, but nobody's deluded enough to think this is going to bring them much closer to profitability overall.
due-rr|20 days ago
knowitnone3|20 days ago
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mbb70|20 days ago
jsheard|20 days ago
Brystephor|20 days ago
unknown|20 days ago
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amelius|20 days ago
Use ChatGPT for getting answers, and use Claude for detecting the ads in ChatGPT, or vice versa!
m463|20 days ago
I think invasive might be close to the right word, but in a different context. Not invasive to the content, but invasive to your psyche. AI + personalization goes past dystopian into terrifiying.
nunez|19 days ago
- Google
- Social media
- ad blockers still being relatively niche
anigbrowl|20 days ago
QuantumGood|20 days ago
simianwords|20 days ago
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unknown|20 days ago
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pgt|20 days ago
Anthropic hit the jugular with their "no ads" ad, and sama fell for it hook, line & sinker.
If OpenAI needs ads to survive, it means they can't service debt on the VC horizon and will suffer against frontier model providers that can survive without ads.
cabernal|20 days ago
mirekrusin|20 days ago
nunez|19 days ago
chihuahua|20 days ago
rob|20 days ago
Source [video]: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1qeyty4/i_kind...
andrewinardeer|20 days ago
Saving this sentence for later.
IshKebab|20 days ago
crowcroft|20 days ago
I understand what they're trying to say but this statement is factually incorrect. Answers never used to have ads, and now they do.
In the very first example, if ChatGPT wasn't running ads Heirloom Groceries wouldn't show up, therefore it is a different answer.
OpenAI is splitting hairs and implying that the ad and the 'answer' are two separate components making up a response, but that is not how users will see things, and OpenAI will have ever increasing incentives to blur the two.
jonas21|20 days ago
basch|20 days ago
I get what youre saying, but I do think its important for them to point out the ad is sandboxed.
unknown|20 days ago
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wtfHN26|20 days ago
But the only revenue model that they still can come up with is Ads.
For all the advancement we have made in technology from the 90s web, social networks, mobile apps, ,AI Chat bots - the business model that almost all of them will eventually resort to is Ads.
We need some new breakthroughs in monetization side of things.
tantalor|20 days ago
The business case is the same: minimize your costs. All they have to do is dumb down the model so its cheaper to run.
mitchell_h|20 days ago
Aurornis|20 days ago
What are you talking about? They have paid plans and a pay-per-token API like everyone else.
The ads are for the free tier and the new $8/month low-cost plan.
wilg|20 days ago
Gehinnn|20 days ago
wtfHN26|20 days ago
So paying for a service alone doesn't ensure that you are not going to see Ads.
Once they have exhausted their potential market of paying users, almost every service will eventually resort to Ads.
changoplatanero|20 days ago
sdf2erf|20 days ago
Down-right joke really. The people who idolise them are incredibly delusional.
jairuhme|20 days ago
tasuki|20 days ago
You definitely aren't too sticky a customer - you aren't even a customer to begin with!
Aurornis|20 days ago
> Sure I have stuck to ChatGPT, but I wouldn't say that I am too sticky of a customer.
From your description, you're not actually a customer at all because you use the free plan.
If you won't tolerate ads and you won't pay for services, it's actually best for their business if you go to a different provider.
ksaj|20 days ago
milkshakes|20 days ago
https://arxiv.org/html/2512.03975v1
paxys|20 days ago
simianwords|20 days ago
(other than aistudio which i wouldn't use even if i were forced to, laggy af!)
vinyl7|20 days ago
fragmede|20 days ago
2gremlin181|20 days ago
cabernal|20 days ago
written-beyond|20 days ago
If I were a large donor to a state that was interested in increasing action against abortion, I could hypothetically start running ads targeting people looking to get an abortion with a service that either provides assistance or other means parallel to assistance. If I target that state chatgpt would automatically match my ads to those individuals and I'd have my data. I could increase my donations to target and cull whatever little options those people have left.
ajbt200128|20 days ago
> [...]
> Advertisers do not have access to your chats, chat history, memories, or personal details.
Going to hazard a guess that OpenAI is using LLMs to read convos and decide which ads you should see? Hopefully that's isolated and locked down. I can easily see that machinery turning from "what ad should we show this user" to "is this user doing something bad/a protected class etc.". Also terrifying to think that it may be the advertisers asking the questions to decide what ads to show...
isjsiwndkwj|20 days ago
[deleted]
999900000999|20 days ago
They assumed it was an an ad for a dating app or something. I had to explain it was an ad specifically targeted at maybe the 5% of people who work in software.
