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.
It ought to be illegal to buy ads against trademarks (+/- some reasonable edit distance).
Long ago, Google search used to be its own product. Now it's the URL bar for 91% of internet users. This is no longer fair.
Google gets to not only tax every brand, but turn every brand into a biding war.
International laws need to be written against this.
Searching for "Claude" brings up a ton of competition in the first spot, and Google gets to fleece Anthropic and OpenAI, yet get its own products featured for free.
Searching "{trademark} vs" (or similar) should be the only way to trigger ads against a trademark.
> It ought to be illegal to buy ads against trademarks (+/- some reasonable edit distance).
I get the intention here, but how do you limit the collateral damage? (Or do you not care about it / see reducing the ability to advertise as a positive?)
There are a lot of trademarks, and they have to be scoped to specific goods and services, but Google has no way of knowing if you're actually looking for something related to that trademark.
e.g. doing a quick trademark search, I see active, registered trademarks for "elevator", "tower", "collision", "cancer sucks", "steve's", "local", "best", "bus", "eco", "panel", "motherboard", "grass", etc. etc. I'm not familiar with any of those brands, but that's just a small sample of the fairly generic terms that would no longer be able to be advertised on.
Google has a way of knowing. They can ask for documentation on who their customers are and what markets they operate in, and do some due diligence. Just like they have ways of knowing whether the ads they run are for blatant scams.
I'm not saying Google doesn't know if a company is in a particular market, I'm saying that a) Google doesn't know what market I'm searching for something from and b) even if they know both from context, it puts them in some awkward positions.
e.g. Vice Media has a trademark on "motherboard" that covers the tech news blog website service.
Is it now impossible for Asus to place an ad for the official Asus motherboard blog on the search term "motherboard"?
Is it legal to advertise for "motherboard" for any good or service other than a tech news blog website?
Is it now illegal to advertise a website featuring in-depth motherboard reviews using the term "motherboard"?
If I search for "motherboard website", what is Google allowed to show me for ads, given they don't know if I'm looking for the Vice website, or motherboard reviews, or the Asus homepage?
If a plain search for "motherboard" results in Vice's website not being in the top results, is Vice allowed to advertise on their own trademark to put it above other results? (Either above organic results, or above paid results for motherboard manufacturers, depending on whether you're allowing the latter.)
Yeah, and like, I commiserate with that view, I think it would make the internet/world a better place, but I don't think "no ads for trademarks" is helpful way to reach for that goal.
> It ought to be illegal to buy ads against trademark
this was one of the biggest problems of AdWords from beginning on: You could do brand-bidding unlimited, even today you see it every day: Search for brand X and competitor Y will show up with same words
I agree it's a bit perverse, but the problem predates Google. People do the real world equivalent all the time. When there are big conferences for specific companies, rivals buy up local ad space on billboards and subways.
That has caused some companies hosting conferences to pay for some of those ad spaces in advance.
Ads on billboards and subways actually bother me far more than search ads.
It's visual and cognitive pollution on public space that I've never consented to - I find it viscerally offensive.
We don't accept billboards on hiking trails, or in elementary classrooms, or in courtrooms (as far as I'm aware, though I wouldn't be surprised if someone turns up a real-life grotesque examples) - we shouldn't accept them in other public spaces either.
I don't agree. If I search for "leatherman" it seems totally reasonable to give competitors a chance. I generally think brand recognition is too powerful. If there is another high quality multitool on the market for a better price, why shouldn't I know about it?
Disclaimer: See my sibling comments for some my general thoughts on the problems with banning trademark ads.
But for your specific example - I get where you're coming from, but I'm skeptical that the ad market is even that functional.
Firstly, if I google "leatherman", every sponsored result for Leatherman brand multitools anyway. (And no amount of refreshes or re-searches gives me anything other than Leathermans.)
Secondarily, I'm not convinced that the set of advertisers (not counting Leatherman itself) that will advertise for "leatherman" are actually on average a better products for the consumer. (e.g. as opposed to lower-quality, higher-priced knockoffs.)
These are both fair points (generally, the consumer market is pretty dysfunctional and not behaving at all like economists would like it to), but the comment I was replying to ("It ought to be illegal to buy ads against trademarks") seems both too heavy-handed and unlikely to actually do any good.
And now it's become an anti-signal. If I search for a hotel the top N results are for other hotels, and then results for travel agents, and buried somewhere in this sea of uselessness is the result I searched for. The managers at Google have become self interested promotion hunters, and the programmers weak sycophants. It wasn't like this in the early days when I was there, the best ideas won, but then the B player managers were hired and the rot started.
It isn't the managers it is the business. All those geniuses hired and over years and years no one came up with another business model but ads. I pay for ad-free YouTube and would happily pay for ad free search. As would many. Many people would like a google scale micropayments system that isn't ads. The failure to do this led directly to social media becoming customer devouring experiences rather than making good products people want.
Paradoxically, the people who pay for adfree experiences would be the most valuable targets for ads, so I suspect any pay for no ads arrangement will be temporary at best.
> All those geniuses hired and over years and years no one came up with another business model but ads
This isn't true, there were many other ideas. It's just that only KPI was how much money they can make, thus ads won. Companies don't have an axis of ethics or morality.
> If I search for a hotel the top N results are for other hotels, and then results for travel agents, and buried somewhere in this sea of uselessness is the result I searched for.
The other day I had a DMV appointment scheduled on my Google Calendar with the office address saved in the location field. I opened the event and clicked on the address to navigate there.
I didn't realize initially but the first few Google Maps results were ads! When clicking on an exact address link!! I almost ended up at some apartment complex 2 miles away. Absolutely bewildering.
Never thought I would go to DuckDuckGo for searching, ever. I'd do Kagi but I don't like their use of Yandex so I'll keep an eye on whether they figure their stuff out politically. I'd pay for search but not if it's paying Russia, I've been very unhappy with what Russia does with money in recent decades.
> The managers at Google have become self interested promotion hunters, and the programmers weak sycophants. It wasn't like this in the early days when I was there, the best ideas won, but then the B player managers were hired and the rot started.
I bet they run some metrics, and while hyper-intelligent persons like you are annoyed, there is a chance that avg joes representing 95% of revenue are fine with that.
