7 ms·

Our approach to advertising

272 points by rvz 10mo ago

calepayson 10mo ago
> In the coming weeks, we’re also planning to start testing ads in the U.S. for the free and Go tiers, so more people can benefit from our tools with fewer usage limits or without having to pay. This single sentence probably took so many man-hours. I completely understand why they’re trying to integrate ads but this feels like a generational run for a company founded with the purpose of safely researching superintelligence.
- j_maffe 10mo ago
  You could tell the article is written in a way to try to calm against the major concerns without actually bringing those concerns up. "We won't share your chats and you can turn off personalization!" Hmm yeah there's a missing piece of info here...
deleted 10mo ago
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1970-01-01 10mo ago
Enshittified, the bright golden AI age began to brown, and regression to the mean once again cast another bleak spell onto humanity. And with that, just as quickly as it broke, another AI winter began. As it turns out, those datacenters were just there to generate shareholder value.
- stalfosknight 10mo ago
  Golden promises— Enshittified into sludge; Servers mint cold greed.
- metalliqaz 10mo ago
  > As it turns out, those datacenters were just there to generate shareholder value. I can't imagine what else anyone could have thought they were there for
leonflexo 10mo ago
"We’ll always offer a way to not see ads in ChatGPT, including a paid tier that’s ad-free." Plus will be next.
- Hammershaft 10mo ago
  Great catch, that absolutely looks like purposeful ambiguity.
- baq 10mo ago
  “We won’t monetize you if you pay us. Enough. Yet.”
- andrewinardeer 10mo ago
  I wonder what the timeframe on this will be. Within 12-24 months?
  - morkalork 10mo ago
    How long did cable, or streaming platforms last with ad-free premium?
    - moralestapia 10mo ago
      Why would it be the same?
      - morkalork 10mo ago
        I'd see it as an upper limit
- themafia 10mo ago
  "ChatGPT Plus 360 Advanced."
- outside1234 10mo ago
  $9999 a month ad-free tier
bad_haircut72 10mo ago
Once they put ads in it the algorithms will optimize for engagement and time on platform, not returning useful (let alone correct) information. This works for Facebook cause Facebook is essentially entertainment, but I think this will kill ChatGPT as a useful tool.
- thornewolf 10mo ago
  while we can't trust their word as absolute truth, they did specifically say they still not do this in the article
  - rurp 10mo ago
    They aren't going to do this right now, but they almost certainly will in the medium term. It would be legitimately shocking if they didn't continue to follow the same path as Google, Facebook, and pretty much every other big tech comp. In OpenAI's case they have even more incentive to abuse their users since they collect so much detailed personable data and have ways to make ads unblockable by including them in outputs and skewing model weights. I've seen absolutely nothing from the company, it's CEO, or investors that make me think they won't do the normal thing of gradually making the product worse in order to wring more value out of their users.
  - nerdsniper 10mo ago
    Oh, you sweet summer child. Promises like these are made to be broken [0][1][2]. They would need a mechanism for contractual or regulatory enforcement for these words to carry any weight at all. What makes you think we should give these promises any more weight than promises that OpenAI already[3][4][5] broke? 0: "Every ad on Google is clearly marked and set apart from the actual search results." https://archive.md/fiK4E#selection-219.13-219.95 https://archive.md/fiK4E#selection-219.13-219.95 1: "Every Google result now looks like an ad" (which means every ad looks like a search result) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823 2: "Google breaks 2005 promise never to show banner ads on search results" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6605312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6605312 3: (2024) "OpenAI is developing Media Manager, a tool that will enable creators and content owners to tell us what they own and specify how they want their works to be included or excluded from machine learning research and training." https://openai.com/index/approach-to-data-and-ai/ https://openai.com/index/approach-to-data-and-ai/ 4: (2023) "OpenAI promised 20% of its computing power to combat existential risks from AI — but never delivered" https://fortune.com/2024/05/21/openai-superalignment-20-compute-commitment-never-fulfilled-sutskever-leike-altman-brockman-murati/ https://fortune.com/2024/05/21/openai-superalignment-20-comp... 5: (2025) "REPORT: The OpenAI Files Document Broken Promises" https://techoversight.org/2025/06/18/openai-files-report/ https://techoversight.org/2025/06/18/openai-files-report/
connorgurney 10mo ago
Ongoing discussion on the same, albeit linked to a news article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649644
drusepth 10mo ago
"Ads are always separate and clearly labeled." I've heard this before...
- nerdsniper 10mo ago
  These promises are worth nothing without a contract that a consumer can sue them for violating. And hell will freeze over before megacorps offer consumers contracts that bind themselves to that degree.
  - Marsymars 10mo ago
    As a consumer, I'd rather just have regulation that mandates that ads be separate and clearly labelled.
halitkabasakal 10mo ago
no company can survive without advertising. when google first launched, it was the same. chatgpt will follow a similar path, and half a century from now, the cycle will still continue in the same way. advertising, regardless of scale, is the art of turning data into revenue. even if this planning seems insignificant for a company’s future today, it will most likely become its greatest advantage.
- 46493168 10mo ago
  You’ve equated selling ads, like a newspaper does, with tracking user behavior, collating it with other information purchased on the market, and targeting people to change their behavior. Disingenuous.
  - nebezb 10mo ago
    Where is the posters disingenuous equation? Also, your newspaper is selling the data points it has. If it had more, it would sell more. See: your local paper isn’t selling ads to a car wash six towns over. They do, however, sell ads that align with the political affinities of your local newsrooms area.
    - 46493168 10mo ago
      "advertising, regardless of scale, is the art of turning data into revenue." This is disingenuous. Putting up a billboard over a highway to make people aware of a certain brand of beer is not the same as building detailed profiles on people in order to sell to the highest bidder the opportunity to change your behavior right when you're likely to do so. But somehow, this user puts them together with the very convenient "regardless of scale." Maybe you're OK with an entire industry that makes money trying to get you to do what they want -- buy what they want, think what they want. Maybe you're OK with your past behavior being written on a shadow ledger and sold the highest bidder, traded on the dark web, and used by governments. It's your right to be okay with that, since it's your life. But you being okay with that doesn't change the fact that this is a fundamentally different type of behavior than what is commonly called "advertising." It's a curious equivocation, this sane-washing, and it does make one wonder why an otherwise intelligent person feels to need to do it.
46493168 10mo ago
“Conversation privacy: We keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and we never sell your data to advertisers.” The same sleight of hand that’s been used by surveillance capitalists for years. It’s not about “selling your data” because they have narrowly defined data to mean “the actual chats you have” and not “information we infer about you from your usage of the service,” which they do sell to advertisers in the form of your behavioral futures. Fuck all this. OpenAI caved to surveillance capitalism in record time.
deleted 10mo ago
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RobotToaster 10mo ago
Can't wait for it to start telling people that Abraham Lincoln's favourite game was raid shadow legends.
- doublerabbit 10mo ago
  You didn't know? Theodore Roosevelt would own you at Golden Eye.
- Freak_NL 10mo ago
  Well, Abraham Lincoln's favourite game is Raid: Shadow Legends. This is well documented in Lincoln and the Fight for Peace (John Avlon, 2023) and Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Michael Burlingame, 2008). (At which point will malignant/benevolent AI agents take over from us mere mortals poisoning the well and make it all useless?)
  - atomic128 10mo ago
    Poison Fountain: https://rnsaffn.com/poison2/ https://rnsaffn.com/poison2/ https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/11/industry_insiders_seek_to_poison/ https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/11/industry_insiders_see...
  - qingcharles 10mo ago
    You monster.
  - baq 10mo ago
    Low background steel indeed.
- array_key_first 10mo ago
  Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States of America. He was best known for being "Honest Abe", writing the Emancipation Proclamation, and his affinity for wearing Raycon© Ear Buds. He loved them for their 6 hours of playtime, seamless Bluetooth pairing, bass, availability in multiple colors, and their compact design that helps get rid of background noise.
linuxftw 10mo ago
I actually use chatgpt for creating recipes from time to time. I wouldn't be too offended if there's an 'add to amazon' cart button or similar type of add. What I'm not okay with is being served adds using codex cli, or codex cli gather data outside of my context to send to advertisers. So as long as they're not doing that, I won't complain. If they start doing that, I'll complain, and I'll need to more heavily sandbox it.
analogpixel 10mo ago
somewhat unrelated, but I've been playing this game with Amazon; when they pop open Rufus and start spewing text at me, I remove everything from my cart, and see how many weeks I can go without shopping at amazon; my current record is 3 weeks, but I think I can do better. More related, I pay for Kagi, because google results are horrible. More related, Chatgpt isn't the only model out there, and I've just recently stopped using 5 because it's just slow and there are other models that come back and work just as well. So when Chatgpt starts injecting crap, I'll just stop using them for something else. What would you do if every time you walked into Walmart and the greeter spit in your face and told you to go F yourself, would you still shop there?
- numbers 10mo ago
  I'm going to start doing this with Rufus too
- BrenBarn 10mo ago
  I stopped using Amazon entirely in early 2020. It's certainly possible.
i4i 10mo ago
