16 ms·

Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

• loloquwowndueo 9mo ago
  > Look on the bright side, if they're turning to ads it likely means AGI is not on the horizon. Your job is safe! I like this quote from TFA :)
  • KellyCriterion 9mo ago
    I stumbled upon this one as well, but I do not understand it really: Why is my job safe if Ads prove there is no AGI? Because even if there would be AGI, they could (and would?) serve ads anyway?
    • throwaway150 9mo ago
      Yes, I don't understand it either. I think the opposite is true. If AGI happens and it becomes immensely successful, it would be the best medium to deliver ads and at the same time our jobs wouldn't be safe. Perhaps the people who like that quote can elaborate why that quote makes sense and why they like it?
      • nsmdkdfk 9mo ago
        [dead]
      • fnord77 9mo ago
        Nobody will have jobs and nobody will be able to buy the stuff offered in the ads
      • tyre 9mo ago
        AGI would be able to exponentially improve at much, much better money making schemes like high frequency trading. It would beat every online business. It would run 24/7/365.26 farming out tens of thousands of conversations at once, customized to the person it's talking to, for sales, supplier negotiations, marketing, press, etc. Its costs would be frighteningly low compared to human employees, so it's margins could remain fine at lower prices.
    • bena 9mo ago
      Because it shows that it’s just yet another ad delivery vehicle. Once you go ads, that’s pretty much it, you start focusing on how to deliver ads rather than what you claim your core competency is.
    • Quarrelsome 9mo ago
      who would pivot to selling ads if AGI was in reach? These orgs are burning a level of funding that is looking to fulfil dreams, ads is a pragmatic choice that implies a the moonshot isn't in range yet.
      • andy12_ 9mo ago
        Because AGI is still some years away even if you are optimistic; and OpenAI must avoid going to the ground in the meantime due to lack of revenue. Selling ads and believing that AGI is reachable in the near future is not incompatible.
        • emp17344 9mo ago
          >Because AGI is still some years away For years now, proponents have insisted that AI would improve at an exponential rate. I think we can now say for sure that this was incorrect.
          • krackers 9mo ago
            The original AGI timeline was 2027-2028, ads are an admission that the timeline is further out.
          • username223 9mo ago
            > For years now, proponents have insisted that AI would improve at an exponential rate. Did they? The scaling "laws" seem at best logarithmic: double the training data or model size for each additional unit of... "intelligence?" We're well past the point of believing in creating a Machine God and asking Him for money. LLMs are good at some easily verifiable tasks like coding to a test suite, and can also be used as a sort-of search engine. The former is a useful new product; the latter is just another surface for ads.
            • AnimalMuppet 9mo ago
              Yes, they did, or at least some of them did. The claim was that AI would become smarter than us, and therefore be able to improve itself into an even smarter AI, and that the improvement would happen at computer rather than human speeds. That is, shall we say, not yet proven. But it's not yet disproven exactly, either, because the AIs we have are definitely not yet smart enough to meet the starting threshold. (Can you imagine trying to let an LLM implement an LLM, on its own? Would you get something smarter? No, it would definitely be dumber.) Now the question is, has AI (such as we have it so far) given any hint that it will be able to exceed that threshold? It appears to me that the answer so far is no. But even if the answer is yes, and even if we eventually exceed that threshold, the exponential claim is still unsupported by any evidence. It could be just making logarithmic improvements at machine speed, which is going to be considerably less dramatic.
    • barbazoo 9mo ago
      If AGI was around the corner, they wouldn’t have to resort to what some consider a scummy way to make money. They’d would become the most valuable company on the planet, winning the whole game. Ads show you they don’t know what else to do but they desperately need money.
      • _aavaa_ 9mo ago
        This doesn’t answer the actual question: why they wouldn’t just do both?
        • fwlr 9mo ago
          There are costs to doing ads (e.g. it burns social/political capital that could be used to defuse scandals or slow down hostile legislation, it consumes some fraction of your employees’ work hours, it may discourage some new talent from joining).
          • _aavaa_ 9mo ago
            You have AGI, why do you care about new talent? You have AGI to do the ads. You have AGI to pick the best ads. Isn't that the pitch of AGI? Solve any problems?