When it comes to anything tech related, the HN crowd are trend setters.
And.... the world is crying out for a google alternative. If it ever appears, the tech savvy people will be the first to move, followed by everyone else.
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.
This could conceivably work maybe up until the point where monied interests are directing public sentiment via alignment tuning or whatever it's called.
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.
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.
> Several of the biggest companies today are fueled by ads, and OpenAI has the perfect ad vehicle. What else were you expecting?
I'm old enough to remember when these people were claiming AI was as important and as revolutionary as fire and electricity. I don't know about you, but I pay for my electricity and the power companies don't have to run ads on my power lines in order to run their business.
They probably would if they could. That gives me some bad ideas - you could vary the line frequency to play the McDonald's 'I'm Lovin It' jingle, etc.- good thing I'm not involved with either ads or power delivery.
I wasn't expecting anything else, because I think Sam Altman is a conman. Let's not forget Altman lambasting ads, and telling us how they were a last restort for OpenAI. So are we there yet? Are we willing to admit that OpenAI is a failing company?
Local LLM models? It'd sure be a shame if enterprise buyers cornered the market on RAM, GPU and storage supplies and put them out of reach for consumers.
I think today's LLMs and their derivatives (agents,..
) are an impressive technological/research achievement with amazing real-world utility. Innovation at its best. I don't see the enshittification of commercial products based upon LLMs as taking away from that. Like I said, I see the potential of this technology in the local/open weights model space. Yes, those are currently noticeably behind the commercial offerings. But that's not a fundamental problem. It's not a race. If we keep improving open products they can one day match if not exceed the commercial options. A bit like open source desktop environments/operating systems - it took a while, but now the OSS options can arguably match if not beat the commercial ones.
Great observation, and thank you for pointing that out. I deployed a new MR for that using the awesome YASaaS for only 17.99/mo to create QR codes in your NextJS website. Using your company credit card to a new platform tied directly to your bun dependencies to pay for all your library subscriptions. Would you like me to tell you how much you'll spend this month?
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.
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
Scale. You can monetize on the people that don’t pay the $200/month. Obviously I have nothing to prove this statement, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the subscriptions are loss leaders.
> Can any provider survive without ads? These AI firms are propped up by VC money ...
Google's Gemini is SOTA and Google is valued at 4 trillion. Now it's ironic of course: Google became a 4 trillion thanks to ads. Which now allows Google to serve no ads in Gemini. It doesn't matter to Google that they're operating at a loss with Gemini: they can throw hundreds of billions at the problem over a few years, serving zero ads, while people make fun of the AI firms showing ads, like ChadGPT.
OpenAI is not just facing Anthropic and its "no ads" ad, it's also facing "we're a 4 trillion company and can run Gemini at a loss for decades" Google, "we pretend we'll put datacenters in space so that xAI can tap into the SpaceX warchest", openweight models which anybody can run on rented hardware for next to nothing compared to ChadGPT's price, etc.
It doesn't matter if others can survive without ads: all that matters is that they can survive long enough without ads so that OpenAI doesn't become another trillion dollar company.
Electricity generation is the constraining factor, but the sun does not turn off in space. xAI data centers in space drives cost to zero, even with inferior models.
Solar in space produces 30% more power, and doesn't turn off at night, meaning you don't need batteries. That means power costs, say, 25% of what it currently does measured against terrestrial solar and batteries.
The 75% electricity discount needs to pay for launch vehicles, specially designed satellites, and the inability to service the hardware or resell it when it's EOL for the data center.
It's a gamble. Maybe it'll turn out to be a slight edge, maybe it'll turn out to fail, but it's not a sure thing and it certainly isn't going to hugely decrease the cost.
Especially since they're competing against Google and their custom designed hardware that's far more power efficient for AI. It's not clear that NVIDIA running at a 75% dollar discount beats Google's best TPU in compute per dollar.
There are far too many variables still unknown to all parties. Anyone trying to say with certainty "X will lose", whether X is terrestrial or space based DCs, is lying and probably trying to sell you something.
You are going to be utterly shocked when you realize that solar panels work on the ground, too. You can buy so many batteries, and so many geographically separated locations for your panels, for the price of launching a datacenter into space.
> would you mind quoting the relative cost of batteries vs. solar panels for a 150kW solar-powered satellite
OK.
At a good location (~25% capacity factor), you need about 600 kW of panels to average 150 kW. Utility-scale solar runs roughly $0.50–$1.00/W installed, so call it ~$450K–$600K. Overnight storage (say ~16 hours) requires ~2,400 kWh. Adding a buffer for cloudy days, say 4,000–7,000 kWh total. At roughly $200–$350/kWh (utility-scale Li-ion), that's ~$1M–$2M.
In a favorable orbit, capacity factor is ~90–100% (GEO or sun-synchronous), so you need roughly 160–170 kW of panels. Space-qualified solar panels historically cost $100–$300/W. Even optimistically at $50–$100/W with newer manufacturing, that's 167 kW * $100/W = ~$17M optimistically, or 167 kW * $200/W = ~$33M realistically. You also need space-rated power management, thermal systems, and radiation-hardened electronics.
Even ignoring launch costs entirely, space solar is roughly 10–20x more expensive than ground solar + batteries, driven almost entirely by the enormous cost premium of space-qualified solar panels. Ground-based solar is extraordinarily cheap now (~$0.50–1/W), while space-grade panels remain orders of magnitude more expensive per watt.
The ground option wins overwhelmingly. The space option would only start to make sense if space-grade panel costs dropped to near terrestrial levels, which would require a revolution in space manufacturing.
Never forget cooling. People imagine a square box with a ginormous sea of solar panels attached, and forget the atrocious and horrible cooling required to vent all the heat that makes your home sewage line look like bottled water by comparison.
150kW solar kit seems to cost around $150k[1]. With the cost of launch with Falcon Heavy, this would pay for about 100kg of payload[2]. Each Starlink satellite weighs ~300kg[3] so I suspect a 150kW "datacenter" satellite would weight much more. Where are the savings supposed to come from? Seems like you could overprovision terrestrial solar panels by 3-4x and still obviously come out ahead. And that's all before considering the R&D costs of building AI datacenter hardware that can survive the orbital radiation environment.