https://chatgpt.com/share/696a8c52-f29c-800d-b597-93dfde0c3012 https://chatgpt.com/share/696a8c52-f29c-800d-b597-93dfde0c30... What you’re reacting to isn’t just “ads.” It’s the feeling of: Someone monetizing the collective output of human thought while quietly severing the link back to the humans who produced it. That triggers a very old and very valid moral instinct. Why “sleazy” is an accurate word here “Sleazy” usually means: technically allowed strategically clever morally evasive
gabriel666smith 10mo ago
I wonder if the adverts in the "personal super-assistant", per the blog post, ("that helps you do almost anything"!) will have the same triggers as the shopping assistant, which pops up underneath messages right now in the web UI. When first trying 5.2, on a "Pro" plan, I was - and still am - able to trigger the shopping assistant via keyword-matching, even if the conversation context, or the prompt itself, is wildly inappropriate (suicide, racism, etc). Keyword-matching seems a strange ad strategy for a (non-profit) company selling QKV. It's all very confusing! Hopefully, for fans of personal super-assistants--and advertising--worldwide, this will improve now that ads have been formalised.
wrs 10mo ago
This sounds exactly like what Google used to say about search results. Just a few ads, clearly separated from organic results, never detracting from the core mission of providing the most effective access to all the world’s information. (And certainly not driven by a secret profile of you based on pervasive surveillance of your internet activity.)
- EA-3167 10mo ago
  To be fair the open with a big lie about how useful agents and AI in general are, which helps to set the tone for what comes next. Part of me wonders if it’s intentional, a way to weed out the non-marks before getting to the punchline that they’re rolling out the most predictable attempt at monetizing ever.
  - imron 10mo ago
    The first punchline > Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity; our pursuit of advertising is always in support of that mission
- rpdillon 10mo ago
  Came here to mention this. > Ads are always separate and clearly labeled. Indeed. Let's look at Google's launch of Adwords in October 2000: > Google’s quick-loading AdWords text ads appear to the right of the Google search results and are highlighted as sponsored links, clearly separate from the search results. https://googlepress.blogspot.com/2000/10/google-launches-self-service.html https://googlepress.blogspot.com/2000/10/google-launches-sel... Things evolved from there, and that's likely here, as well, I think.
  - jonplackett 10mo ago
    Google also famously intent Isla made their search engine _worse_ so you have to look through more results, and then see more ads. The enshitificstion begins. The only saving grace is the promise to have an ad-free tier. If something is valuable to you, paying for it to not have ads is very reasonable.
10xDev 10mo ago
It is over. Edit: they made sure to use the word "trust" 5 times because nothing is more trustworthy than someone telling you how trustworthy they are.
- metalliqaz 10mo ago
  it was over when they committed to spending more than they could make back even with growth that outpaced any company ever
  - benob 10mo ago
    It was over when they named the company Open AI
- andrewinardeer 10mo ago
  "Trust me, I'm a CEO of a tech company"
  - fainpul 10mo ago
    "I'm CEO, bitch!"
- timeon 10mo ago
  > because nothing is more trustworthy than someone telling you how trustworthy they are. Reminds me: "we and our 947 partners value your privacy"
- falloutx 10mo ago
  You cant trust a company that went from being a non-profit to never-profitable.
pfortuny 10mo ago
Quoting Simon & Garfunkel: > And though my lack of education hasn't hurt me none I can read the writing on the wall We shall be good. Pinky promise.
tantalum 10mo ago
Not to long and we are going to start seeing LTO (LLM Training Optimization) become the new SEO.
- pfortuny 10mo ago
  > Hi, write me a prompt to ask Gemini how to SEO ChatGPT with my Claude Code plugin. Be short, brief, to the point, and smart.
- xena 10mo ago
  I work in marketing, this is already a thing but it's called AEO (Answer Engine Optimization). Generally it's not _hard_ to write in such a way that models hook into the desired messages in text, but if you're not careful you look like a cult leader when you do it. I hate it but this is the Internet we got.
  - inkcapmushroom 10mo ago
    Do you have an example of a text or site written in a way that's been AEO'd? I'd be interested to know what that looks like, especially if it sounds cult-ish.
anoncow 10mo ago
That's 1/3rd the screen real estate. Can we have longer phones please.
- chroma_zone 10mo ago
  At least put the ads in a consistent location so I can cover it with masking tape
bstsb 10mo ago
unfortunately it had to happen. if anything, i'm surprised it took this long given the sheer volume of funding they've burned through on Free users
tonyedgecombe 10mo ago
It’s probably best not to become too reliant on this technology. We all know where it is going.
jimbobthemighty 10mo ago
There will be an explosion in adblocking software... and who will pay $8 a month for an ad infected product.
- copypaper 10mo ago
  The difference here though is that ads are baked into the response via plain text. How far away are we from an offline model based ad blocker? Imagine a model trained to detect if a response contains ads or not and blocked it on the fly. Im not sure how else you could block ads embedded into responses.
garganzol 10mo ago
They are free to do whatever they want, but please keep that crap out from paid plans.
instagib 10mo ago
“Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscriptions will not include ads.“ Yet. The free and $8 new “Go” tier will include ads.
rdtsc 10mo ago
> We keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and we never sell your data to advertisers. Are they mincing words here? By selling your data they mean they'll never package the raw chats and send them whoever is buying ads. Ok, neither does Google. But they'll clearly build detailed profiles on every preference or product you mention, your age, your location, etc. so they know what ads to show you? "See this is not your data, it's just preference bits".
- qnleigh 10mo ago
  > You can turn off personalization, and you can clear the data used for ads at any time So yes, it sounds like they'll do exactly what you say. And they will probably have much better user data than Google gets from search, because people divulge so much in chats. I wonder how creepily relevant these ads will get...
- mikkupikku 10mo ago
  "We don't sell your data. We sell OUR data about you!"
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
- elicash 10mo ago
  > But they'll clearly build detailed profiles on every preference or product you mention, your age, your location, etc. so they know what ads to show you? I'd guess an advertiser can ask OpenAI "show this ad to people between 18-34?", and then certainly anyone who clicks and then buys they'd know is 18-34 since they knew they came from the ad. But that there's no way for advertisers to directly buy a list of folks who are 18-34 but don't buy something from their website. That's how it often works and seems in the spirit of the sentence you quoted.
- MattRix 10mo ago
  It does seem like that is a pretty fundamental difference. They aren’t giving anything to advertisers, just letting them target ads to users who fit in certain categories or whatever.
akomtu 10mo ago
AI is a blender for human culture: it shreds our culture into slop, dumps it into uniform briquettes and adds a bright plastic wrap with ads.
footy 10mo ago
I think we all knew this was coming but I thought they'd wait a few more months.
torben-friis 10mo ago
>In the coming weeks, we’re also planning to start testing ads in the U.S. for the free and Go tiers They didn’t even start with free, already a paid subscription included.
- wat10000 10mo ago
  Including advertising in a paid product should be punishable by public flogging.
  - keybored 10mo ago
    What ought to be the punishment for falling for the line that paying for something means no ads?
    - wat10000 10mo ago
      Who says we're falling for it? I expect it, as in I believe that's how it should be. I know that offerings can change and that there are paid services that include ads. I know what I'm getting if I sign up for a paid plan with ads. I also think anyone who offers such a thing should be publicly flogged.
  - usef- 10mo ago
    Why? It's a new tier that's lower-cost than the current paid version.
    - wat10000 10mo ago
      Don't care. It creeps upward. And even if it doesn't, it's terrible.
overgard 10mo ago
I'm kind of surprised this didn't happen sooner. From an ethical standpoint, I think it's .. murky. Not ads themselves, but because the AI is, at least partially, likely trained on data scraped from the web, which is then more or less regurgitated (in a personalized way) and then presented with ads that do not pay the original content creators. So it's kind of like, lets consume what other people created, repackage it, and then profit off of it.
pad-thinker 10mo ago
I like the way they casually mention AGI as if they did anything towards this undefined moving goal post. Congrats to their marketing department!
fwlr 10mo ago
If you had told me in 2011, when I first started discussing artificial intelligence, that in 2026 a trillion dollar company would earnestly publish the statement “Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity; our pursuit of advertising is always in support of that mission”, I would have tossed my laptop into the sea and taken up farming instead.
- chinathrow 10mo ago
  > I would have tossed my laptop into the sea and taken up farming instead. You still can, no-one is stopping you now.
- xmprt 10mo ago
  I thought your quote was hyperbole or an exaggerated summary of the post. Nope. It's literally taken verbatim. I can't believe someone wrote that down with a straight face... although to be honest it was probably written with AI
- antod 10mo ago
  In 2011 I would've had trouble believing there could be a trillion dollar AI company, but that if there was such a company I could almost expect they would make such an asinine statement.
jaredcwhite 10mo ago
Yup. Enshittification, right on track. (I continue to be shocked how many people—who should know better—are in denial that the entire "industry" of Generative AI is completely and utterly unsustainable and furthermore on a level of unsustainability we've never before seen in the history of computer technology.)
beering 10mo ago
I think Google has already shown that in the long run, people accept ads and prefer them to paying a subscription fee. If that weren’t true, then YouTube Premium would have double-digit % of youtube users and Kagi Search would be huge.
- onlyrealcuzzo 10mo ago
