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The difference is implementation comes down to business goals more than anything. There is a clear directionality for ChatGPT. At some point they will monetize

The difference is implementation comes down to business goals more than anything. There is a clear directionality for ChatGPT. At some point they will monetize by ads and affiliate links. Their memory implementation is aimed at creating a user profile. Claude's memory implementation feels more oriented towards the long term goal of accessing abstractions and past interactions. It's very close to how humans access memories, albeit with a search feature. (they have not implemented it yet afaik), there is a clear path where they leverage their current implementation w RL posttraining such that claude "remembers" the mistakes you pointed out last time. It can in future iterations derive abstractions from a given conversation (eg: "user asked me to make xyz changes on this task last time, maybe the agent can proactively do it or this was the process last time the agent did it"). At the most basic level, ChatGPT wants to remember you as a person, while Claude cares about how your previous interactions were.

Workaccount2 1y ago
Don't fool yourself into thinking Anthropic won't be serving up personalized ads too.
- dotancohen 1y ago
  Though in general I like the idea of personal ads for products (NOT political ads), I've never seen an implementation that I felt comfortable with. I wonder if Arthropic might be able to nail that. I'd love to see products that I'm specifically interested in, so long as the advertisement itself is not altered to fit my preferences.
  - lostdog 1y ago
    There is no such thing as a good flow for showing sponsored items in an LLM workflow. The point of using an LLM is to find the thing that matches your preferences the best. As soon as the amount of money the LLM company makes plays into what's shown, the LLM is no longer aligned with the user, and no longer a good tool.
    - agar 1y ago
      Same can be said for search. And your statement is provably correct, depending on the definition of "good tool." But it's not only money's influence on the company, it's also money's influence on the /data/ underlying the platform that undermines the tool. Once financial incentives are in place, what will be the AI equivalent of review bombing, SEO, linkjacking, google bombing, and similar bad behaviors that undermine the quality of the source data?
  - Terr_ 1y ago
    > Though in general I like the idea of personal ads for products (NOT political ads), I've never seen an implementation that I felt comfortable with. No implementation will work for very long when the incentives behind it are misaligned. The most important part of the architecture is that the user controls it for the user's best interests.
- zer00eyz 1y ago
  Claude: "What is my purpose?" Anthropic: "You serve ad's." Claude: "Oh, my god." Jest asside, every paper on alignment wrapped in the blanket of safety is also a moving toward the goal of alignment to products. How much does a brand pay to make sure it gets placement in, say, GPT6? How does anyone even price that sort of thing (because in theory it's there forever, or until 7 comes out)? It makes for some interesting business questions and even more interesting sales pitches.
  - Yoric 1y ago
    Could be part of a LORA or some other kind of plug-in refinement.
  - rubidium 1y ago
    I’ll be concerned when ex-Yelp “growth strategists” start showing up at OpenAI and leverage the same extortionist technics.
  - rblatz 1y ago
    The models aren’t static, we have to build validation sets to measure model drift and modify our prompts to compensate.
  - swiftcoder 1y ago
    Ads aren't going to be trained into the model. They'll be an ads backend that the model queries with a set of topic tags, just like in traditional web advertising.
    - puilp0502 1y ago
      It's going to be interesting if ChatGPT actually hooks up with SSPs and dumps a whole "user preference" embedding vector to the ad networks.
- ankit219 1y ago
  My conjecture is that their memory implementation is not aimed at building a user profile. I don't know if they would or would not serve ads in the future, but it's hard to see how the current implementation helps them in that regard.
  - cj 1y ago