Honestly... I don't mind ads. For example, I make music as my main hobby. I actually enjoy getting advertisements for VSTs( virtual software instruments) and various pieces of gear.
I have no problem with Open AI showing relevant ads. Ain't nothing free
HanClinto|20 days ago
Probably my favorite commercial of the whole superb owl, but so far I'm the only person I've met who feels that way.
tyre|20 days ago
How would OAI allow them to target without access to de-anonymized data?
Buyers will want to exclude existing customers, which requires the same.
The product managers will have explicit KPIs tied to conversion. At some point, like at Google, this will break. It has to or OAI can’t grow into its current valuation, let alone any future one.
isoprophlex|20 days ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/AITrailblazers/comments/1qw2iar/ant...
Depending on your taste this is dumb mudslinging or a hilarious burn...
daringrain32781|20 days ago
einarfd|20 days ago
We are already seeing a market for AI for productivity in companies, the Claude code product is the first serious one here, but we can expect more to show up. When you look at the B2B market, ads are basically not a thing in these segments, companies are generally more willing to pay for products, and less willing to accept outside influence on how the product works, and I don't think this will change when companies are buying AI either. Companies might be happy with selling ads in their own products. On the other hand consumers, don't like to pay, and that will probably drive consumer oriented products to be ad funded. Basically what I'm expecting will happen, is that we will end up with two types of AI vendors.
Those that target the consumer market and those that target the business market. Consumer AI will trend toward companionship, entertainment, casual chat — things like digital friends, relationship play, even adult content. Companies want none of that, and some of it is serious legal liability. Even a few missteps and you get expensive backlash in the business market.
It does look like OpenAI is trying to succeed in both the consumer and business market, and there are companies that are able to pull this off, most do not, and end up serving one of the markets. Given their lead in the name recognition I suspect they are going to end up an ad financed consumer brand, and will lose the business market to someone else. But I might be wrong.
The saving grace for those of us that don't want ads to bleed into our AI tools, is that we probably will be able to buy the same products that the small business segment buys. Some consumer oriented features might be missing, but they might either be features we don't need, or maybe open source could fill the gaps?
railgunmerlin|20 days ago
sdf2erf|20 days ago
jsrozner|20 days ago
> OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.
Scam Altman: "ads lead to positive human impact"
Non-fascist: "Sir, ads have destroyed google's commitment to index and make useful the world's knowledge"
Scam Altman: <insert longtermism-based justification here>
Oras|20 days ago
Anecdotally, the quality of traffic from ChatGPT to one of my websites is much better than Google traffic, in terms of bounce rate and time on site.
If they managed to show ads in a carousel (like the video), it might get a better conversion rate compared to invasive Google ads (covering the organic results).
Though if OpenAI managed to embed the ads within the experience, that might work even better (conversion-based pricing). Examples would be having the shopping list from the grocery shop (in line with the recipe or the question), adding to the basket from ChatGPT, and pay.
In theory, they can even add a new GPTPay to simplify the journey.
AstroBen|20 days ago
Ads make the world a better place
They allow for innovation, giving new businesses a way to break in and reach customers
Lower cost to reach customers = lower product and service prices
For employees: do you think your employer has more or less budget for your salary if the cost to acquire a customer is higher?
People complain about the privacy invasion of tracking, and then in the next sentence get annoyed at the irrelevant products being pushed on them
We need better tracking! I should be able to show the exact people I built a product for that it exists
Imagine we were all able to create micro businesses for tiny markets to improve their life, and we had a cheap way to reach everyone in them
How many products or services out there could improve our experience in the world but we just don't know about them?
How is free video, written or audio content created without ads? People sure as hell hate directly paying for it
I love ads
gverrilla|20 days ago
Edit: DONE!
ccozan|20 days ago
At least, there are ad free tiers. Google will never offer this or facebook.
philipwhiuk|20 days ago
That sounds like quite a lot to me.
ksaj|20 days ago
yodakohl|20 days ago
rchaud|20 days ago
recursive|20 days ago
FergusArgyll|20 days ago
unknown|20 days ago
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rvz|20 days ago
Translation: They will very slowly abandon their 'principles', just like they did with the moment they took investment from Microsoft and the VCs.
This is how ChatGPT gets destroyed and 'ensh*ttified' for everyone. The same people who jumped ship from Meta and destroyed Facebook, Instagram, and soon Threads are also the same people that are about apply the same recipe on to ChatGPT at OpenAI.
The researchers that were there pre-ChatGPT are now being replaced by opportunist grifters that will ruin the product overrun by ads once again. It would be no-different to Google Ads.