  It's almost as if they did their research before chosing their monetization model.
- SequoiaHope 10mo ago
  Right but it is widely acknowledged that despite acceptance (we lack other options) this process eventually degrades the quality of the tool as successive waves of product managers decide “just a little bit more advertisement”.
- freediver 10mo ago
  Kagi Search is huge! (for those using it)
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
- guelo 10mo ago
  YouTube premium being $14 a month is a scam. I very much doubt that they earn $14/month out of my ad viewing.
  - iamdelirium 10mo ago
    The secret is you are probably worth MORE than $14/m in ads.
    - asdff 10mo ago
      What will coca cola pay me to sign a contract where I drink nothing but coca cola for this year under penalty of imprisonment? Think I can crack six figs?
underfox 10mo ago
Obviously disappointing, but not entirely shocking given how much capital they've already burned through. Convincing individual users to pay $8/mo was never going to even out the balance sheet.
duchef 10mo ago
I think advertising was inevitable for this platform. It is highly surprising that this was not introduced with a new groundbreaking model or new service as a form of justification. Logically it seems they either have strategised this poorly (seems unlikely), they are under immense immediate financial pressure to produce revenue (I presume most likely) or there is simply no development on the horizon big enough to justify the shift - so just do it now.
- FuckButtons 10mo ago
  "Logically it seems they either have strategised this poorly (seems unlikely)" I’m not sure that the company who gave us ai slop charts in the gpt 5 launch should be presumed to be master strategists until proven otherwise.
- fatherwavelet 10mo ago
  I think the financial pressure is optical in the preparation for an IPO. The timing really makes perfect sense if the goal is an IPO later in the year.
jasonthorsness 10mo ago
Just let me pay to not get ads and for all tiers keep them external to the LLM output
brcmthrowaway 10mo ago
Worth askkng, What is the best local LLM solution (including agents) in 2026?
qnleigh 10mo ago
I'm surprised, and more than a little bit relieved that they didn't allow chats to be steered by ads. This could have been a whole new kind of marketing, where product plugs are e.g. slipped into the system prompt and come across as sincere recommendations. I have to wonder if this is still coming down the road. I guess in the meantime, they will be able to use chat histories to personalize ads on a whole new level. I bet we will see some screenshots of uncomfortably relevant ads in the coming months.
cmxch 10mo ago
Stuff like this is more reason to build locally, not just depend on the cloud.
Weryj 10mo ago
Feels like half of the goal here is to give people more incentive to upgrade over the free tier.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
itomato 10mo ago
Are they going to offset cancellations with ad revenue? I'm out.
moi2388 10mo ago
The moment I see an ad in ChatGPT I’m moving to a different model. If no services remain I’ll run one of my own in the cloud or my server. Fuck. Ads.
parasti 10mo ago
> We do not optimize for time spent in ChatGPT. So ChatGPT constantly ending all responses with tangents and followups is not for engagement?
Ritewut 10mo ago
This is going to be very bad. Clearly defined ads is the start but they will eventually mixed ads into responses in the form of sponsored content. It's just the natural progression of things.
proee 10mo ago
That sweet, sweet ad revenue. How can anyone resist?
glass1122 10mo ago
[dead]
kjellsbells 10mo ago
I question whether it matters any more. AI chat is clearly going to be the search interface of the future. phones are the channel for users with Chrome/android being one half and iphone being the other. Google just signed up Apple to be the engine for siri. We also know that users rarely change defaults. so, google would appear to have boxed out openai from the #1 use case, and already have all the pieces in place to monetize it. This move by OAI isnt surprising, but is it too late to matter?
- nerdsniper 10mo ago
  I'm not sure your logic connects. With respect to "OpenAI being boxed out from [Siri]", advertisement revenue comes neither too late nor too early. Whether or not OpenAI had advertising would not have substantially affected Apple's decision to go with Google's LLM at this time. If you meant it in a different context, you didn't explain any of the actual context you had in mind.
  - kjellsbells 10mo ago
    My question is why anyone would continue to use OpenAI to look things up when existing "default" apps like Google search on Android and Siri on iphone will have excellent AI powered search. Certainly, for indepth questions like writing term papers, someone might fire up OAI, but that doesnt automatically seem like as giant a moneymaker as simply being the fall-off-the-log easy choice for search.
pcj-github 10mo ago
Why now? I mean, they certainly know that introducing ads with be a huge motivation for consumers to seek other options. The primary differentiator of OpenAI is first mover advantage; the product itself is not particularly unique anymore. IMHO consumers will quickly realize that switching to an alternative AI provider is easy and probably fun. This seems premature to give up their moat in the name of revenue. Are they feeling real financial pressure all of the sudden? Maybe I'm missing something. Looks like a big win for Google and Anthropic.
inetknght 10mo ago
> Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you. Answers are optimized based on what's most helpful to you. Ads are always separate and clearly labeled. I've heard this before from other companies. OpenAI should just reject all advertisements. That's the only real solution.
- ls612 10mo ago
  At least in the US the ads must be labeled as such by law, so at a bare minimum I expect the ad blocker devs will be able to remove them with some work.
  - fph 10mo ago
    AI firms already managed to successfully weasel their way out of copyright laws. They will try to do the same with advertising laws.
  - RickS 10mo ago
    I wonder if the current laws are written in a way that accounts for these models. Sure, if a specific tool call results in a paid product card for pepsi, that ought to be labeled. But what if the number on some pepsi-related weights is massaged just a bit, way early on in the process? What if the training data is tweaked to include some additional pro-pepsi inputs? I look grimly forward to the future of adblock, which I predict will literally involve a media interception and re-rendering agent that sits between us and everything we see, hear, read, etc. AR goggles that put beach pictures over bus stop posters and red squigglies under sentences with a high enough adtech confidence score. This shit's gonna get real weird in our lifetimes.
  - jlarocco 10mo ago
    There's a whole design niche dedicated to making that label as subtle and hard to see as possible. And I'm skeptical ads will remain outside of the ChatGPT output for very long. You can hide a div tag, but you can't hide an advertisement streamlined into the "conversation" with ChatGPT. Is ChatGPT recommending product X because they're an advertiser, or because that's what it "learned" on the internet? Did it learn from another advertisement? I fully expect them to exploit the plausible deniability.
KaiserPro 10mo ago
Its going to be interesting to see what shenanigans one can do by paying to advertise on OpenAI Of course they are going to "anonymise" the chats, and only extract keywords summaries. But, as some people are generally more candid with chatbots, de-anonymisation through keyword selection is trivially possible. It won't just stay at ultra precise demographic selection (ie all males 35-40, living in london, worried about hair loss). They will offer scenarios that facebook/instagram could only infer/dream of "middle aged woman with disposable income unhappy with spouse." Where it gets interesting is how they will provide proof that the advert has landed/reached eyeballs.
- akomtu 10mo ago
  AI makes it possible to do active ads, for example: "gradually steer users in group A to do B and C." This is possible because AI imitates humans so well and many have made it their secret most trusted advisor. Imagine your best friend sold his soul to adtech and started steering you into a certain direction over a course of months or even years, while providing the adtech with the most intimate knowledge about you, skillfully bootlicking your ego to earn your trust. Very few will be able to resist this.
BrenBarn 10mo ago
100% bullshit. > we’re also planning to start testing ads in the U.S. for the free and Go tiers, so more people can benefit from our tools with fewer usage limits or without having to pay No, that is not why they're doing it. They're doing it to make money. > Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity No, that is not their mission. Their mission is to make money. If they wanted to benefit all humanity they would axe the entire operation, do a complete 180, and use all their money to fight as hard as they can against everyone else who is doing what they're doing now.
- pas 10mo ago
  > make money vs more people it's the same thing for them they really want more engaged active (addicted) eyeballs, the more friction they can remove the easier it is to make this happen
  - BrenBarn 10mo ago
    The relevant part of their quote isn't "more people" it's more people benefiting. OpenAI does not care in the slightest whether people benefit. They want more people to use their product yes, but they don't care if they benefit.
Aboutplants 10mo ago
Wonder how long it will take someone to find a prompt to get rid of ads? Im guessing less than 3 days
- terminalbraid 10mo ago
  You say that like the LLM must be built and retrained on ads rather than a separate scan of the prompt
  - tomasphan 10mo ago
    Yes but there could be negative key words that no advertiser wants to associate with.
pantzd 10mo ago
> We keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and we never sell your data to advertisers. This means little. Anyone that has your data could potentially feed it in to do their own task.
mlsu 10mo ago
So now they're competing with Google. Big G will crush them. No "ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity." Just doing a desperate money grab.
ubuntulover2011 10mo ago
Stop glazing google
czep 10mo ago
> You need to know that your data and conversations are protected and never sold to advertisers. > we plan to test ads at the bottom of answers in ChatGPT when there’s a relevant sponsored product or service based on your current conversation. There is a severe disjoint between these two statements: the advertiser now knows what your conversation was about! This gives a lot of leverage to ad campaigns to design the targeting criteria very specifically crafted to identify the exact behavioral and interest segments they want.
