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I realize a lot of the comments here are pessimistic, but this is a pretty obvious monetization path that they just can't not take. This is actually a huge angl

I realize a lot of the comments here are pessimistic, but this is a pretty obvious monetization path that they just can't not take. This is actually a huge angle IMO. ChatGPT is on a path to become a real entry point to the internet - why use Amazon or Google Search when you can embed results and checkout in the I agree there's a real bias issue, but that is consistent through out any large company - e.g., Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc have sponsored results

libraryatnight 1y ago
"...obvious monetization path that they just can't not take." Sure they could. This notion that an unscrupulous revenue stream is justified if it pays well enough smacks of "Just following orders!" "It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.” - Grapes of Wrath At some point we have to stop this madness.
- neuralRiot 1y ago
  Most people has been convinced throughout the years that individual actions have no effect on big corps, they need to learn that it shouldn’t matter. If you don’t agree with what a service or product provider does simply don’t buy their product find an alternative or just don’t but do it just for your own principles.
  - what 1y ago
    Do you run an ad blocker? If so this feels a little hypocritical, you should just bounce from the site and seek an alternative if you don’t agree with what they do.
  - ethbr1 1y ago
    > If you don’t agree with what a service or product provider does simply don’t buy their product find an alternative This implies antitrust has been sufficiently enforced such that there are viable alternatives in all markets. That's not currently true.
fourside 1y ago
I don’t quite follow this logic. Like there’s too much money involved to not dilute the value of a nascent technology? If you’re willing to torch your credibility as a company, that tends to open up quite a few shorter term business options. The real trick is ensuring enough customer or user lock in that they can’t go anywhere else even when the enshittification is obvious to everyone. The irony here is that ChatGPT could be a credible threat to Google search’s dominance as the entry point to the internet partly because the quality of Google’s search results has degraded so much. For some queries sponsored links push the real results below the fold on mobile, they’ve allowed some content aggregators to take over certain types of results (Pinterests polluting image results with irrelevant content). But that doesn’t matter while you make gobs of money. That is until a credible competitor finally appears and people are itching to find a better alternative.
- bonoboTP 1y ago
  > torch your credibility as a company That's only so in our little cynical skeptical contrarian hacker bubble. For most people, it's an appreciated convenience.
  - Esophagus4 1y ago
    Exactly - while you and I might route our DNS queries by carrier pigeon to avoid tracking, some of my family actually like personalized ads on social media and even buy things from them.
    - fishmicrowaver 1y ago
      I installed an ad blocker on our home Internet on a raspberry pi. My wife told me to take it off.
      - kyriakos 1y ago
        To be fair dns ad blocking causes problems to everyday browsing, I understand your wife complaining about it.
siva7 1y ago
They have hundred millions of paying subscribers, that kind of commercial success you could not even dream of when search engines and ads became a thing. Yet it's not enough. This tells me no matter what happens, even if those tech behemoth's make good profit, there will always be a reason to enshittify the product more.
- famouswaffles 1y ago
  They have hundreds of millions of subscribers, but the vast majority of them are not paying, and more importantly, are not monetized in any way.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
    With increasing competition from all sides driving down the margins. Sure ChatGpt is a household name now, but if Microsoft/Google offer the same thing for half the price, plenty of cost conscious subscribers will bail to the cheapest offering.
- podnami 1y ago
  Hey man, take a step away from the keyboard. Instead imagine the every day person. Would they rather click, scroll, swipe and pull out credit cards across multiple websites - or just ask their digital assistant to do it? The defaulting to negativity will really eat some communities up from the inside.
  - skydhash 1y ago
    Does the average user does this? Granted, I’m not i. the USA, but does people really order that much on unusual websites?
  - rudedogg 1y ago
    You see negativity, I see disappointment that OpenAI isn’t trying to innovate, and instead hoping they can replay Google Search’s history for themselves
  - 1y ago
theptip 1y ago
Yeah, it’s a very sensible feature to add. Obviously lots of users are making “please recommend a <product>” queries, it’s a usecase where deep research really shines. So if your users are spending a lot of time on a tasks, why not make it more delightful? Of course, you need to make sure you don’t allow accidental purchases, that would be the way you destroy trust. But assuming a clear intent to purchase is established, then I think this will be well-received.
- matsemann 1y ago
  But it could also destroy their brand. Right now I think most people somewhat "trust" LLM recommendations (just glossing over the hallucinations). But more and more results in the future will either be sponsored products, or spam bots having poisoned the data set by having spammed reddit and the likes. So I'm afraid of a steep enshittification of this use.
  - stephen_g 1y ago
    Really though, I think that kind of grift was inevitable given the incredible amount of capital poured into the LLM craze… The more money went in, the faster it was going to happen - how else could they generate a return on that much money?
  - theptip 1y ago
    Honestly - consumers couldn’t care less, if the product experience lets them get things done. And especially if there is a free version. Google, Amazon, etc are some of the most popular brands in history, while they were doing much more egregious ad tracking. I think this is a blind spot for this community, personally. Like, it’s right to care about this stuff, but I think we are wrong to think other people care too.
  - thwarted 1y ago
    I got spam sales email yesterday touting that exact thing. Paying for product placement in conversations with chatbots, claiming it's "not an ad".
ehnto 1y ago
> but this is a pretty obvious monetization path that they just can't not take Now that they are a commercial entity, you are right. If they had remained on their original mission path though I suspect this wouldn't be the no-brainer it is now.
- jstummbillig 1y ago
  The "original mission path" was a) not viable and b) would not have included a product to begin with. So it actually is a no-brainer: None of this would apply, because ChatGPT simply would not exist.
  - ehnto 1y ago
    Not viable to achieve what?
    - jstummbillig 1y ago
      Not viable to achieve the stated goal of creating AGI (originally) as a non-profit, because the best way anyone has so far figured how to maybe do that is apparently too expensive, both in terms of capex and opex.
      - Gud 1y ago
        Perhaps if they had remained true to their original mission, they would have been able to recruit the genius required.
      - rhetocj23 1y ago
        Lol this is delusional. If the latter was true, Google would take its tremendous cash balance and earnings and reinvest into what is necessary to reach AGI right now. OAI has a funding problem. Google in comparison most certainly does not. Google could go raise funding for it right now too. The real issue is the lack of confidence behind the supposed theory that more aggressive reinvestment yields AGI.
dbbk 1y ago
Yes they have to make money somewhere to survive, and subscriptions is obviously not the answer
tedd4u 1y ago
Add bias to the bot though, right? I don’t want GPT shilling its wares to me, motivated by whatever it thinks the most likely to convert item or the item with the greatest fee is.