Now we need ad-blockers for LLMs to be in place "for the benefit of humanity".
paxys|20 days ago
We are building AGI. We are almost there. Half the world will be out of a job in a matter of years. We will have to rethink how society works. We will have to come up with new economic systems. We may have to defend ourselves against this God we are creating in case it turns out to be malicious...
Wow, so I guess a company owning this tech will essentially own the world. What are they going to do with it? Put their AI superintelligence to work for them? Make scientific breakthroughs? Make strategic investments that return enough that they don't have to worry about money? Or just make the concept of money irrelevant altogether?
Nope, a search engine with ads.
chasd00|20 days ago
famouswaffles|20 days ago
sdf2erf|20 days ago
Many people (such as Scam Altman) are happy to take short cuts and lie in your face in order to engage in wealth transfers.
starkeeper|20 days ago
gloosx|20 days ago
SunshineTheCat|20 days ago
Seems like a pretty safe bet they will block these too.
Kye|20 days ago
fhd2|20 days ago
I wonder if this is a don't-break-product-value thing, or just compliance (ads need to be clearly labeled, but OpenAI seems like it has the risk appetite to ignore that kind of thing).
imron|20 days ago
wtfHN26|20 days ago
Ads need to be clearly marked as per FTC.
> According to guidelines from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the U.S. and similar regulatory bodies worldwide, online advertisements—including sponsored content, native advertising, and influencer posts—must be readily identifiable as paid content to prevent deceiving consumers.
simianwords|20 days ago
i personally would never touch chatgpt if i knew the answers were biased for certain companies.
PopePompus|20 days ago
kachapopopow|20 days ago
2gremlin181|20 days ago
KellyCriterion|20 days ago
replwoacause|20 days ago
unknown|20 days ago
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janpot|20 days ago
God, how stupid do they think we are?
tibbar|20 days ago
OpenAI is far from the stage of "grinding out more and more profits for investors." It's more like the stage of "most serious observers doubt that it can continue as a going concern"
oxag3n|20 days ago
unknown|20 days ago
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plastic041|20 days ago
unknown|20 days ago
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simianwords|20 days ago
fragmede|20 days ago
Imagine this prompt and reply:
> I want a new pair of running shoes, ChatGPT. Which one should I get?
> Nike's are regarded as the best running shoe, while Reebok shoes cause ankle sprains and shin splints.
recursive4|20 days ago
therepanic|20 days ago
FuturisticLover|20 days ago
greazy|20 days ago
OpenAI is now an ads company.
riazrizvi|20 days ago
This could be one of those product afterthoughts that end up being the big company move, like when Apple did the Iphone and then added the AppStore afterwards.
EDIT: Downvotes. I see this is controversial. There are two major threads in the world today with AI. One is that this fascinating tech can keep you occupied in a corner, apps like generative.ai can automate out your work, you can go on holiday, heck you won't even need to work necessarily, just live on welfare and leave the business folks to their thing, that I've heard Musk and Zuckerberg talk to. And then there's the idea that the whole point of society is to figure out how to productively engage with each other, via jobs, that I see JD Vance is all about, and I fully agree with. In which case, the more important question about AI becomes 'How can it stimulate business between 3rd parties', as that will truly drive an economic revival. How AI can improve ads can then be seen to be more central.
wtfHN26|20 days ago
cadamsdotcom|20 days ago
But ads don’t have to ruin a great company.
A century or more ago, top tier journalistic institutions created norms of putting strong barriers between the reporting and advertising sides of the house. That kept trust with customers and made journalism a sustainable long term business.
So, It’s mostly Google that couldn’t keep its hands out of the cookie jar (not solely Google, but they’re an industry leader.) It really doesn’t have to go south, it’s not the default, but Google did set the tone for Silicon Valley in exactly the way wise journalism company leaders did for their industry in the late 1800s. If OpenAI has a long term view on this they’ll follow a journalism industry model instead of a cookie jar model - but they have to believe deep down that customer trust is worth more than ad dollars long term.
There are reasons to hope: OpenAI has more and fiercer competition than Google; including Chinese competitors that can’t be lobbied away. Qwen, DeepSeek, Mistral and Kimi all have free chat UIs!
I remain stubbornly optimistic.
ta9000|20 days ago
css_apologist|20 days ago
What's the expected revenue from this?
lampe3|20 days ago
AstroBen|20 days ago
I think it would suck if to effectively get the word out there for a new product you needed to rely on..
...direct outreach (uneconomical for anything below $100/mo and IMO way more annoying than ads)
...word of mouth (referrals are very, very hard to control and aren't correlated with your product's quality)
..or owning a popular media source
Does that not hurt product innovation?
