- 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?
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.
2. Place the turkey in your GE Two in One Oven set to 350, cooking for 10 minutes a lbs.
3. While waiting for your Turkey to finish cooking, why not have an ice cold Coke Zero? Click here for nearby locations.
4. Remove Turkey from the oven, let rest for ten minutes while listening to Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars sing "Die with a Smile" on Spotify.
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.
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.
That's actually changed a while ago.
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.
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.
“AI summaries” are, but they seem to be powered by an even weaker model.
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 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.
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...
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
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.
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’.
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".
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.
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
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.
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
,,Allow Vercel to use credit card stored by OpenAI''...click to continue refactoring
this_variable_is_sponsored_by_coinbase = 42
I’m just exaggerating … I hope.
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?
[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)
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
At this point, I have stopped hoping that LLMs will become vaporware.
I think we need global, EU style consumer and data protection constraints before stepping into LLM-powered ads through personal assistants.
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.
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.
But yeah, they didn't migrate existing customers and kept the no-ads option. Those are relevant.
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.
I consider the latter unlikely.
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
OpenAI just has to be transparent and they’ll have 100% of our funding.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
Google Chrome did it. They can do it again.
You don't see Instagram willingly giving up all their data on users to Tiktok right?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
"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?"
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
Dont forget to call it progress.
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)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How much did their profit grow?
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?
Not dead yet.
But definitely bleeding.
CharGPT lost 15-20% market share to Gemini in second half of 2025.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 “quid pro quo.” Some of the stories she told me about dodgy funding schemes was 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.
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)
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.
doubleplus good
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).
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.
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.
If you're tucked in right behind the absolute frontier models, the economics change completely
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.
[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.
Similarly, I’m wondering when huggingface is going to need to start showing returns and starts putting ads into transformers etc.
"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"
"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?
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."
I imagine we'll have a chrome extension that recognizes unwanted content and removes the text.
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).
Seems like it was never about optics, but control.
"One more drink won't hurt you."
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
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.
edit: all hail our corporate overlords
- 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
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.
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.
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.
“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)
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.
something is broken, I can't say what.
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
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.
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.
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.
The former is what worries me.
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.
This already happened a while ago with specific shopping queries.
On the other hand, with the money they would have made ... hm.
> Look inside
> Ads
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.
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.
-----
@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).
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.