libraryatnight 1y ago

"...obvious monetization path that they just can't not take." Sure they could. This notion that an unscrupulous revenue stream is justified if it pays well enough smacks of "Just following orders!" "It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.” - Grapes of Wrath At some point we have to stop this madness.

neuralRiot 1y ago
Most people has been convinced throughout the years that individual actions have no effect on big corps, they need to learn that it shouldn’t matter. If you don’t agree with what a service or product provider does simply don’t buy their product find an alternative or just don’t but do it just for your own principles.
- what 1y ago
  Do you run an ad blocker? If so this feels a little hypocritical, you should just bounce from the site and seek an alternative if you don’t agree with what they do.
- ethbr1 1y ago
  > If you don’t agree with what a service or product provider does simply don’t buy their product find an alternative This implies antitrust has been sufficiently enforced such that there are viable alternatives in all markets. That's not currently true.

fourside 1y ago

I don’t quite follow this logic. Like there’s too much money involved to not dilute the value of a nascent technology? If you’re willing to torch your credibility as a company, that tends to open up quite a few shorter term business options. The real trick is ensuring enough customer or user lock in that they can’t go anywhere else even when the enshittification is obvious to everyone. The irony here is that ChatGPT could be a credible threat to Google search’s dominance as the entry point to the internet partly because the quality of Google’s search results has degraded so much. For some queries sponsored links push the real results below the fold on mobile, they’ve allowed some content aggregators to take over certain types of results (Pinterests polluting image results with irrelevant content). But that doesn’t matter while you make gobs of money. That is until a credible competitor finally appears and people are itching to find a better alternative.