    > I don't know if they would or would not serve ads in the future There are 2 possible futures: 1) You are served ads based on your interactions 2) You pay a subscription fee equal to the amount they would have otherwise earned on ads I highly doubt #2 will happen. (See: Facebook, Google, twitter, et al) Let’s not fool ourselves. We will be monetized. And model quality will be degraded to maximize profits when competition in the LLM space dies down. It’s not a pretty future. I wouldn’t be surprised if right now is the peak of model quality, etc. Peak competition, everyone is trying to be the best. That won’t continue forever. Eventually everyone will pivot their priority towards monetization rather than model quality/training. Hopefully I’m wrong.
    - taneq 1y ago
      3) You pay a subscription fee, and are force-fed ads anyway.
    - fluidcruft 1y ago
      But aren't we only worth something like $300/year each to Meta in terms of ads? I remember someone arguing something like that when the TikTok ban was being passed into law... essentially the argument was that TikTok was "dumping" engagement at far below market value (at something like $60/year) to damage American companies. That was something the argument I remember anyway.
      - cj 1y ago
        If that’s the case, we have an even bigger problem on our hands. How will these companies ever be profitable? If we’re already paying $20/mo and they’re operating at a loss, what’s the next move (assuming we’re only worth an extra $300/yr with ads?) The math doesn’t add up, unless we stop training new models and degrade the ones currently in production, or have some compute breakthrough that makes hardware + operating costs an order of magnitudes cheaper.
- michaelbrave 1y ago
  I kinda figured they were more interested in enterprise customers rather than consumer customers.
- GuB-42 1y ago
  Anthropic seems to want to make you buy a subscription, not show you ads. ChatGPT seems to be more popular to those who don't want to pay, and they are therefore more likely to rely on ads.
  - cantor_S_drug 1y ago
    They might be coming from different directions. But these things, as often they do, will converge. Too big of a market to leave.
  - mrheosuper 1y ago
    so ChatGPT will become "saleman". And i do not trust any saleman.
    - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
      They're all salesmen, they were trained on the web which is jam packed with SEO content.
      - aswegs8 1y ago
        Interesting point. Never thought about AI slop being fed by SEO slop.
    - FergusArgyll 1y ago
      The plan is not ads said by chatgpt - it's ads on the side that are relevant to the conversartion (or you in general). Or affiliate links. That's my understanding.
    - bigfishrunning 1y ago
      You shouldn't be trusting an LLM either, so this is a real sideways move.
  - chii 1y ago
    and netflix used to think they dont want to show ads either.
- AlecSchueler 1y ago
  It's very interesting to ask Claude what ads it would show you based on your past interactions.
spongebobstoes 1y ago
why do you see a "clear directionality" leading to ads? this is not obvious to me. chatgpt is not social media, they do not have to monetize in the same way they are making plenty of money from subscriptions, not to count enterprise, business and API
- 0xCMP 1y ago
  One has a more obvious route to building a profile directly off that already collected data. And while they are making lots of revenue even they have admitted on recent interviews that ChatGPT on it's own is still not (yet) breakeven. With the kind of money invested, in AI companies in general, introducing very targeted Ads is an obvious way to monetize the service more.
  - simianwords 1y ago
    This is incorrect understanding of unit economics. They are not breaking even only because of reinvestment into r and d.
    - 0xCMP 1y ago
      Sam Altman said in an on-the-record dinner interview with Platformer[0] that besides R&D ChatGPT was breakeven and Brad Lightstep, head of ChatGPT, corrected him by saying they were close, but not yet break even. I assume Sam and Brad both understand the unit economics of their product. Article is pay-walled for me, but I heard it on their podcast[1]. Which somehow I heard fine, but that page is getting pay-walled for me. [0]: https://www.platformer.news/sam-altman-gpt-5-interview-lightcap-turley/ https://www.platformer.news/sam-altman-gpt-5-interview-light... [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/15/podcasts/hardfork-gpt5-perplexity.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/15/podcasts/hardfork-gpt5-pe...