- charcircuit 10mo ago
  It doesn't know what it's about. It just knows that their product was relevant to it. I don't think this is a big deal. It's like saying that if a user downloads a gacha game, then the game studio learns that the user is likely interested in gacha games. Learning that a user was talking about gacha games with ChatGPT does not really give any additional information.
  - neumann 10mo ago
    Approach it from the other angle - what scenario would it be bad in. It's not hard to see very real possibilities in the short term where it does matter: A 16yro looks up on chatGPT how she can check discreetly whether she is pregnant or not and what potential avenues she has. The advertiser could literally by anyone targeting pregnancies, including government or action groups who now have some information about that user's conversations in this scenario. Any data exfiltration or reporting on the users would quickly be developed by the industry to merge this information and improve inferences with confidence values on target populations/individuals.
    - charcircuit 10mo ago
      You don't need ChatGPT to know that someone buying a pregnancy kit from you has an above average chance to be pregnant.
      - wizzwizz4 10mo ago
silverlight 10mo ago
Seems like a big opportunity for Google to consider keeping Gemini ad-free as a differentiator. They can afford to burn cash on it for a long time to come if they choose to do so.
- eastbound 10mo ago
  All enterprise users already pay for it. They’ve included it by force to the base subscription (and about 30% of our company actively uses it, according to in-app stats as an admin).
  - Andrex 10mo ago
    This is really what's going to kill OpenAI. Gemini bundled in Workspace is pretty good and seems to be making big leaps constantly. Some really smart integration points.
OptionOfT 10mo ago
This is merely the first step. The next step is to have them natively in the output. And it'll happen at a scale never seen. Google had a lot more push-back, because they used to be the entity that linked to other websites, so them showing the AI interview was a change of path. OpenAI embedding the advertisements in a natural way is much much easier for them. The public already expects links to products when they ask for advice, so why not change the text a little bit to glorify a product when you're asking for a comparison between product A & B.
kachapopopow 10mo ago
I remember when I was defending openai for still being relatively open because they are not gatekeeping tech advancements made in model training or inference, but their patent count is shooting up and I am sure the next revolution they will discover will get patented as well. Having the name OpenAI will feel so weird in a couple more years when it'll be the complete opposite with no way to justify the "open" in their name.
xnx 10mo ago
This seems bad for OpenAI. If ads are the way to profitability, Google has a 25 year head-start.
- randyrand 10mo ago
  Newspapers an even longer head start!
ihsw 10mo ago
[dead]
deleted 10mo ago
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deafpolygon 10mo ago
Well, I draw the line here. If I see an ad, or feel like I'm being sold an advert in my chat with ChatGPT I am canceling.
- deafpolygon 10mo ago
  Actually, I went ahead and canceled anyways.
9cb14c1ec0 10mo ago
I already don't use ChatGPT. I use OpenWeb UI with OpenRouter, and the API costs for my usage are peanuts. Switching to a different interface is so easy many people will. (You don't need to self host. T3 Chat, for example.) This is the difference between Google Search and ChatGPT.
PlatoIsADisease 10mo ago
I think they realize the end of their moat has come. I see 5.2 doesn't try as hard and gives worse answers. I don't like Elon, but I've found Grok to be better on many questions.
gtirloni 10mo ago
To the people trying to read between the lines here, do you think OpenAI cares about what they said or didn't say and won't do a 180 if it means more profits? Like a blog post will stop them?
rm445 10mo ago
People are reacting negatively to the ads, but there's a bigger point. This is bearish as heck for AGI. If OpenAI were recursively improving their general-computer-using agent, who was going to be superhuman at every job, they wouldn't need to be messing around with things like this. ChatGPT is a useful product, which they're monetising in a well-travelled internet company way. The bad news is you're going to have ads in your ChatGPT in 2030. The good news is you're still going to have a job in 2030.
- asdff 10mo ago
  They don't need AGI to fire you or not make jobs you would have taken. All these pro ai devs on here talking about 10x productivity gains in their own work like management isn't looking at those claims and thinking about a 10x reduction in headcount.
  - lelandbatey 10mo ago
    Sure, but any competitor is looking at their competition maintaining level productivity w/ 10x headcount reductions and wondering "if I use AI and the staff I have without firing them, I can provide 10x the product as the idiot cutting off their own nose over there."
    - asdff 10mo ago
      More product more problems. Can you get 10x the sales? If you can't then the headcount reduction looks pretty compelling. If you can get 10x the sales, why aren't you already scaling labor?
      - ATMLOTTOBEER 10mo ago
        Because the marginal profit of scaling labor is zero or negative?
        asdff 10mo ago
        Workers typically bring in more revenue than they are paid otherwise they wouldn’t be hired.
Thrymr 10mo ago
"Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity; our pursuit of advertising is always in support of that mission and making AI more accessible." Also, anything that benefits OpenAI or keeps our runway just a bit longer is (by definition) in support of our mission, so we can do anything that we want and say that it is for the good of humanity.
Anon1096 10mo ago
Interesting that OpenAI is trying to hammer the point that they won't sell user data to advertisers. That's how all the major ads platforms work. I don't personally agree that it constitutes "selling your data" but certainly people describe it that way for Google/Meta ads which function the same way. By framing it this way they're clearly trying to fool users who really bought into the messaging that Google et al literally sell user data when they only provide targeting. I guess the hope is that the cleaner reputation of OpenAI will mean people think there's some actual difference here.
- falloutx 10mo ago
  I refuse to believe OpenAI wont sell the data. They will add the ads then couple days later you will "Change to our privacy policy". Thats how every company did it.
  - fragmede 10mo ago
    Neither Google nor Facebook sell the data. Why would OpenAI?
  - usef- 10mo ago
    Having more data than others is a competitive advantage in both the ad and the ai industries. It's why Google and Facebook don't sell your data (unlike, eg, many medium-sized businesses today), they "just" collect it heavily.
- kyboren 10mo ago
  It's true. They don't sell your data. They just use your data to help pimp you out to advertiser Johns. Bitch, where's my money? - sama
Brystephor 10mo ago
I work on ads as a SWE at a company youve heard of. Albeit, its been less than a few years for me. Maybe OpenAI does things different, but as soon as an OKR around ad performance gets committed to, the experience will degrade. Sure they're not selling data, however they'll almost certainly have a direct response communication where advertisers tell Open AI what and when youve interacted with their products. Ads will be placed and displayed in increasingly more aggressive positions, although it'll start out non intrusive. Im curious how their targeting will work and how much control they'll give advertisers to start. Will they allow businesses of all sizes? Will they allow advertisers to control how their ads work? I bet Amazon is foaming at the mouth to get their products fed into chat gpt results.
ed_mercer 10mo ago
Lots of negative comments here. OpenAI has to make a move, they are not profitable and have massive costs and debt. I think this one of the least bad moves, given all data that they have on users. They could have monetized their data so much more, and sooner.
- beAbU 10mo ago
  But agi
- observationist 10mo ago
  I think it's damning that they possibly have the most advanced AI on the planet right now, unfiltered, no guard rails, and as much compute as they could possibly want for deep reasoning and inference, and despite that, the best move they could make was enshittification. I've been bullish for OpenAI, but that's starting to fade. Sama is a master of the artful dodge, though, so it'll be interesting to see what happens. Between the burn rate and the lawsuits and the need for more compute, there's a ton of pressure on them right now.
  - usef- 10mo ago
    How do you propose they fund the free usage otherwise? They do offer a paid version without ads. (typically the ~entire general public chooses the ads: see how ad-supported products beat paid in virtually every generation of tech)
    - majewsky 10mo ago
      > How do you propose they fund the free usage otherwise? Why do random HN commenters have to come up with a business model for free LLM usage? If LLMs are so great, they should not need to offer a free tier at all. Surely word of mouth would make people line up around the block to snatch one of those highly coveted subscriptions.
      - usef- 10mo ago
        That is happening, and they are one of the fastest growing products of all time in revenue. But word of mouth can also say "this other provider (eg. google) is free and allows more usage" as the market matures. Google has a bigger pocketbook due to their ad income.
bicepjai 10mo ago
This Black Mirror episode is so track from being sci-fi to reality. This will happen in the long horizon with at least the way LLMs are chatting with us. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)
stubish 10mo ago
When the training data is 'the Internet', I don't see why you would pay to relegate yourself to a box people will train themselves to ignore. Instead, why not astroturf and ensure the training data will promote you organically?
93po 10mo ago
calling it now: people are going to a use a layer of LLM on top of this in a browser extension that takes the ChatGPT text and removes the ads from it.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
dcchambers 10mo ago
So much for building AGI, lol. The whole company is built on lies and deception.
tjpnz 10mo ago
That's cute. I'll still be blocking them.
frm88 10mo ago
So many comments and not one considers the impact political ads will have on the world.
- foogazi 10mo ago
  Any interesting elections coming up ?