For the price of launching a datacenter into space, you could probably build one in NA, one in Europe, and one in Asia and solve the "sun sets" problem that way with the side benefit of having excess capacity you can turn on by paying for local non-solar electricity.
You also have easy upgradeability and expansion, easier cooling and the value of the land and hardware as an asset. None of which are available in space.
Yes, but you still don't want to see crap like that nagging you every time you use the tool, especially when paying $200/mo for it.
ps. I wish there was a way to make this progress bar blink circle like in other places without this "Nagging...", "Flipping burgers...", "Fishing..." stupid nonsense and unaligned logo-like animation - it's infantile, poor taste, distracting and annoying. It was fun for first 5 minutes, it's not anymore, it's shitty now, make it stop, please.
"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.
I guess the question is, when I write a prompt into ChatGPT is the answer the entire response I get back, or is the answer just one part of the response I get back.
To date the entire response = the answer and so users likely see them as synonymous. That metaphor is being broken now and we're saying "no actually the response contains multiple things and only one part of it is the 'answer'".
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.
That's what a business would do if they were getting a loan from the bank instead of ravenous VCs that will pay their legal fees and settlements when theyget busted for training their models on copyrighted content, as long as they IPO within a reasonable timeframe.
That doesn't scale in the world of capitalism. Because you need to increase revenues year after year and there are only so many people willing to pay. So you either keep increasing the price (and that has a limit) or you find other ways to monetize and the current meta seems to be pay + ads.
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.
lol pretty much. their reservation price was more than met.
Although considering Brin's interactions with female employees etc, no surprise really. They were full of it from the off. Page is better at hiding it.
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.
You're putting a higher price on general user chatter over ad income? Everything is a source of data. How much it can benefit from what's on offer with each data point isn't as much of a given.
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 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?
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 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.
"Lower cost to reach customers = lower product and service prices"
This is economically illiterate.
Advertising is not a discount mechanism. It is a tax on the consumer. When I buy a product heavily marketed on Instagram or Google, I'm paying for the product plus the auction bid price required to acquire me plus the margin of the ad-tech middleman (which are trillion dollar companies).
You are conflating "information distribution" with "persuasive surveillance." In a world without behavioral advertising, businesses compete on quality and reputation, not on who can exploit the most psychological vulnerabilities to manufacture demand.
As for innovation: The current ad ecosystem has killed organic discovery. You can't build a "micro-business" based on merit anymore.
The winner SHOULD be the engineer who solved a hard problem efficiently. But instead the winner is the dropshipper who cracked the arbitrage spread between a cheap, garbage product and a highly manipulative Facebook ad campaign.
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.
Yep; it is just a matter of time before that is thrown back in their face when they add the ads. No way shareholders will let a revenue stream go unutilized particularly if a competitor proofs the market for them.
> 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"
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?
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 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 :)
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.
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.
> 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.
This is working a lot like Meta/Facebook where they have got immense data about your interests.
Google Search OTOH has been using broad matched queries and is deciding which keywords to show your Ads.
I heard from many people that they don't like this approach of Google Search Ads now.
As they are blowing up more money for useless keywords they didn't want to target.
The only option they have is to add negative keywords - that mostly happens after the money is spent on junk keywords.
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"
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!
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.
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.
I would be surprised if any major AI companies could sustain free plan for more than a year or two once it becomes popular. Claude can do it for now because the ratio of paying users is higher as it is popular among more niche audience.
> 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.
"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."
Really don’t feel comfortable defending OpenAI in any way because there is a lot to complain about but ads for paid services that cost a lot more than $8 per month is not really an anomaly. Look at Amazon prime, prime video, Hulu, airline flights, any major newspaper subscription, YT premium, etc, etc. I get the annoyance but just cancel the service if you don’t want ads or pay for a tier that isn’t subsidized.
This is interesting. On one side, I hate ads everywhere. On the other side, I was always very appreciative of the work of some people like Benetton or some creative ads. I remember watching here in Europe, there is a show that was called Culture Pub every Sunday night that was showing the best ads, and I always enjoyed watching it. That part is probably the best part. The creativity
I'm curious why you hate ads? Outside of the most obnoxious recipe sites plastered with them I don't find they effect me much
The business landscape would look much different without advertising. New products would struggle to get the word out there. Cost to reach customers would go up, leading to higher product prices and lack of innovation due to not being able to break in
YouTube creators would struggle, probably going under unless they own their own products if they can't rely on sponsorships or ads
People love to complain both about privacy invasion of tracking, and then also about irrelevant products being pushed on them that they'd never want
Bad targeting is the problem! Targeting needs to be better. Do you think a business wants to push their products on people that don't want them? Of course not. It's a total waste of money
Imagine a world where micro-niche businesses could exist, where we could innovate products exactly for you and a tiny sub-group of other people that would improve your life. The only way you'd ever find out about them, and thus that they could be sustainable, is with better ad targeting
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?"
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.
How do I transfer 3 years of memories over to Claude? Users really like the personalization they've gotten with ChatGPT. It knows about my pets and their names. I gotta teach all of that stuff to Claude or whomever again? sigh. I'll just stick with ChatGPT.
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.
> 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".
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
> 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
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!
The premise of advertising is that it's manipulation to trick you into spending money you wouldn't otherwise spend. We know this because companies pay for ads with the intention you spend more money.
Every ad you see materially makes you a little bit poorer and cuts off a small amount of your life. Think of it this way - every ad is a few seconds lost, maybe a few minutes, and a few cents down the drain.
But this isn't understood because it's so abstracted. The link between your personal shopping habits and advertising is not understood, and, in fact, cannot be understood, because it's fundamentally brain hacking.
If you believe you are immune to ads, you are not. Or, at least, you can never prove it.
Cumulatively, this adds up. If you never saw ads, how much longer would you live? A year, maybe two? If you never saw ads, how much richer would you be? 200%, 500%? Who knows.
Why does it have to be "manipulation"? If you don't know about something that you might want to buy, learning about it isn't being manipulated.
Also, the lifespan thing is crazy - what if you learned about something that improved your health, like an exercise machine or something? You can't just ignore the upsides. What if you bought something that saved you money in the long run, like a quality tool?
This is a joke, right? Users already got to use chatgpt, so the only change to users is that they'll be subjected to ads, which many of them don't like.