- dweinus 1y ago
  > they are making plenty of money from subscriptions, not to count enterprise, business and API ...except that they aren't? They are not in the black and all that investor money comes with strings
resters 1y ago
Suppose the user uses an LLM for topics a, b, and c quite often, and d, e and f less often. Suppose b, c, and f are topics that OpenAI could offer interruption ads (full screen, 30 seconds or longer commercials) and most users would sit through it and wait for the response. All that is needed to do that is to analyze topics. Now suppose that OpenAI can analyze 1000 chats and coding sessions and its algorithm determines that it can maximize revenue by leading the user to get a job at a specific company and then buy a car from another company. It could "accomplish" this via interruption ads or by modifying the quality or content of its responses to increase the chances of those outcomes happening. While both of these are in some way plausible and dystopian, all it takes is DeepSeek running without ads and suddenly the bar for how good closed source LLMs have to be to get market share is astronomically higher. In my view, LLMs will be like any good or service, users will pay for quality but differnet users will demand different levels of quality. Advertising would seemingly undermine the credibility of the AI's answers, and so I think full screen interruption ads are the most likely outcome.
devnullbrain 1y ago
The elephant in the room is that AGI doesn't need ads to make revenue but a new Google does. The words aren't matching with the actions.
- tinnywoody4u 1y ago
  Has it? Made revenue, I mean.
  - jychang 1y ago
    Obviously yes, AI makes revenue.
  - virgilp 1y ago
    You can question the profits, but revenue is already there.
- _heimdall 1y ago
  The bigger elephant in the room is that LLMs will never be AGI, even by the purely economic definition many LLM companies use.
  - michaelbrave 1y ago
    I always kinda figured that AGI would need to be sort of similarly modeled like a brain, for which LLMs could at least fit the function for language. Meaning AGI won't be LLM based, but maybe parts of it could be.
  - Insanity 1y ago
    I've been saying this for years now. LLMs are _not_ the right methodology to get to AGI. My friends who were drinking the kool-aid are only recently coming around to "hey, this might not get us AGI". But sometimes it feels like I'm the lone voice in a bubble where people are convinced AGI is just around the corner. I'm wondering if it's because people are susceptible to the marketing, or are just doing some type of 'wishful thinking' - as some seem genuinely interested in AGI.
Tistron 1y ago
Why would their way of handling memory for conversations have much to do with how they will analyse your user profile for ads? They have access to all your history either way and can use that to figure out what products to recommend, or ads to display, no?
- erikerikson 1y ago
  It's about weaving the ads into the LLM responses overly and more subtly. There's the ads that come before the movie and then the ads that are part of the dialog, involved in the action, and so on. Apple features heavily in movies and TV series when people are using a computer, for example. There's payments for car models to be the one that's driven in chase scenes. There's even payments for characters to present the struggles that form core pain points that that specific products are category leaders to solve.
1970-01-01 1y ago
> At some point they will monetize by ads and affiliate links. I couldn't agree more. Enshittifcation has to eat one of these corporation's models. Most likely it will be the corp with the most strings attached to growth (MSFT, FB)
singlepaynews 1y ago
I’m reading your summary versus the other article here, but it seems like for writing code, Claude would be the clear winner? When chat breaks apart for me, it’s almost always because the context window has been overflown and it is no longer remembering some important feature implemented earlier in the chat; it seems based on your description that Claude is optimizing to not do that.