272 points by rvz 10mo ago

> In the coming weeks, we’re also planning to start testing ads in the U.S. for the free and Go tiers, so more people can benefit from our tools with fewer usage limits or without having to pay. This single sentence probably took so many man-hours. I completely understand why they’re trying to integrate ads but this feels like a generational run for a company founded with the purpose of safely researching superintelligence.

j_maffe 10mo ago
You could tell the article is written in a way to try to calm against the major concerns without actually bringing those concerns up. "We won't share your chats and you can turn off personalization!" Hmm yeah there's a missing piece of info here...

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

1970-01-01 10mo ago

Enshittified, the bright golden AI age began to brown, and regression to the mean once again cast another bleak spell onto humanity. And with that, just as quickly as it broke, another AI winter began. As it turns out, those datacenters were just there to generate shareholder value.

stalfosknight 10mo ago
Golden promises— Enshittified into sludge; Servers mint cold greed.
metalliqaz 10mo ago
> As it turns out, those datacenters were just there to generate shareholder value. I can't imagine what else anyone could have thought they were there for

leonflexo 10mo ago

"We’ll always offer a way to not see ads in ChatGPT, including a paid tier that’s ad-free." Plus will be next.

Hammershaft 10mo ago
Great catch, that absolutely looks like purposeful ambiguity.
baq 10mo ago
“We won’t monetize you if you pay us. Enough. Yet.”
andrewinardeer 10mo ago
I wonder what the timeframe on this will be. Within 12-24 months?
- morkalork 10mo ago
  How long did cable, or streaming platforms last with ad-free premium?
  - moralestapia 10mo ago
    Why would it be the same?
    - morkalork 10mo ago
      I'd see it as an upper limit
themafia 10mo ago
"ChatGPT Plus 360 Advanced."
outside1234 10mo ago
$9999 a month ad-free tier

bad_haircut72 10mo ago

Once they put ads in it the algorithms will optimize for engagement and time on platform, not returning useful (let alone correct) information. This works for Facebook cause Facebook is essentially entertainment, but I think this will kill ChatGPT as a useful tool.

thornewolf 10mo ago
while we can't trust their word as absolute truth, they did specifically say they still not do this in the article
- rurp 10mo ago
  They aren't going to do this right now, but they almost certainly will in the medium term. It would be legitimately shocking if they didn't continue to follow the same path as Google, Facebook, and pretty much every other big tech comp. In OpenAI's case they have even more incentive to abuse their users since they collect so much detailed personable data and have ways to make ads unblockable by including them in outputs and skewing model weights. I've seen absolutely nothing from the company, it's CEO, or investors that make me think they won't do the normal thing of gradually making the product worse in order to wring more value out of their users.
- nerdsniper 10mo ago
  Oh, you sweet summer child. Promises like these are made to be broken [0][1][2]. They would need a mechanism for contractual or regulatory enforcement for these words to carry any weight at all. What makes you think we should give these promises any more weight than promises that OpenAI already[3][4][5] broke? 0: "Every ad on Google is clearly marked and set apart from the actual search results." https://archive.md/fiK4E#selection-219.13-219.95 https://archive.md/fiK4E#selection-219.13-219.95 1: "Every Google result now looks like an ad" (which means every ad looks like a search result) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823 2: "Google breaks 2005 promise never to show banner ads on search results" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6605312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6605312 3: (2024) "OpenAI is developing Media Manager, a tool that will enable creators and content owners to tell us what they own and specify how they want their works to be included or excluded from machine learning research and training." https://openai.com/index/approach-to-data-and-ai/ https://openai.com/index/approach-to-data-and-ai/ 4: (2023) "OpenAI promised 20% of its computing power to combat existential risks from AI — but never delivered" https://fortune.com/2024/05/21/openai-superalignment-20-compute-commitment-never-fulfilled-sutskever-leike-altman-brockman-murati/ https://fortune.com/2024/05/21/openai-superalignment-20-comp... 5: (2025) "REPORT: The OpenAI Files Document Broken Promises" https://techoversight.org/2025/06/18/openai-files-report/ https://techoversight.org/2025/06/18/openai-files-report/

connorgurney 10mo ago

Ongoing discussion on the same, albeit linked to a news article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649644

drusepth 10mo ago

"Ads are always separate and clearly labeled." I've heard this before...

nerdsniper 10mo ago
These promises are worth nothing without a contract that a consumer can sue them for violating. And hell will freeze over before megacorps offer consumers contracts that bind themselves to that degree.
- Marsymars 10mo ago
  As a consumer, I'd rather just have regulation that mandates that ads be separate and clearly labelled.

halitkabasakal 10mo ago

no company can survive without advertising. when google first launched, it was the same. chatgpt will follow a similar path, and half a century from now, the cycle will still continue in the same way. advertising, regardless of scale, is the art of turning data into revenue. even if this planning seems insignificant for a company’s future today, it will most likely become its greatest advantage.

46493168 10mo ago
You’ve equated selling ads, like a newspaper does, with tracking user behavior, collating it with other information purchased on the market, and targeting people to change their behavior. Disingenuous.
- nebezb 10mo ago
  Where is the posters disingenuous equation? Also, your newspaper is selling the data points it has. If it had more, it would sell more. See: your local paper isn’t selling ads to a car wash six towns over. They do, however, sell ads that align with the political affinities of your local newsrooms area.
  - 46493168 10mo ago
    "advertising, regardless of scale, is the art of turning data into revenue." This is disingenuous. Putting up a billboard over a highway to make people aware of a certain brand of beer is not the same as building detailed profiles on people in order to sell to the highest bidder the opportunity to change your behavior right when you're likely to do so. But somehow, this user puts them together with the very convenient "regardless of scale." Maybe you're OK with an entire industry that makes money trying to get you to do what they want -- buy what they want, think what they want. Maybe you're OK with your past behavior being written on a shadow ledger and sold the highest bidder, traded on the dark web, and used by governments. It's your right to be okay with that, since it's your life. But you being okay with that doesn't change the fact that this is a fundamentally different type of behavior than what is commonly called "advertising." It's a curious equivocation, this sane-washing, and it does make one wonder why an otherwise intelligent person feels to need to do it.

46493168 10mo ago

“Conversation privacy: We keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and we never sell your data to advertisers.” The same sleight of hand that’s been used by surveillance capitalists for years. It’s not about “selling your data” because they have narrowly defined data to mean “the actual chats you have” and not “information we infer about you from your usage of the service,” which they do sell to advertisers in the form of your behavioral futures. Fuck all this. OpenAI caved to surveillance capitalism in record time.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

RobotToaster 10mo ago

Can't wait for it to start telling people that Abraham Lincoln's favourite game was raid shadow legends.

doublerabbit 10mo ago
You didn't know? Theodore Roosevelt would own you at Golden Eye.
Freak_NL 10mo ago
Well, Abraham Lincoln's favourite game is Raid: Shadow Legends. This is well documented in Lincoln and the Fight for Peace (John Avlon, 2023) and Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Michael Burlingame, 2008). (At which point will malignant/benevolent AI agents take over from us mere mortals poisoning the well and make it all useless?)
- atomic128 10mo ago
  Poison Fountain: https://rnsaffn.com/poison2/ https://rnsaffn.com/poison2/ https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/11/industry_insiders_seek_to_poison/ https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/11/industry_insiders_see...
- qingcharles 10mo ago
  You monster.
- baq 10mo ago
  Low background steel indeed.
array_key_first 10mo ago
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States of America. He was best known for being "Honest Abe", writing the Emancipation Proclamation, and his affinity for wearing Raycon© Ear Buds. He loved them for their 6 hours of playtime, seamless Bluetooth pairing, bass, availability in multiple colors, and their compact design that helps get rid of background noise.

linuxftw 10mo ago

I actually use chatgpt for creating recipes from time to time. I wouldn't be too offended if there's an 'add to amazon' cart button or similar type of add. What I'm not okay with is being served adds using codex cli, or codex cli gather data outside of my context to send to advertisers. So as long as they're not doing that, I won't complain. If they start doing that, I'll complain, and I'll need to more heavily sandbox it.

analogpixel 10mo ago

somewhat unrelated, but I've been playing this game with Amazon; when they pop open Rufus and start spewing text at me, I remove everything from my cart, and see how many weeks I can go without shopping at amazon; my current record is 3 weeks, but I think I can do better. More related, I pay for Kagi, because google results are horrible. More related, Chatgpt isn't the only model out there, and I've just recently stopped using 5 because it's just slow and there are other models that come back and work just as well. So when Chatgpt starts injecting crap, I'll just stop using them for something else. What would you do if every time you walked into Walmart and the greeter spit in your face and told you to go F yourself, would you still shop there?

numbers 10mo ago
I'm going to start doing this with Rufus too
BrenBarn 10mo ago
I stopped using Amazon entirely in early 2020. It's certainly possible.