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.
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)
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.
https://searchengineland.com/search-ad-labeling-history-goog...
It ought to be illegal to buy ads against trademarks (+/- some reasonable edit distance).
Long ago, Google search used to be its own product. Now it's the URL bar for 91% of internet users. This is no longer fair.
Google gets to not only tax every brand, but turn every brand into a biding war.
International laws need to be written against this.
Searching for "Claude" brings up a ton of competition in the first spot, and Google gets to fleece Anthropic and OpenAI, yet get its own products featured for free.
Searching "{trademark} vs" (or similar) should be the only way to trigger ads against a trademark.
> It ought to be illegal to buy ads against trademarks (+/- some reasonable edit distance).
I get the intention here, but how do you limit the collateral damage? (Or do you not care about it / see reducing the ability to advertise as a positive?)
There are a lot of trademarks, and they have to be scoped to specific goods and services, but Google has no way of knowing if you're actually looking for something related to that trademark.
e.g. doing a quick trademark search, I see active, registered trademarks for "elevator", "tower", "collision", "cancer sucks", "steve's", "local", "best", "bus", "eco", "panel", "motherboard", "grass", etc. etc. I'm not familiar with any of those brands, but that's just a small sample of the fairly generic terms that would no longer be able to be advertised on.
Google has a way of knowing. They can ask for documentation on who their customers are and what markets they operate in, and do some due diligence. Just like they have ways of knowing whether the ads they run are for blatant scams.
I'm not saying Google doesn't know if a company is in a particular market, I'm saying that a) Google doesn't know what market I'm searching for something from and b) even if they know both from context, it puts them in some awkward positions.
e.g. Vice Media has a trademark on "motherboard" that covers the tech news blog website service.
Is it now impossible for Asus to place an ad for the official Asus motherboard blog on the search term "motherboard"?
Is it legal to advertise for "motherboard" for any good or service other than a tech news blog website?
Is it now illegal to advertise a website featuring in-depth motherboard reviews using the term "motherboard"?
If I search for "motherboard website", what is Google allowed to show me for ads, given they don't know if I'm looking for the Vice website, or motherboard reviews, or the Asus homepage?
If a plain search for "motherboard" results in Vice's website not being in the top results, is Vice allowed to advertise on their own trademark to put it above other results? (Either above organic results, or above paid results for motherboard manufacturers, depending on whether you're allowing the latter.)
There should be no ads on the internet.
Yeah, and like, I commiserate with that view, I think it would make the internet/world a better place, but I don't think "no ads for trademarks" is helpful way to reach for that goal.
> It ought to be illegal to buy ads against trademark
this was one of the biggest problems of AdWords from beginning on: You could do brand-bidding unlimited, even today you see it every day: Search for brand X and competitor Y will show up with same words
I agree it's a bit perverse, but the problem predates Google. People do the real world equivalent all the time. When there are big conferences for specific companies, rivals buy up local ad space on billboards and subways.
That has caused some companies hosting conferences to pay for some of those ad spaces in advance.
Ads on billboards and subways actually bother me far more than search ads.
It's visual and cognitive pollution on public space that I've never consented to - I find it viscerally offensive.
We don't accept billboards on hiking trails, or in elementary classrooms, or in courtrooms (as far as I'm aware, though I wouldn't be surprised if someone turns up a real-life grotesque examples) - we shouldn't accept them in other public spaces either.
I don't agree. If I search for "leatherman" it seems totally reasonable to give competitors a chance. I generally think brand recognition is too powerful. If there is another high quality multitool on the market for a better price, why shouldn't I know about it?
Disclaimer: See my sibling comments for some my general thoughts on the problems with banning trademark ads.
But for your specific example - I get where you're coming from, but I'm skeptical that the ad market is even that functional.
Firstly, if I google "leatherman", every sponsored result for Leatherman brand multitools anyway. (And no amount of refreshes or re-searches gives me anything other than Leathermans.)
Secondarily, I'm not convinced that the set of advertisers (not counting Leatherman itself) that will advertise for "leatherman" are actually on average a better products for the consumer. (e.g. as opposed to lower-quality, higher-priced knockoffs.)
These are both fair points (generally, the consumer market is pretty dysfunctional and not behaving at all like economists would like it to), but the comment I was replying to ("It ought to be illegal to buy ads against trademarks") seems both too heavy-handed and unlikely to actually do any good.
And now it's become an anti-signal. If I search for a hotel the top N results are for other hotels, and then results for travel agents, and buried somewhere in this sea of uselessness is the result I searched for. The managers at Google have become self interested promotion hunters, and the programmers weak sycophants. It wasn't like this in the early days when I was there, the best ideas won, but then the B player managers were hired and the rot started.
It isn't the managers it is the business. All those geniuses hired and over years and years no one came up with another business model but ads. I pay for ad-free YouTube and would happily pay for ad free search. As would many. Many people would like a google scale micropayments system that isn't ads. The failure to do this led directly to social media becoming customer devouring experiences rather than making good products people want.
Paradoxically, the people who pay for adfree experiences would be the most valuable targets for ads, so I suspect any pay for no ads arrangement will be temporary at best.
Exactly. Next up, it'll be on the Plus tier to "help subsidize the low price of this tier".
Check out kagi; adfree search
I refuse to pay for ad free YouTube + otherwise I'd watch even more of it. The annoyingness of ads is a pretty important brake.
There's other options to break this kind of cognitive pattern, like https://unhook.app/
If I want them, I can use them. No need to justify ads for this use case.
That doesn't work on the TV. It also apparently requires using a specific browser (Kiwi) to work on mobile.
But thanks, still useful on desktop.
Seems to work in Firefox on Android?
> All those geniuses hired and over years and years no one came up with another business model but ads
This isn't true, there were many other ideas. It's just that only KPI was how much money they can make, thus ads won. Companies don't have an axis of ethics or morality.
Ideas don't count - it's persuasion and execution that matter. One of the several reasons that the rule is not ruled by smartness/rationality.
> If I search for a hotel the top N results are for other hotels, and then results for travel agents, and buried somewhere in this sea of uselessness is the result I searched for.
The other day I had a DMV appointment scheduled on my Google Calendar with the office address saved in the location field. I opened the event and clicked on the address to navigate there.