Workaccount2 1y ago

Don't fool yourself into thinking Anthropic won't be serving up personalized ads too.

dotancohen 1y ago
Though in general I like the idea of personal ads for products (NOT political ads), I've never seen an implementation that I felt comfortable with. I wonder if Arthropic might be able to nail that. I'd love to see products that I'm specifically interested in, so long as the advertisement itself is not altered to fit my preferences.
- lostdog 1y ago
  There is no such thing as a good flow for showing sponsored items in an LLM workflow. The point of using an LLM is to find the thing that matches your preferences the best. As soon as the amount of money the LLM company makes plays into what's shown, the LLM is no longer aligned with the user, and no longer a good tool.
  - agar 1y ago
    Same can be said for search. And your statement is provably correct, depending on the definition of "good tool." But it's not only money's influence on the company, it's also money's influence on the /data/ underlying the platform that undermines the tool. Once financial incentives are in place, what will be the AI equivalent of review bombing, SEO, linkjacking, google bombing, and similar bad behaviors that undermine the quality of the source data?
- Terr_ 1y ago
  > Though in general I like the idea of personal ads for products (NOT political ads), I've never seen an implementation that I felt comfortable with. No implementation will work for very long when the incentives behind it are misaligned. The most important part of the architecture is that the user controls it for the user's best interests.
zer00eyz 1y ago
Claude: "What is my purpose?" Anthropic: "You serve ad's." Claude: "Oh, my god." Jest asside, every paper on alignment wrapped in the blanket of safety is also a moving toward the goal of alignment to products. How much does a brand pay to make sure it gets placement in, say, GPT6? How does anyone even price that sort of thing (because in theory it's there forever, or until 7 comes out)? It makes for some interesting business questions and even more interesting sales pitches.
- Yoric 1y ago
  Could be part of a LORA or some other kind of plug-in refinement.
- rubidium 1y ago
  I’ll be concerned when ex-Yelp “growth strategists” start showing up at OpenAI and leverage the same extortionist technics.
- rblatz 1y ago
  The models aren’t static, we have to build validation sets to measure model drift and modify our prompts to compensate.
- swiftcoder 1y ago
  Ads aren't going to be trained into the model. They'll be an ads backend that the model queries with a set of topic tags, just like in traditional web advertising.
  - puilp0502 1y ago
    It's going to be interesting if ChatGPT actually hooks up with SSPs and dumps a whole "user preference" embedding vector to the ad networks.
ankit219 1y ago
My conjecture is that their memory implementation is not aimed at building a user profile. I don't know if they would or would not serve ads in the future, but it's hard to see how the current implementation helps them in that regard.
- cj 1y ago
  > I don't know if they would or would not serve ads in the future There are 2 possible futures: 1) You are served ads based on your interactions 2) You pay a subscription fee equal to the amount they would have otherwise earned on ads I highly doubt #2 will happen. (See: Facebook, Google, twitter, et al) Let’s not fool ourselves. We will be monetized. And model quality will be degraded to maximize profits when competition in the LLM space dies down. It’s not a pretty future. I wouldn’t be surprised if right now is the peak of model quality, etc. Peak competition, everyone is trying to be the best. That won’t continue forever. Eventually everyone will pivot their priority towards monetization rather than model quality/training. Hopefully I’m wrong.
  - taneq 1y ago
    3) You pay a subscription fee, and are force-fed ads anyway.
  - fluidcruft 1y ago
    But aren't we only worth something like $300/year each to Meta in terms of ads? I remember someone arguing something like that when the TikTok ban was being passed into law... essentially the argument was that TikTok was "dumping" engagement at far below market value (at something like $60/year) to damage American companies. That was something the argument I remember anyway.
    - cj 1y ago
      If that’s the case, we have an even bigger problem on our hands. How will these companies ever be profitable? If we’re already paying $20/mo and they’re operating at a loss, what’s the next move (assuming we’re only worth an extra $300/yr with ads?) The math doesn’t add up, unless we stop training new models and degrade the ones currently in production, or have some compute breakthrough that makes hardware + operating costs an order of magnitudes cheaper.
michaelbrave 1y ago
I kinda figured they were more interested in enterprise customers rather than consumer customers.
GuB-42 1y ago
Anthropic seems to want to make you buy a subscription, not show you ads. ChatGPT seems to be more popular to those who don't want to pay, and they are therefore more likely to rely on ads.
- cantor_S_drug 1y ago
  They might be coming from different directions. But these things, as often they do, will converge. Too big of a market to leave.
- mrheosuper 1y ago
  so ChatGPT will become "saleman". And i do not trust any saleman.
  - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
    They're all salesmen, they were trained on the web which is jam packed with SEO content.
    - aswegs8 1y ago
      Interesting point. Never thought about AI slop being fed by SEO slop.
  - FergusArgyll 1y ago
    The plan is not ads said by chatgpt - it's ads on the side that are relevant to the conversartion (or you in general). Or affiliate links. That's my understanding.
  - bigfishrunning 1y ago
    You shouldn't be trusting an LLM either, so this is a real sideways move.
- chii 1y ago
  and netflix used to think they dont want to show ads either.
AlecSchueler 1y ago
It's very interesting to ask Claude what ads it would show you based on your past interactions.

spongebobstoes 1y ago

why do you see a "clear directionality" leading to ads? this is not obvious to me. chatgpt is not social media, they do not have to monetize in the same way they are making plenty of money from subscriptions, not to count enterprise, business and API