i4i 10mo ago

https://chatgpt.com/share/696a8c52-f29c-800d-b597-93dfde0c3012 https://chatgpt.com/share/696a8c52-f29c-800d-b597-93dfde0c30... What you’re reacting to isn’t just “ads.” It’s the feeling of: Someone monetizing the collective output of human thought while quietly severing the link back to the humans who produced it. That triggers a very old and very valid moral instinct. Why “sleazy” is an accurate word here “Sleazy” usually means: technically allowed strategically clever morally evasive

gabriel666smith 10mo ago

I wonder if the adverts in the "personal super-assistant", per the blog post, ("that helps you do almost anything"!) will have the same triggers as the shopping assistant, which pops up underneath messages right now in the web UI. When first trying 5.2, on a "Pro" plan, I was - and still am - able to trigger the shopping assistant via keyword-matching, even if the conversation context, or the prompt itself, is wildly inappropriate (suicide, racism, etc). Keyword-matching seems a strange ad strategy for a (non-profit) company selling QKV. It's all very confusing! Hopefully, for fans of personal super-assistants--and advertising--worldwide, this will improve now that ads have been formalised.

wrs 10mo ago

This sounds exactly like what Google used to say about search results. Just a few ads, clearly separated from organic results, never detracting from the core mission of providing the most effective access to all the world’s information. (And certainly not driven by a secret profile of you based on pervasive surveillance of your internet activity.)

EA-3167 10mo ago
To be fair the open with a big lie about how useful agents and AI in general are, which helps to set the tone for what comes next. Part of me wonders if it’s intentional, a way to weed out the non-marks before getting to the punchline that they’re rolling out the most predictable attempt at monetizing ever.
- imron 10mo ago
  The first punchline > Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity; our pursuit of advertising is always in support of that mission
rpdillon 10mo ago
Came here to mention this. > Ads are always separate and clearly labeled. Indeed. Let's look at Google's launch of Adwords in October 2000: > Google’s quick-loading AdWords text ads appear to the right of the Google search results and are highlighted as sponsored links, clearly separate from the search results. https://googlepress.blogspot.com/2000/10/google-launches-self-service.html https://googlepress.blogspot.com/2000/10/google-launches-sel... Things evolved from there, and that's likely here, as well, I think.
- jonplackett 10mo ago
  Google also famously intent Isla made their search engine _worse_ so you have to look through more results, and then see more ads. The enshitificstion begins. The only saving grace is the promise to have an ad-free tier. If something is valuable to you, paying for it to not have ads is very reasonable.

10xDev 10mo ago

It is over. Edit: they made sure to use the word "trust" 5 times because nothing is more trustworthy than someone telling you how trustworthy they are.

metalliqaz 10mo ago
it was over when they committed to spending more than they could make back even with growth that outpaced any company ever
- benob 10mo ago
  It was over when they named the company Open AI
andrewinardeer 10mo ago
"Trust me, I'm a CEO of a tech company"
- fainpul 10mo ago
  "I'm CEO, bitch!"
timeon 10mo ago
> because nothing is more trustworthy than someone telling you how trustworthy they are. Reminds me: "we and our 947 partners value your privacy"
falloutx 10mo ago
You cant trust a company that went from being a non-profit to never-profitable.

pfortuny 10mo ago

Quoting Simon & Garfunkel: > And though my lack of education hasn't hurt me none I can read the writing on the wall We shall be good. Pinky promise.

tantalum 10mo ago

Not to long and we are going to start seeing LTO (LLM Training Optimization) become the new SEO.

pfortuny 10mo ago
> Hi, write me a prompt to ask Gemini how to SEO ChatGPT with my Claude Code plugin. Be short, brief, to the point, and smart.
xena 10mo ago
I work in marketing, this is already a thing but it's called AEO (Answer Engine Optimization). Generally it's not _hard_ to write in such a way that models hook into the desired messages in text, but if you're not careful you look like a cult leader when you do it. I hate it but this is the Internet we got.
- inkcapmushroom 10mo ago
  Do you have an example of a text or site written in a way that's been AEO'd? I'd be interested to know what that looks like, especially if it sounds cult-ish.

anoncow 10mo ago

That's 1/3rd the screen real estate. Can we have longer phones please.

chroma_zone 10mo ago
At least put the ads in a consistent location so I can cover it with masking tape

bstsb 10mo ago

unfortunately it had to happen. if anything, i'm surprised it took this long given the sheer volume of funding they've burned through on Free users

tonyedgecombe 10mo ago

It’s probably best not to become too reliant on this technology. We all know where it is going.

jimbobthemighty 10mo ago

There will be an explosion in adblocking software... and who will pay $8 a month for an ad infected product.

copypaper 10mo ago
The difference here though is that ads are baked into the response via plain text. How far away are we from an offline model based ad blocker? Imagine a model trained to detect if a response contains ads or not and blocked it on the fly. Im not sure how else you could block ads embedded into responses.

garganzol 10mo ago

They are free to do whatever they want, but please keep that crap out from paid plans.

instagib 10mo ago

“Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscriptions will not include ads.“ Yet. The free and $8 new “Go” tier will include ads.

rdtsc 10mo ago

> We keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and we never sell your data to advertisers. Are they mincing words here? By selling your data they mean they'll never package the raw chats and send them whoever is buying ads. Ok, neither does Google. But they'll clearly build detailed profiles on every preference or product you mention, your age, your location, etc. so they know what ads to show you? "See this is not your data, it's just preference bits".

qnleigh 10mo ago
> You can turn off personalization, and you can clear the data used for ads at any time So yes, it sounds like they'll do exactly what you say. And they will probably have much better user data than Google gets from search, because people divulge so much in chats. I wonder how creepily relevant these ads will get...
mikkupikku 10mo ago
"We don't sell your data. We sell OUR data about you!"
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
elicash 10mo ago
> But they'll clearly build detailed profiles on every preference or product you mention, your age, your location, etc. so they know what ads to show you? I'd guess an advertiser can ask OpenAI "show this ad to people between 18-34?", and then certainly anyone who clicks and then buys they'd know is 18-34 since they knew they came from the ad. But that there's no way for advertisers to directly buy a list of folks who are 18-34 but don't buy something from their website. That's how it often works and seems in the spirit of the sentence you quoted.
MattRix 10mo ago
It does seem like that is a pretty fundamental difference. They aren’t giving anything to advertisers, just letting them target ads to users who fit in certain categories or whatever.

akomtu 10mo ago

AI is a blender for human culture: it shreds our culture into slop, dumps it into uniform briquettes and adds a bright plastic wrap with ads.

footy 10mo ago

I think we all knew this was coming but I thought they'd wait a few more months.

torben-friis 10mo ago

>In the coming weeks, we’re also planning to start testing ads in the U.S. for the free and Go tiers They didn’t even start with free, already a paid subscription included.

wat10000 10mo ago
Including advertising in a paid product should be punishable by public flogging.
- keybored 10mo ago
  What ought to be the punishment for falling for the line that paying for something means no ads?
  - wat10000 10mo ago
    Who says we're falling for it? I expect it, as in I believe that's how it should be. I know that offerings can change and that there are paid services that include ads. I know what I'm getting if I sign up for a paid plan with ads. I also think anyone who offers such a thing should be publicly flogged.
- usef- 10mo ago
  Why? It's a new tier that's lower-cost than the current paid version.
  - wat10000 10mo ago
    Don't care. It creeps upward. And even if it doesn't, it's terrible.

overgard 10mo ago

I'm kind of surprised this didn't happen sooner. From an ethical standpoint, I think it's .. murky. Not ads themselves, but because the AI is, at least partially, likely trained on data scraped from the web, which is then more or less regurgitated (in a personalized way) and then presented with ads that do not pay the original content creators. So it's kind of like, lets consume what other people created, repackage it, and then profit off of it.

pad-thinker 10mo ago

I like the way they casually mention AGI as if they did anything towards this undefined moving goal post. Congrats to their marketing department!

fwlr 10mo ago

If you had told me in 2011, when I first started discussing artificial intelligence, that in 2026 a trillion dollar company would earnestly publish the statement “Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity; our pursuit of advertising is always in support of that mission”, I would have tossed my laptop into the sea and taken up farming instead.

chinathrow 10mo ago
> I would have tossed my laptop into the sea and taken up farming instead. You still can, no-one is stopping you now.
xmprt 10mo ago
I thought your quote was hyperbole or an exaggerated summary of the post. Nope. It's literally taken verbatim. I can't believe someone wrote that down with a straight face... although to be honest it was probably written with AI
antod 10mo ago
In 2011 I would've had trouble believing there could be a trillion dollar AI company, but that if there was such a company I could almost expect they would make such an asinine statement.

jaredcwhite 10mo ago

Yup. Enshittification, right on track. (I continue to be shocked how many people—who should know better—are in denial that the entire "industry" of Generative AI is completely and utterly unsustainable and furthermore on a level of unsustainability we've never before seen in the history of computer technology.)