I didn't realize initially but the first few Google Maps results were ads! When clicking on an exact address link!! I almost ended up at some apartment complex 2 miles away. Absolutely bewildering.
Never thought I would go to DuckDuckGo for searching, ever. I'd do Kagi but I don't like their use of Yandex so I'll keep an eye on whether they figure their stuff out politically. I'd pay for search but not if it's paying Russia, I've been very unhappy with what Russia does with money in recent decades.
Been using DuckDuckGo for almost 2 years now - couldn't believe it at first, but results are at least as good, if not even better than Google.
I used Kagi for a year or two then switched to DDG. It's fine. I do not miss Google at all.
Kagi is using Google search behind the scenes. I think that’s why it felt so easy to switch to.
> The managers at Google have become self interested promotion hunters, and the programmers weak sycophants. It wasn't like this in the early days when I was there, the best ideas won, but then the B player managers were hired and the rot started.
I bet they run some metrics, and while hyper-intelligent persons like you are annoyed, there is a chance that avg joes representing 95% of revenue are fine with that.
In the early days they werent a publicy traded company and Brin/Page did not get exposed to the taste of being ultra-wealthy.
Steve Jobs looking back now is incredibly rare - someone who was wealthy but had the spirit of innovation to keep going again and again.
When it comes to anything tech related, the HN crowd are trend setters.
And.... the world is crying out for a google alternative. If it ever appears, the tech savvy people will be the first to move, followed by everyone else.
Kagi is waiting for your money
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.
The ratchet can loosen! It should be easy to detect what is an ad and thus block it (or overlay some artwork over it or just blank it out).
Use ChatGPT for getting answers, and use Claude for detecting the ads in ChatGPT, or vice versa!
This could conceivably work maybe up until the point where monied interests are directing public sentiment via alignment tuning or whatever it's called.
> more invasive
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.
/thread
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.
> Several of the biggest companies today are fueled by ads, and OpenAI has the perfect ad vehicle. What else were you expecting?
I'm old enough to remember when these people were claiming AI was as important and as revolutionary as fire and electricity. I don't know about you, but I pay for my electricity and the power companies don't have to run ads on my power lines in order to run their business.
They probably would if they could. That gives me some bad ideas - you could vary the line frequency to play the McDonald's 'I'm Lovin It' jingle, etc.- good thing I'm not involved with either ads or power delivery.
Don't forget morse code
And that's all you really need to know about this AI grift.
I wasn't expecting anything else, because I think Sam Altman is a conman. Let's not forget Altman lambasting ads, and telling us how they were a last restort for OpenAI. So are we there yet? Are we willing to admit that OpenAI is a failing company?
Failing or not, there's no way to justify their current spend without saying the words "massive" and "bubble".
Local LLM models? It'd sure be a shame if enterprise buyers cornered the market on RAM, GPU and storage supplies and put them out of reach for consumers.
> What else were you expecting?
some of us were hoping for actual innovation, not more ads
I think today's LLMs and their derivatives (agents,.. ) are an impressive technological/research achievement with amazing real-world utility. Innovation at its best. I don't see the enshittification of commercial products based upon LLMs as taking away from that. Like I said, I see the potential of this technology in the local/open weights model space. Yes, those are currently noticeably behind the commercial offerings. But that's not a fundamental problem. It's not a race. If we keep improving open products they can one day match if not exceed the commercial options. A bit like open source desktop environments/operating systems - it took a while, but now the OSS options can arguably match if not beat the commercial ones.
Great observation, and thank you for pointing that out. I deployed a new MR for that using the awesome YASaaS for only 17.99/mo to create QR codes in your NextJS website. Using your company credit card to a new platform tied directly to your bun dependencies to pay for all your library subscriptions. Would you like me to tell you how much you'll spend this month?
Indeed. What advertisers want is chatbot that works as a sales rep, and this is the sort of thing LLMs can be really really good at. Money talks.
> and the best monetization plan is ads.... Again?
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.
But they could make more money if they show the ads to everyone.
E.g like Amazon prime.
For now, but they'd be stupid to not push ads on all their tiers.
You know what's better than 20 bucks a month? 20 bucks a month and ads.
Ads are they only way to make a lot of money on the internet.
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.
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
asking £200/month for the high tiers isn't enough?
to be honest probably not
If that is the case that I can not understand how a few cents extra from ad spots will make the difference.
Scale. You can monetize on the people that don’t pay the $200/month. Obviously I have nothing to prove this statement, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the subscriptions are loss leaders.
Advertisers will pay MORE per user than users will. That is why they are so valuable to companies offering freemium services!
> Can any provider survive without ads? These AI firms are propped up by VC money ...
Google's Gemini is SOTA and Google is valued at 4 trillion. Now it's ironic of course: Google became a 4 trillion thanks to ads. Which now allows Google to serve no ads in Gemini. It doesn't matter to Google that they're operating at a loss with Gemini: they can throw hundreds of billions at the problem over a few years, serving zero ads, while people make fun of the AI firms showing ads, like ChadGPT.
OpenAI is not just facing Anthropic and its "no ads" ad, it's also facing "we're a 4 trillion company and can run Gemini at a loss for decades" Google, "we pretend we'll put datacenters in space so that xAI can tap into the SpaceX warchest", openweight models which anybody can run on rented hardware for next to nothing compared to ChadGPT's price, etc.
It doesn't matter if others can survive without ads: all that matters is that they can survive long enough without ads so that OpenAI doesn't become another trillion dollar company.
Yes, xAI & Anthropic.
Electricity generation is the constraining factor, but the sun does not turn off in space. xAI data centers in space drives cost to zero, even with inferior models.
I see no other future than SpaceXai winning.
Cost to zero? Definitely not.
Solar in space produces 30% more power, and doesn't turn off at night, meaning you don't need batteries. That means power costs, say, 25% of what it currently does measured against terrestrial solar and batteries.
The 75% electricity discount needs to pay for launch vehicles, specially designed satellites, and the inability to service the hardware or resell it when it's EOL for the data center.
It's a gamble. Maybe it'll turn out to be a slight edge, maybe it'll turn out to fail, but it's not a sure thing and it certainly isn't going to hugely decrease the cost.