0xCMP 1y ago
One has a more obvious route to building a profile directly off that already collected data. And while they are making lots of revenue even they have admitted on recent interviews that ChatGPT on it's own is still not (yet) breakeven. With the kind of money invested, in AI companies in general, introducing very targeted Ads is an obvious way to monetize the service more.
- simianwords 1y ago
  This is incorrect understanding of unit economics. They are not breaking even only because of reinvestment into r and d.
  - 0xCMP 1y ago
    Sam Altman said in an on-the-record dinner interview with Platformer[0] that besides R&D ChatGPT was breakeven and Brad Lightstep, head of ChatGPT, corrected him by saying they were close, but not yet break even. I assume Sam and Brad both understand the unit economics of their product. Article is pay-walled for me, but I heard it on their podcast[1]. Which somehow I heard fine, but that page is getting pay-walled for me. [0]: https://www.platformer.news/sam-altman-gpt-5-interview-lightcap-turley/ https://www.platformer.news/sam-altman-gpt-5-interview-light... [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/15/podcasts/hardfork-gpt5-perplexity.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/15/podcasts/hardfork-gpt5-pe...
dweinus 1y ago
> they are making plenty of money from subscriptions, not to count enterprise, business and API ...except that they aren't? They are not in the black and all that investor money comes with strings

resters 1y ago

Suppose the user uses an LLM for topics a, b, and c quite often, and d, e and f less often. Suppose b, c, and f are topics that OpenAI could offer interruption ads (full screen, 30 seconds or longer commercials) and most users would sit through it and wait for the response. All that is needed to do that is to analyze topics. Now suppose that OpenAI can analyze 1000 chats and coding sessions and its algorithm determines that it can maximize revenue by leading the user to get a job at a specific company and then buy a car from another company. It could "accomplish" this via interruption ads or by modifying the quality or content of its responses to increase the chances of those outcomes happening. While both of these are in some way plausible and dystopian, all it takes is DeepSeek running without ads and suddenly the bar for how good closed source LLMs have to be to get market share is astronomically higher. In my view, LLMs will be like any good or service, users will pay for quality but differnet users will demand different levels of quality. Advertising would seemingly undermine the credibility of the AI's answers, and so I think full screen interruption ads are the most likely outcome.

devnullbrain 1y ago

The elephant in the room is that AGI doesn't need ads to make revenue but a new Google does. The words aren't matching with the actions.

tinnywoody4u 1y ago
Has it? Made revenue, I mean.
- jychang 1y ago
  Obviously yes, AI makes revenue.
- virgilp 1y ago
  You can question the profits, but revenue is already there.
_heimdall 1y ago
The bigger elephant in the room is that LLMs will never be AGI, even by the purely economic definition many LLM companies use.
- michaelbrave 1y ago
  I always kinda figured that AGI would need to be sort of similarly modeled like a brain, for which LLMs could at least fit the function for language. Meaning AGI won't be LLM based, but maybe parts of it could be.
- Insanity 1y ago
  I've been saying this for years now. LLMs are _not_ the right methodology to get to AGI. My friends who were drinking the kool-aid are only recently coming around to "hey, this might not get us AGI". But sometimes it feels like I'm the lone voice in a bubble where people are convinced AGI is just around the corner. I'm wondering if it's because people are susceptible to the marketing, or are just doing some type of 'wishful thinking' - as some seem genuinely interested in AGI.

Tistron 1y ago

Why would their way of handling memory for conversations have much to do with how they will analyse your user profile for ads? They have access to all your history either way and can use that to figure out what products to recommend, or ads to display, no?

erikerikson 1y ago
It's about weaving the ads into the LLM responses overly and more subtly. There's the ads that come before the movie and then the ads that are part of the dialog, involved in the action, and so on. Apple features heavily in movies and TV series when people are using a computer, for example. There's payments for car models to be the one that's driven in chase scenes. There's even payments for characters to present the struggles that form core pain points that that specific products are category leaders to solve.

1970-01-01 1y ago

> At some point they will monetize by ads and affiliate links. I couldn't agree more. Enshittifcation has to eat one of these corporation's models. Most likely it will be the corp with the most strings attached to growth (MSFT, FB)

singlepaynews 1y ago

I’m reading your summary versus the other article here, but it seems like for writing code, Claude would be the clear winner? When chat breaks apart for me, it’s almost always because the context window has been overflown and it is no longer remembering some important feature implemented earlier in the chat; it seems based on your description that Claude is optimizing to not do that.