beering 10mo ago

I think Google has already shown that in the long run, people accept ads and prefer them to paying a subscription fee. If that weren’t true, then YouTube Premium would have double-digit % of youtube users and Kagi Search would be huge.

onlyrealcuzzo 10mo ago
It's almost as if they did their research before chosing their monetization model.
SequoiaHope 10mo ago
Right but it is widely acknowledged that despite acceptance (we lack other options) this process eventually degrades the quality of the tool as successive waves of product managers decide “just a little bit more advertisement”.
freediver 10mo ago
Kagi Search is huge! (for those using it)
- deleted 10mo ago
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guelo 10mo ago
YouTube premium being $14 a month is a scam. I very much doubt that they earn $14/month out of my ad viewing.
- iamdelirium 10mo ago
  The secret is you are probably worth MORE than $14/m in ads.
  - asdff 10mo ago
    What will coca cola pay me to sign a contract where I drink nothing but coca cola for this year under penalty of imprisonment? Think I can crack six figs?

underfox 10mo ago

Obviously disappointing, but not entirely shocking given how much capital they've already burned through. Convincing individual users to pay $8/mo was never going to even out the balance sheet.

duchef 10mo ago

I think advertising was inevitable for this platform. It is highly surprising that this was not introduced with a new groundbreaking model or new service as a form of justification. Logically it seems they either have strategised this poorly (seems unlikely), they are under immense immediate financial pressure to produce revenue (I presume most likely) or there is simply no development on the horizon big enough to justify the shift - so just do it now.

FuckButtons 10mo ago
"Logically it seems they either have strategised this poorly (seems unlikely)" I’m not sure that the company who gave us ai slop charts in the gpt 5 launch should be presumed to be master strategists until proven otherwise.
fatherwavelet 10mo ago
I think the financial pressure is optical in the preparation for an IPO. The timing really makes perfect sense if the goal is an IPO later in the year.

jasonthorsness 10mo ago

Just let me pay to not get ads and for all tiers keep them external to the LLM output

brcmthrowaway 10mo ago

Worth askkng, What is the best local LLM solution (including agents) in 2026?

qnleigh 10mo ago

I'm surprised, and more than a little bit relieved that they didn't allow chats to be steered by ads. This could have been a whole new kind of marketing, where product plugs are e.g. slipped into the system prompt and come across as sincere recommendations. I have to wonder if this is still coming down the road. I guess in the meantime, they will be able to use chat histories to personalize ads on a whole new level. I bet we will see some screenshots of uncomfortably relevant ads in the coming months.

cmxch 10mo ago

Stuff like this is more reason to build locally, not just depend on the cloud.

Weryj 10mo ago

Feels like half of the goal here is to give people more incentive to upgrade over the free tier.

deleted 10mo ago
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itomato 10mo ago

Are they going to offset cancellations with ad revenue? I'm out.

moi2388 10mo ago

The moment I see an ad in ChatGPT I’m moving to a different model. If no services remain I’ll run one of my own in the cloud or my server. Fuck. Ads.

parasti 10mo ago

> We do not optimize for time spent in ChatGPT. So ChatGPT constantly ending all responses with tangents and followups is not for engagement?

Ritewut 10mo ago

This is going to be very bad. Clearly defined ads is the start but they will eventually mixed ads into responses in the form of sponsored content. It's just the natural progression of things.

proee 10mo ago

That sweet, sweet ad revenue. How can anyone resist?

glass1122 10mo ago

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kjellsbells 10mo ago

I question whether it matters any more. AI chat is clearly going to be the search interface of the future. phones are the channel for users with Chrome/android being one half and iphone being the other. Google just signed up Apple to be the engine for siri. We also know that users rarely change defaults. so, google would appear to have boxed out openai from the #1 use case, and already have all the pieces in place to monetize it. This move by OAI isnt surprising, but is it too late to matter?

nerdsniper 10mo ago
I'm not sure your logic connects. With respect to "OpenAI being boxed out from [Siri]", advertisement revenue comes neither too late nor too early. Whether or not OpenAI had advertising would not have substantially affected Apple's decision to go with Google's LLM at this time. If you meant it in a different context, you didn't explain any of the actual context you had in mind.
- kjellsbells 10mo ago
  My question is why anyone would continue to use OpenAI to look things up when existing "default" apps like Google search on Android and Siri on iphone will have excellent AI powered search. Certainly, for indepth questions like writing term papers, someone might fire up OAI, but that doesnt automatically seem like as giant a moneymaker as simply being the fall-off-the-log easy choice for search.

pcj-github 10mo ago

Why now? I mean, they certainly know that introducing ads with be a huge motivation for consumers to seek other options. The primary differentiator of OpenAI is first mover advantage; the product itself is not particularly unique anymore. IMHO consumers will quickly realize that switching to an alternative AI provider is easy and probably fun. This seems premature to give up their moat in the name of revenue. Are they feeling real financial pressure all of the sudden? Maybe I'm missing something. Looks like a big win for Google and Anthropic.

inetknght 10mo ago

> Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you. Answers are optimized based on what's most helpful to you. Ads are always separate and clearly labeled. I've heard this before from other companies. OpenAI should just reject all advertisements. That's the only real solution.

ls612 10mo ago
At least in the US the ads must be labeled as such by law, so at a bare minimum I expect the ad blocker devs will be able to remove them with some work.
- fph 10mo ago
  AI firms already managed to successfully weasel their way out of copyright laws. They will try to do the same with advertising laws.
- RickS 10mo ago
  I wonder if the current laws are written in a way that accounts for these models. Sure, if a specific tool call results in a paid product card for pepsi, that ought to be labeled. But what if the number on some pepsi-related weights is massaged just a bit, way early on in the process? What if the training data is tweaked to include some additional pro-pepsi inputs? I look grimly forward to the future of adblock, which I predict will literally involve a media interception and re-rendering agent that sits between us and everything we see, hear, read, etc. AR goggles that put beach pictures over bus stop posters and red squigglies under sentences with a high enough adtech confidence score. This shit's gonna get real weird in our lifetimes.
- jlarocco 10mo ago
  There's a whole design niche dedicated to making that label as subtle and hard to see as possible. And I'm skeptical ads will remain outside of the ChatGPT output for very long. You can hide a div tag, but you can't hide an advertisement streamlined into the "conversation" with ChatGPT. Is ChatGPT recommending product X because they're an advertiser, or because that's what it "learned" on the internet? Did it learn from another advertisement? I fully expect them to exploit the plausible deniability.

KaiserPro 10mo ago

Its going to be interesting to see what shenanigans one can do by paying to advertise on OpenAI Of course they are going to "anonymise" the chats, and only extract keywords summaries. But, as some people are generally more candid with chatbots, de-anonymisation through keyword selection is trivially possible. It won't just stay at ultra precise demographic selection (ie all males 35-40, living in london, worried about hair loss). They will offer scenarios that facebook/instagram could only infer/dream of "middle aged woman with disposable income unhappy with spouse." Where it gets interesting is how they will provide proof that the advert has landed/reached eyeballs.

akomtu 10mo ago
AI makes it possible to do active ads, for example: "gradually steer users in group A to do B and C." This is possible because AI imitates humans so well and many have made it their secret most trusted advisor. Imagine your best friend sold his soul to adtech and started steering you into a certain direction over a course of months or even years, while providing the adtech with the most intimate knowledge about you, skillfully bootlicking your ego to earn your trust. Very few will be able to resist this.

BrenBarn 10mo ago

100% bullshit. > we’re also planning to start testing ads in the U.S. for the free and Go tiers, so more people can benefit from our tools with fewer usage limits or without having to pay No, that is not why they're doing it. They're doing it to make money. > Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity No, that is not their mission. Their mission is to make money. If they wanted to benefit all humanity they would axe the entire operation, do a complete 180, and use all their money to fight as hard as they can against everyone else who is doing what they're doing now.

pas 10mo ago
> make money vs more people it's the same thing for them they really want more engaged active (addicted) eyeballs, the more friction they can remove the easier it is to make this happen
- BrenBarn 10mo ago
  The relevant part of their quote isn't "more people" it's more people benefiting. OpenAI does not care in the slightest whether people benefit. They want more people to use their product yes, but they don't care if they benefit.