Especially since they're competing against Google and their custom designed hardware that's far more power efficient for AI. It's not clear that NVIDIA running at a 75% dollar discount beats Google's best TPU in compute per dollar.
The constraint is getting regulatory approval for building new power plants on Earth, even solar plants.
We can make chips faster than we can build power plants.
That's a constraint. It's not the constraint.
There are far too many variables still unknown to all parties. Anyone trying to say with certainty "X will lose", whether X is terrestrial or space based DCs, is lying and probably trying to sell you something.
How will we handle cooling in space?
Boyle’s Law: run at higher temperature. Watch Elon’s interviews. He is right.
> Watch Elon’s interviews. He is right.
90% of his predictions didn't materialize, he's full of shit, how do people keep falling for it over and over again?
Which ones didn’t materialize?
Fully autonomous cars in 2014, 2015, 2016, ... 2026
Camera based fully self driving cars
Robotaxi fleets by 2020
Whatever the fuck were these tesla tunnels in LA
Humans on Mars by 2024
The sub 25k tesla
etc.
Hyperloop
I'm still waiting for full self-driving car autopilot to materialize.
I was going to say that you're parroting his interviews and then you outted yourself.
This sounds like Air conditioning in space.
But watching him battling basic physics is very funny, not gonna lie.
You are going to be utterly shocked when you realize that solar panels work on the ground, too. You can buy so many batteries, and so many geographically separated locations for your panels, for the price of launching a datacenter into space.
Batteries are expensive.
Marginal cost of launches keep coming down for SpaceX with reusable rockets and lifetime of satellites is long.
Solar panels are much more efficient in space (no atmosphere).
Before downvoting, would you mind quoting the relative cost of batteries vs. solar panels for a 150kW solar-powered satellite?
> would you mind quoting the relative cost of batteries vs. solar panels for a 150kW solar-powered satellite
OK.
At a good location (~25% capacity factor), you need about 600 kW of panels to average 150 kW. Utility-scale solar runs roughly $0.50–$1.00/W installed, so call it ~$450K–$600K. Overnight storage (say ~16 hours) requires ~2,400 kWh. Adding a buffer for cloudy days, say 4,000–7,000 kWh total. At roughly $200–$350/kWh (utility-scale Li-ion), that's ~$1M–$2M.
In a favorable orbit, capacity factor is ~90–100% (GEO or sun-synchronous), so you need roughly 160–170 kW of panels. Space-qualified solar panels historically cost $100–$300/W. Even optimistically at $50–$100/W with newer manufacturing, that's 167 kW * $100/W = ~$17M optimistically, or 167 kW * $200/W = ~$33M realistically. You also need space-rated power management, thermal systems, and radiation-hardened electronics.
Even ignoring launch costs entirely, space solar is roughly 10–20x more expensive than ground solar + batteries, driven almost entirely by the enormous cost premium of space-qualified solar panels. Ground-based solar is extraordinarily cheap now (~$0.50–1/W), while space-grade panels remain orders of magnitude more expensive per watt.
The ground option wins overwhelmingly. The space option would only start to make sense if space-grade panel costs dropped to near terrestrial levels, which would require a revolution in space manufacturing.
They lose 0.5% efficiency for every 1c above 25c, do you plan on having your space panels actively cooled?
FYI you'd need 2x the solar panels of the ISS to run a single rack of NVIDIA GB300, and microsoft just built a datacenter with 4600 of these racks.
Never forget cooling. People imagine a square box with a ginormous sea of solar panels attached, and forget the atrocious and horrible cooling required to vent all the heat that makes your home sewage line look like bottled water by comparison.
With or without the rocket?
150kW solar kit seems to cost around $150k[1]. With the cost of launch with Falcon Heavy, this would pay for about 100kg of payload[2]. Each Starlink satellite weighs ~300kg[3] so I suspect a 150kW "datacenter" satellite would weight much more. Where are the savings supposed to come from? Seems like you could overprovision terrestrial solar panels by 3-4x and still obviously come out ahead. And that's all before considering the R&D costs of building AI datacenter hardware that can survive the orbital radiation environment.
[1] https://sunwatts.com/150-kw-solar-kits/
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-space-launches-low-e...
[3] https://everydayastronaut.com/starlink-group-4-5-falcon-9-bl...
> so I suspect a 150kW "datacenter" satellite would weight much more.
150kw is just enough to power a single gb300 rack, the rack alone weights 1500kg+
Lame. I was expecting Elmo to crack cold fusion in a ketamine-infused weekend and solve power constraints for the world.
Guess he is not as bright as he thinks he is.
For the price of launching a datacenter into space, you could probably build one in NA, one in Europe, and one in Asia and solve the "sun sets" problem that way with the side benefit of having excess capacity you can turn on by paying for local non-solar electricity.
You also have easy upgradeability and expansion, easier cooling and the value of the land and hardware as an asset. None of which are available in space.
Kind of ironic as claude code keeps showing this "get $50 bucks for referral" when coding on $200/mo plan, so fucking annoying. Hypocrites.
IMO an optional referral bonus is less invasive than inline ads that could potentially change the quality of my response.
If we invented Excel's transpose in 2026, we'd put ads on it. Hey, someone has to pay for all that innovation!
Yes, but you still don't want to see crap like that nagging you every time you use the tool, especially when paying $200/mo for it.
ps. I wish there was a way to make this progress bar blink circle like in other places without this "Nagging...", "Flipping burgers...", "Fishing..." stupid nonsense and unaligned logo-like animation - it's infantile, poor taste, distracting and annoying. It was fun for first 5 minutes, it's not anymore, it's shitty now, make it stop, please.
The elegant solution is to rent space in the system prompt to advertisers. $X per character per hour, up to 1000 characters.
"I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us as a business model," - Sam Altman, October 2024
Source [video]: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1qeyty4/i_kind...
"Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers will not have ads."
Saving this sentence for later.
"Introducing the new Premium, Teams, Business and Learning tiers!"
This guy businesses!
"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 correct in the same way as saying ads in the New York Times don't change the articles. Seems fair.
I think a better comparison is saying that search ads don't change search results (but it does change the results page).
The point is that the language and nuance ends up being lost on a large portion of the audience.