bonoboTP 1y ago
> torch your credibility as a company That's only so in our little cynical skeptical contrarian hacker bubble. For most people, it's an appreciated convenience.
- Esophagus4 1y ago
  Exactly - while you and I might route our DNS queries by carrier pigeon to avoid tracking, some of my family actually like personalized ads on social media and even buy things from them.
  - fishmicrowaver 1y ago
    I installed an ad blocker on our home Internet on a raspberry pi. My wife told me to take it off.
    - kyriakos 1y ago
      To be fair dns ad blocking causes problems to everyday browsing, I understand your wife complaining about it.

siva7 1y ago

They have hundred millions of paying subscribers, that kind of commercial success you could not even dream of when search engines and ads became a thing. Yet it's not enough. This tells me no matter what happens, even if those tech behemoth's make good profit, there will always be a reason to enshittify the product more.

famouswaffles 1y ago
They have hundreds of millions of subscribers, but the vast majority of them are not paying, and more importantly, are not monetized in any way.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
  With increasing competition from all sides driving down the margins. Sure ChatGpt is a household name now, but if Microsoft/Google offer the same thing for half the price, plenty of cost conscious subscribers will bail to the cheapest offering.
podnami 1y ago
Hey man, take a step away from the keyboard. Instead imagine the every day person. Would they rather click, scroll, swipe and pull out credit cards across multiple websites - or just ask their digital assistant to do it? The defaulting to negativity will really eat some communities up from the inside.
- skydhash 1y ago
  Does the average user does this? Granted, I’m not i. the USA, but does people really order that much on unusual websites?
- rudedogg 1y ago
  You see negativity, I see disappointment that OpenAI isn’t trying to innovate, and instead hoping they can replay Google Search’s history for themselves
- 1y ago

theptip 1y ago

Yeah, it’s a very sensible feature to add. Obviously lots of users are making “please recommend a <product>” queries, it’s a usecase where deep research really shines. So if your users are spending a lot of time on a tasks, why not make it more delightful? Of course, you need to make sure you don’t allow accidental purchases, that would be the way you destroy trust. But assuming a clear intent to purchase is established, then I think this will be well-received.

matsemann 1y ago
But it could also destroy their brand. Right now I think most people somewhat "trust" LLM recommendations (just glossing over the hallucinations). But more and more results in the future will either be sponsored products, or spam bots having poisoned the data set by having spammed reddit and the likes. So I'm afraid of a steep enshittification of this use.
- stephen_g 1y ago
  Really though, I think that kind of grift was inevitable given the incredible amount of capital poured into the LLM craze… The more money went in, the faster it was going to happen - how else could they generate a return on that much money?
- theptip 1y ago
  Honestly - consumers couldn’t care less, if the product experience lets them get things done. And especially if there is a free version. Google, Amazon, etc are some of the most popular brands in history, while they were doing much more egregious ad tracking. I think this is a blind spot for this community, personally. Like, it’s right to care about this stuff, but I think we are wrong to think other people care too.
- thwarted 1y ago
  I got spam sales email yesterday touting that exact thing. Paying for product placement in conversations with chatbots, claiming it's "not an ad".

ehnto 1y ago

> but this is a pretty obvious monetization path that they just can't not take Now that they are a commercial entity, you are right. If they had remained on their original mission path though I suspect this wouldn't be the no-brainer it is now.

jstummbillig 1y ago
The "original mission path" was a) not viable and b) would not have included a product to begin with. So it actually is a no-brainer: None of this would apply, because ChatGPT simply would not exist.
- ehnto 1y ago
  Not viable to achieve what?
  - jstummbillig 1y ago
    Not viable to achieve the stated goal of creating AGI (originally) as a non-profit, because the best way anyone has so far figured how to maybe do that is apparently too expensive, both in terms of capex and opex.
    - Gud 1y ago
      Perhaps if they had remained true to their original mission, they would have been able to recruit the genius required.
    - rhetocj23 1y ago
      Lol this is delusional. If the latter was true, Google would take its tremendous cash balance and earnings and reinvest into what is necessary to reach AGI right now. OAI has a funding problem. Google in comparison most certainly does not. Google could go raise funding for it right now too. The real issue is the lack of confidence behind the supposed theory that more aggressive reinvestment yields AGI.

dbbk 1y ago

Yes they have to make money somewhere to survive, and subscriptions is obviously not the answer

tedd4u 1y ago

Add bias to the bot though, right? I don’t want GPT shilling its wares to me, motivated by whatever it thinks the most likely to convert item or the item with the greatest fee is.