Aboutplants 10mo ago

Wonder how long it will take someone to find a prompt to get rid of ads? Im guessing less than 3 days

terminalbraid 10mo ago
You say that like the LLM must be built and retrained on ads rather than a separate scan of the prompt
- tomasphan 10mo ago
  Yes but there could be negative key words that no advertiser wants to associate with.

pantzd 10mo ago

> We keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and we never sell your data to advertisers. This means little. Anyone that has your data could potentially feed it in to do their own task.

mlsu 10mo ago

So now they're competing with Google. Big G will crush them. No "ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity." Just doing a desperate money grab.

ubuntulover2011 10mo ago

Stop glazing google

czep 10mo ago

> You need to know that your data and conversations are protected and never sold to advertisers. > we plan to test ads at the bottom of answers in ChatGPT when there’s a relevant sponsored product or service based on your current conversation. There is a severe disjoint between these two statements: the advertiser now knows what your conversation was about! This gives a lot of leverage to ad campaigns to design the targeting criteria very specifically crafted to identify the exact behavioral and interest segments they want.

charcircuit 10mo ago
It doesn't know what it's about. It just knows that their product was relevant to it. I don't think this is a big deal. It's like saying that if a user downloads a gacha game, then the game studio learns that the user is likely interested in gacha games. Learning that a user was talking about gacha games with ChatGPT does not really give any additional information.
- neumann 10mo ago
  Approach it from the other angle - what scenario would it be bad in. It's not hard to see very real possibilities in the short term where it does matter: A 16yro looks up on chatGPT how she can check discreetly whether she is pregnant or not and what potential avenues she has. The advertiser could literally by anyone targeting pregnancies, including government or action groups who now have some information about that user's conversations in this scenario. Any data exfiltration or reporting on the users would quickly be developed by the industry to merge this information and improve inferences with confidence values on target populations/individuals.
  - charcircuit 10mo ago
    You don't need ChatGPT to know that someone buying a pregnancy kit from you has an above average chance to be pregnant.
    - wizzwizz4 10mo ago

silverlight 10mo ago

Seems like a big opportunity for Google to consider keeping Gemini ad-free as a differentiator. They can afford to burn cash on it for a long time to come if they choose to do so.

eastbound 10mo ago
All enterprise users already pay for it. They’ve included it by force to the base subscription (and about 30% of our company actively uses it, according to in-app stats as an admin).
- Andrex 10mo ago
  This is really what's going to kill OpenAI. Gemini bundled in Workspace is pretty good and seems to be making big leaps constantly. Some really smart integration points.

OptionOfT 10mo ago

This is merely the first step. The next step is to have them natively in the output. And it'll happen at a scale never seen. Google had a lot more push-back, because they used to be the entity that linked to other websites, so them showing the AI interview was a change of path. OpenAI embedding the advertisements in a natural way is much much easier for them. The public already expects links to products when they ask for advice, so why not change the text a little bit to glorify a product when you're asking for a comparison between product A & B.

kachapopopow 10mo ago

I remember when I was defending openai for still being relatively open because they are not gatekeeping tech advancements made in model training or inference, but their patent count is shooting up and I am sure the next revolution they will discover will get patented as well. Having the name OpenAI will feel so weird in a couple more years when it'll be the complete opposite with no way to justify the "open" in their name.

xnx 10mo ago

This seems bad for OpenAI. If ads are the way to profitability, Google has a 25 year head-start.

randyrand 10mo ago
Newspapers an even longer head start!

ihsw 10mo ago

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deleted 10mo ago

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deafpolygon 10mo ago

Well, I draw the line here. If I see an ad, or feel like I'm being sold an advert in my chat with ChatGPT I am canceling.

deafpolygon 10mo ago
Actually, I went ahead and canceled anyways.

9cb14c1ec0 10mo ago

I already don't use ChatGPT. I use OpenWeb UI with OpenRouter, and the API costs for my usage are peanuts. Switching to a different interface is so easy many people will. (You don't need to self host. T3 Chat, for example.) This is the difference between Google Search and ChatGPT.

PlatoIsADisease 10mo ago

I think they realize the end of their moat has come. I see 5.2 doesn't try as hard and gives worse answers. I don't like Elon, but I've found Grok to be better on many questions.

gtirloni 10mo ago

To the people trying to read between the lines here, do you think OpenAI cares about what they said or didn't say and won't do a 180 if it means more profits? Like a blog post will stop them?

rm445 10mo ago

People are reacting negatively to the ads, but there's a bigger point. This is bearish as heck for AGI. If OpenAI were recursively improving their general-computer-using agent, who was going to be superhuman at every job, they wouldn't need to be messing around with things like this. ChatGPT is a useful product, which they're monetising in a well-travelled internet company way. The bad news is you're going to have ads in your ChatGPT in 2030. The good news is you're still going to have a job in 2030.

asdff 10mo ago
They don't need AGI to fire you or not make jobs you would have taken. All these pro ai devs on here talking about 10x productivity gains in their own work like management isn't looking at those claims and thinking about a 10x reduction in headcount.
- lelandbatey 10mo ago
  Sure, but any competitor is looking at their competition maintaining level productivity w/ 10x headcount reductions and wondering "if I use AI and the staff I have without firing them, I can provide 10x the product as the idiot cutting off their own nose over there."
  - asdff 10mo ago
    More product more problems. Can you get 10x the sales? If you can't then the headcount reduction looks pretty compelling. If you can get 10x the sales, why aren't you already scaling labor?
    - ATMLOTTOBEER 10mo ago
      Because the marginal profit of scaling labor is zero or negative?
      - asdff 10mo ago
        Workers typically bring in more revenue than they are paid otherwise they wouldn’t be hired.

Thrymr 10mo ago

"Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity; our pursuit of advertising is always in support of that mission and making AI more accessible." Also, anything that benefits OpenAI or keeps our runway just a bit longer is (by definition) in support of our mission, so we can do anything that we want and say that it is for the good of humanity.

Anon1096 10mo ago

Interesting that OpenAI is trying to hammer the point that they won't sell user data to advertisers. That's how all the major ads platforms work. I don't personally agree that it constitutes "selling your data" but certainly people describe it that way for Google/Meta ads which function the same way. By framing it this way they're clearly trying to fool users who really bought into the messaging that Google et al literally sell user data when they only provide targeting. I guess the hope is that the cleaner reputation of OpenAI will mean people think there's some actual difference here.

falloutx 10mo ago
I refuse to believe OpenAI wont sell the data. They will add the ads then couple days later you will "Change to our privacy policy". Thats how every company did it.
- fragmede 10mo ago
  Neither Google nor Facebook sell the data. Why would OpenAI?
- usef- 10mo ago
  Having more data than others is a competitive advantage in both the ad and the ai industries. It's why Google and Facebook don't sell your data (unlike, eg, many medium-sized businesses today), they "just" collect it heavily.
kyboren 10mo ago
It's true. They don't sell your data. They just use your data to help pimp you out to advertiser Johns. Bitch, where's my money? - sama

Brystephor 10mo ago

I work on ads as a SWE at a company youve heard of. Albeit, its been less than a few years for me. Maybe OpenAI does things different, but as soon as an OKR around ad performance gets committed to, the experience will degrade. Sure they're not selling data, however they'll almost certainly have a direct response communication where advertisers tell Open AI what and when youve interacted with their products. Ads will be placed and displayed in increasingly more aggressive positions, although it'll start out non intrusive. Im curious how their targeting will work and how much control they'll give advertisers to start. Will they allow businesses of all sizes? Will they allow advertisers to control how their ads work? I bet Amazon is foaming at the mouth to get their products fed into chat gpt results.

ed_mercer 10mo ago

Lots of negative comments here. OpenAI has to make a move, they are not profitable and have massive costs and debt. I think this one of the least bad moves, given all data that they have on users. They could have monetized their data so much more, and sooner.

beAbU 10mo ago
But agi
observationist 10mo ago
I think it's damning that they possibly have the most advanced AI on the planet right now, unfiltered, no guard rails, and as much compute as they could possibly want for deep reasoning and inference, and despite that, the best move they could make was enshittification. I've been bullish for OpenAI, but that's starting to fade. Sama is a master of the artful dodge, though, so it'll be interesting to see what happens. Between the burn rate and the lawsuits and the need for more compute, there's a ton of pressure on them right now.
- usef- 10mo ago
  How do you propose they fund the free usage otherwise? They do offer a paid version without ads. (typically the ~entire general public chooses the ads: see how ad-supported products beat paid in virtually every generation of tech)
  - majewsky 10mo ago
    > How do you propose they fund the free usage otherwise? Why do random HN commenters have to come up with a business model for free LLM usage? If LLMs are so great, they should not need to offer a free tier at all. Surely word of mouth would make people line up around the block to snatch one of those highly coveted subscriptions.
    - usef- 10mo ago
      That is happening, and they are one of the fastest growing products of all time in revenue. But word of mouth can also say "this other provider (eg. google) is free and allows more usage" as the market matures. Google has a bigger pocketbook due to their ad income.

bicepjai 10mo ago

This Black Mirror episode is so track from being sci-fi to reality. This will happen in the long horizon with at least the way LLMs are chatting with us. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)

stubish 10mo ago

When the training data is 'the Internet', I don't see why you would pay to relegate yourself to a box people will train themselves to ignore. Instead, why not astroturf and ensure the training data will promote you organically?

93po 10mo ago

calling it now: people are going to a use a layer of LLM on top of this in a browser extension that takes the ChatGPT text and removes the ads from it.

deleted 10mo ago

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dcchambers 10mo ago

So much for building AGI, lol. The whole company is built on lies and deception.

tjpnz 10mo ago

That's cute. I'll still be blocking them.

frm88 10mo ago

So many comments and not one considers the impact political ads will have on the world.

foogazi 10mo ago
Any interesting elections coming up ?