Just like some youtube content with built-in ads about AI tools while the video is bushing on AI tools
doesnt it just mean the ad isnt part of the context? that they are isolated from each other and the ad cant steer the conversation?
I get what youre saying, but I do think its important for them to point out the ad is sandboxed.
I totally agree, but the framing is critical.
I guess the question is, when I write a prompt into ChatGPT is the answer the entire response I get back, or is the answer just one part of the response I get back.
To date the entire response = the answer and so users likely see them as synonymous. That metaphor is being broken now and we're saying "no actually the response contains multiple things and only one part of it is the 'answer'".
Maybe I'm the one splitting hairs though.
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.
Maybe they charge a price that covers the cost of the service + a little profit.
That's what a business would do if they were getting a loan from the bank instead of ravenous VCs that will pay their legal fees and settlements when theyget busted for training their models on copyrighted content, as long as they IPO within a reasonable timeframe.
this is exactly what they do, if you pay for your account, you don't see ads
As of November 2025, no ChatGPT tier is profitable, not even the $200 a month one:
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/sam-altman-lose...
That doesn't scale in the world of capitalism. Because you need to increase revenues year after year and there are only so many people willing to pay. So you either keep increasing the price (and that has a limit) or you find other ways to monetize and the current meta seems to be pay + ads.
> But the only revenue model that they still can come up with is Ads.
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.
I mean thats the problem, right? Nobody has a better idea. If you do, then use it and win the AI war.
The ads in Google also started like this. (However, to my knowledge, there is no way I can pay Google to get the ads in my search removed)
you can at least pay them to get the ads removed from youtube
Not really. I’ve had YT premium for years and it removes the obtrusive ones, but I see ads in some form every time I use it.
Probably means the perpetual “…speaking of security, let me tell you about our sponsor nordvpn…” that’s in every video on YouTube.
What? No?
That can be done for free by more tightly managing your hardware platform.
IIRC many OTT streaming players found that they can make more money from Ads than they can from subscription alone.
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.
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.
Good people are moral for a million bucks but almost none are for a billion.
lol pretty much. their reservation price was more than met.
Although considering Brin's interactions with female employees etc, no surprise really. They were full of it from the off. Page is better at hiding it.
I’ve already tested the cancel button. Can confirm it works.
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.
> wouldn't say that I am too sticky of a customer.
You definitely aren't too sticky a customer - you aren't even a customer to begin with!
> I mainly use ChatGPT and use the free plan
> 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.
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.
they are source of data, so they are not fully without value.
You're putting a higher price on general user chatter over ad income? Everything is a source of data. How much it can benefit from what's on offer with each data point isn't as much of a given.
you really believe that gemini by google will not run ads?
https://arxiv.org/html/2512.03975v1
Oh no. How much longer do we have?
Free tiers for Claude and Gemini will also have ads soon. It's a matter of when, not if.
there's literally no other provider with a good free tier?
(other than aistudio which i wouldn't use even if i were forced to, laggy af!)
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 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?
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 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.
People think they should magically find out about new products without considering the macro effects of a world without advertising
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
"Lower cost to reach customers = lower product and service prices"
This is economically illiterate. Advertising is not a discount mechanism. It is a tax on the consumer. When I buy a product heavily marketed on Instagram or Google, I'm paying for the product plus the auction bid price required to acquire me plus the margin of the ad-tech middleman (which are trillion dollar companies).
You are conflating "information distribution" with "persuasive surveillance." In a world without behavioral advertising, businesses compete on quality and reputation, not on who can exploit the most psychological vulnerabilities to manufacture demand.
As for innovation: The current ad ecosystem has killed organic discovery. You can't build a "micro-business" based on merit anymore. The winner SHOULD be the engineer who solved a hard problem efficiently. But instead the winner is the dropshipper who cracked the arbitrage spread between a cheap, garbage product and a highly manipulative Facebook ad campaign.
Anthropic had some very clever response to this in the form of an ad
https://www.reddit.com/r/AITrailblazers/comments/1qw2iar/ant...
Depending on your taste this is dumb mudslinging or a hilarious burn...
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.
Yep; it is just a matter of time before that is thrown back in their face when they add the ads. No way shareholders will let a revenue stream go unutilized particularly if a competitor proofs the market for them.
I searched for original OpenAI mission statement. This hackernews comment came up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34367824#34370925
> 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>
Good time to entirely delete my chatgpt account.
Edit: DONE!
I suggest deleting the google account, facebook account,{insert whatever} account, ..., because .... ads!
At least, there are ad free tiers. Google will never offer this or facebook.
Good idea!
Edit: DONE!
Have to wonder if the IPO push for this year is genuine now
Its seemingly a hedge against not generating enough revenue to maintain existing investor trust / sustain operations in the future.
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?
If you are aware enough to ask the question, I'm sure you can figure out the answer.
neither, these are banner ads, not generated by the model
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?
Nope, a search engine with ads.
Because creating real products, like Apple does, is actually pretty hard to do.
Many people (such as Scam Altman) are happy to take short cuts and lie in your face in order to engage in wealth transfers.
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.
AGI achieved (Advertisement Generating Intelligence).
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 :)
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.
Kinda sad that in 3 decades into the tech industry the only viable business model is to build a moat and then sell ads
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.
If this EVER shows up on a paid plan I'm out. Full stop.
> 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).
It’s a boil the frog 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.
its a trust thing because the market they operate in is tight - no reason to quickly move to the next option.
i personally would never touch chatgpt if i knew the answers were biased for certain companies.
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.
so perfectly personalized ads? the CPM on this is probably wild (for openai).
What makes this any more personalized than Google Search ads?
This is working a lot like Meta/Facebook where they have got immense data about your interests.
Google Search OTOH has been using broad matched queries and is deciding which keywords to show your Ads.
I heard from many people that they don't like this approach of Google Search Ads now. As they are blowing up more money for useless keywords they didn't want to target. The only option they have is to add negative keywords - that mostly happens after the money is spent on junk keywords.
Does anyone know if there is an option to enable ads in the tiers which do not have them by default?
Ads, like AI, subsumes the product in which its embedded in.
OpenAI is now an ads company.
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.
God, how stupid do they think we are?
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"
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!
I remain stubbornly optimistic.
google used to be designed to give you the best answer and now it isn't. No reason why this will not go the same way.