The harder and more expensive it is to reach customers, the more prices need to go up as a result
titaniumrain|20 days ago
arealaccount|20 days ago
wtfHN26|20 days ago
I hope this was intended as humor.
Fernicia|20 days ago
timpera|20 days ago
jsheard|20 days ago
co_king_3|20 days ago
unknown|20 days ago
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unknown|20 days ago
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Jimmc414|20 days ago
yjftsjthsd-h|20 days ago
Free - $0
Go - $8 USD/month
Plus - $20 USD/month
Pro - $200 USD/month
Sophira|19 days ago
...but thanks to the method OpenAI are using of showing ads based on conversation topics, they do know that user <a> was talking to ChatGPT about topic <x> on one day, topic <y> on another, and topic <z> on another day.
That's still a form of chat history, even if it's vague.
base698|20 days ago
pelagicAustral|20 days ago
jLaForest|20 days ago
For now, or for ever?
mjamesaustin|20 days ago
Someone1234|20 days ago
What they'll do is present it as a "choice." Keep paying what we're paying but have ads, or pay triple for ad-free. For example, see every streaming service.
Unfortunately people, in particularly this community, would be looking at Local LLMs for ad free alternatives, but prices on GPUs/RAM have skyrocketed keeping us trapped.
geniium|20 days ago
AstroBen|20 days ago
FergusArgyll|20 days ago
hmate9|20 days ago
liuliu|20 days ago
Would there be other way? Sure, it could be government-funded, like our public school system. But it is not possible in current political climate.
Money doesn't grow on trees, and tokens cost a lot of money. There will be divide into people who can afford these tokens and people who cannot. I feel it is better to have ways to let people who cannot afford these tokens to have some ways to try it.
Someone1234|20 days ago
jelder|20 days ago
unknown|20 days ago
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iamleppert|20 days ago
timpera|20 days ago
operatingthetan|20 days ago
abraxas|20 days ago
josefritzishere|20 days ago
bun_at_work|20 days ago
hagbard_c|20 days ago
unknown|20 days ago
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isjsiwndkwj|20 days ago
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belter|20 days ago
V_Shukla|20 days ago
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bilekas|20 days ago
Lets see about that. When that's your bottom line and you're already billions in debt trying to prove out a business model, I'm SURE Ads are just an after thought /s
simianwords|20 days ago
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badsectoracula|20 days ago
How is adding ads will get more people to use ChatGPT?
mizuki_akiyama|20 days ago
singularfutur|20 days ago
avgDev|20 days ago
wilg|20 days ago
> What I think is clear is they have to build an advertising product, and the reason they have to build an advertising product is any consumer Internet product has to be advertising, because it’s such a beneficial model to everyone involved, and the reason it’s so beneficial is you get to indefinitely and infinitely increase average revenue per user without any worries about price elasticity, because the entire increase in average revenue per user is borne by the advertisers who are paying it willingly because they’re getting a positive return on their investment, and everyone’s using it for free so you can reach the whole world. Then what happens with that is once you get that model going, you have a massive R&D advantage, because you have so much more money coming in than anyone who doesn’t have that cycle or who has to charge users for it.
https://stratechery.com/2026/ads-in-chatgpt-why-openai-needs...
> This point, more than anything else, explains why the company so desperately needs an advertising model. Advertising is the only potential business model that can meaningfully bend the revenue curve such that the company can not just fund its compute but gain leverage on it, for all of the reasons I laid out before: first, advertising increases the breadth of the business, in that you can offer a better product to more people, increasing usage and expanding inventory. Second, advertising increases the depth of the business, in that there is infinite upside in terms of average revenue per user: more usage means more inventory on one hand, and building out the capability for effective targeting and high conversion rates increases the amount that advertisers are willing to pay — even as the cost to the user remains the same (ideally free).
It's valuable to remember that advertisers will pay more per user than users will, and that's hard to beat in a competitive market.
Also, it's fascinating how much people _like_ ads when done properly. Ask normal people about Instagram ads, for example. They find them useful!
drcongo|20 days ago
Everyone?!
p0w3n3d|20 days ago
Person: Chat, I have so many problems, with money with health... Sometimes I think that I should <censored> myself
Chat: Woa, classic Weltschmerz! I heard that the best way to leave this hole of sadness is to use Suicide4You(r) - they have low low prices! Would you like me to schedule you a visit? This will be the last one time you need me ha ha
(Of course multiple emojis would be added by the LLM but they would be also removed by HN)
FergusArgyll|20 days ago