I guess I'm the product. Again.
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?
Because you can no longer trust the API output to be unbiased.
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.
While the general census will be largely negative, it good for advertisers, i guess.
Are these Bing Ads or OpenAI has it's own Ad Platform now ?
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.
Will this make OpenAI profitable?
What's the expected revenue from this?
I Am Shocked, I Am Shocked, Well Not That Shocked.
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
switching to gemini right now... this is insane! why should i pay openai to get unsolicited ads?!
What Google is talking about seems way worse https://www.levernews.com/googles-ai-knows-what-youll-pay/
Switching to the BIGGEST Advertising Company in the world to get away from Ads ?
I hope this was intended as humor.
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.
Normal pro users aren't getting ads, yet.
Yet?
So a paid tier is getting ads got it.
The Gemini experience is quite inferior right now unfortunately.
this is downvoted but anyone who has used gemini seriously would know that it comes nowhere close to chatgpt or claude.
switching to meth right now... this is insane! why should i pay my coke dealer to give me 50% pure cocaine?!
Do you really think an AI model provided by Google is never going to have ads?
I would be surprised if any major AI companies could sustain free plan for more than a year or two once it becomes popular. Claude can do it for now because the ratio of paying users is higher as it is popular among more niche audience.
> 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.
That sounds like quite a lot to me.
"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."
In case anyone else wanted to know - https://chatgpt.com/pricing
Free - $0
Go - $8 USD/month
Plus - $20 USD/month
Pro - $200 USD/month
> Go - $8 USD/month
So, you pay and get ads :-P
Really don’t feel comfortable defending OpenAI in any way because there is a lot to complain about but ads for paid services that cost a lot more than $8 per month is not really an anomaly. Look at Amazon prime, prime video, Hulu, airline flights, any major newspaper subscription, YT premium, etc, etc. I get the annoyance but just cancel the service if you don’t want ads or pay for a tier that isn’t subsidized.
Netflix has an ad-supported paid tier. https://www.netflix.com/ads-plan
BETRAYAL
You're absolutely right.
Just wanted to mention the ads from Claude here :)
ironically they're also ads which apparently people hate?
This is interesting. On one side, I hate ads everywhere. On the other side, I was always very appreciative of the work of some people like Benetton or some creative ads. I remember watching here in Europe, there is a show that was called Culture Pub every Sunday night that was showing the best ads, and I always enjoyed watching it. That part is probably the best part. The creativity
I'm curious why you hate ads? Outside of the most obnoxious recipe sites plastered with them I don't find they effect me much
The business landscape would look much different without advertising. New products would struggle to get the word out there. Cost to reach customers would go up, leading to higher product prices and lack of innovation due to not being able to break in
YouTube creators would struggle, probably going under unless they own their own products if they can't rely on sponsorships or ads
People love to complain both about privacy invasion of tracking, and then also about irrelevant products being pushed on them that they'd never want
Bad targeting is the problem! Targeting needs to be better. Do you think a business wants to push their products on people that don't want them? Of course not. It's a total waste of money
Imagine a world where micro-niche businesses could exist, where we could innovate products exactly for you and a tiny sub-group of other people that would improve your life. The only way you'd ever find out about them, and thus that they could be sustainable, is with better ad targeting
I love ads
Folks ...were promised AGI and end up with a GenAi porn Reddit...
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?"
I hate ads too but whats the outrage? Did people expect it to be free forever? Everything else has ads. youtube, instagram, x, google etc. etc.
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.
This impacts a non-free plan; their $8/month plan now has ads too.
You can't trust a product that uses ads, because then you are the product.
how? i trusted google and youtube and it works out pretty fine for me. same with any other service that has a free ad supported tier.
For many people, that's a risk they're willing to take for free stuff.
Nope. I'm out. I might still use the API, but the monthly subscription is already gone and I'm on to Claude.
Anthropic was absolutely right!
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.
This has been in the discourse for a while, they didn't make a shot in the dark.
I see what you did there.
>Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers will not have ads.
For now, or for ever?
Until users are sufficiently locked in and they decide to start tightening the screws.
how will lockin happen? just use claude or something
How do I transfer 3 years of memories over to Claude? Users really like the personalization they've gotten with ChatGPT. It knows about my pets and their names. I gotta teach all of that stuff to Claude or whomever again? sigh. I'll just stick with ChatGPT.
...is what OpenAI is betting on.
you can already export everything in chatgpt and if your competitors really wanted you, they would provide a way to import it.
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.
Did enshittification already begin or is this it?
> 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".
Oh well, just use another model to filter out the ads from adGPT. Better still, don't use it at all.
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
> 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
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.
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!
> any consumer Internet product has to be advertising, because it’s such a beneficial model to everyone involved
Everyone?!
OpenAI: Gets money Shoe store: gets customers ChatGPT user: gets to use chatgpt
Yes, everyone
The premise of advertising is that it's manipulation to trick you into spending money you wouldn't otherwise spend. We know this because companies pay for ads with the intention you spend more money.
Every ad you see materially makes you a little bit poorer and cuts off a small amount of your life. Think of it this way - every ad is a few seconds lost, maybe a few minutes, and a few cents down the drain.
But this isn't understood because it's so abstracted. The link between your personal shopping habits and advertising is not understood, and, in fact, cannot be understood, because it's fundamentally brain hacking.
If you believe you are immune to ads, you are not. Or, at least, you can never prove it.
Cumulatively, this adds up. If you never saw ads, how much longer would you live? A year, maybe two? If you never saw ads, how much richer would you be? 200%, 500%? Who knows.
Why does it have to be "manipulation"? If you don't know about something that you might want to buy, learning about it isn't being manipulated.
Also, the lifespan thing is crazy - what if you learned about something that improved your health, like an exercise machine or something? You can't just ignore the upsides. What if you bought something that saved you money in the long run, like a quality tool?
This is a joke, right? Users already got to use chatgpt, so the only change to users is that they'll be subjected to ads, which many of them don't like.
If they lose money on it they will either discontinue or go bankrupt. Not a joke
It was gonna happen eventually.
People want revolutionary AI but won't pay $20/month for it. Now they complain when the company tries to monetize. The entitlement is staggering.
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.
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)
You should read TFA