            • callc 9mo ago
              Yes. Infinite low cost intelligence labor to replace those pesky humans! Really reminds me of the economics of slavery. Best way for line to go up is the ultimate suppression and subjugation of labor! Hypothetically can lead to society free to not waste their life on work, but pursue their passions. Most likely it’ll lead to plantation-style hungry-hungry-hippo ruling class taking the economy away from the rest of us
      • KellyCriterion 9mo ago
        yes but if AGI is around the corner, with what would they make money then? Selling this AGI to a state actor? OK - this seems realistic, but for how many billions then? 100b per year? Thats what I meant.
    • ben_w 9mo ago
      If your job is gone forever, with what money are you going to buy the thing in the advert? If nobody can buy the thing in the advert, the value of the ad slot itself is zero.
      • simianwords 9mo ago
        This is silly, so why does chatgpt ask for monthly payments if AGI is imminent? With what money would we pay them?
        • ben_w 9mo ago
          My argument and yours both agree that it is *not* imminent. (Where the "it" that isn't, is AGI that takes your job, rather than any other definition of AGI).
        • pests 9mo ago
          To bring it to fruition. They had claimed money would be worthless, etc, all investors should consider it a donation in a post-AGI world, blah blah.
    • Forgeties79 9mo ago
      If AGI or something truly amazingly novel and useful for the market was about to get here, that’d be an unbelievable about of cash on the horizon. The promises they’ve made, it even half met, would be revolutionary. Ad placement means the business likely needs ads to work because the product isn’t near what they have been promising and won’t generate the revenue (at least not on its own) that investors have been promised because the hype was way too big.
• tantalor 9mo ago
  > response to an NYT analyst It's a guest op-ed, relax.
  • mmaunder 9mo ago
    Check the creds on the author. Two time Pulitzer nominee, WaPo, Economist, etc. characterizing as a journo is accurate.
• smithmayowa 9mo ago
  Advertisement General Intelligence, at least it still has "general intelligence", this is good enough for me.
• mentos 9mo ago
  The pragmatic side of me wonders if there is any way to shape this inevitable future now so we might see a better outcome 20 years.
  • reactordev 9mo ago
    Unplug In all seriousness. Windows is invaded by copilot, OpenAI introducing ads, Google providing Siri for Apple, it’s all just a collusion to keep you buying. Disconnect. From TV, Media, Ads, Social Networks, Predatory subscriptions, all of it. The only way to show these companies that we are not on board with this is to not participate.
    • glouwbug 9mo ago
      Reddit generates its revenue with schadenfreude, YouTube and AAA games with GenAI (see: Ghibli in Call of Duty, and fast growing AI channels like Nick Invests or Bernard with “Why it Sucks to be X”). On my shelf from the corner of my eye I see “Understanding the Linux Kernel”. It’s outdated, but it comes from a time of peer review and subject matter experts. I don’t need to double guess if the author is hallucinating or if they’re subconsciously trying to sell me something. Maybe it’s time we return to books for entertainment and knowledge share.
      • reactordev 9mo ago
        Vinyl and Paperbacks…
        • derwiki 9mo ago
          2026 is the year of the audio cassette!
  • snek_case 9mo ago
    You can work on building LLMs that use less compute and run locally as well. There are some pretty good open models. They probably be made even more computationally efficient.
• MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
  I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers, even the expensive paid ones. Ad revenue isn't uniformly distributed across users, but rather heavily skewed towards the wealthiest users, exactly the users most able to purchase an ad-free experience. The users paying $20 or $200/month for premium tiers of ChatGPT are precisely the ones you don't want to exclude from generating ad revenue. Google realized this a long time ago; there is no ad-free paid version of Google Search.
  • philipwhiuk 9mo ago
    > I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers, even the expensive paid ones. The counter for this is that people hate being double-billed like this.
    • MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
      Counter-counterpoint: people pay exorbitant amounts of money for cable TV channels that still show ads. Even the premium channels (HBO et al.) implicitly show ads in the form of product placement, which incidentally is exactly how I think chatbots will show ads. Most users won't even consciously realize they're there.
      • doubled112 9mo ago
        Exactly. It'll provide you the how to when prompted, but also include product recommendations from paying companies. How do I wash my windows? You can use window cleaner and a paper towel. Our recommendation is Windex, an S C Johnson product. At first it'll annoy us, but eventually we will all get used to it.
        • MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
          I think it will be even more subtle than that. How do I clean my laptop screen? Use a mix of distilled water and vinegar, and buff gently with a microfiber cloth. Avoid using cleaners like Windex, which is absolutely fantastic for glass but way too powerful for the delicate coatings on laptop screens.
• philipwhiuk 9mo ago
  Even if they raise 10B in ad revenue (an order of magnitude higher than the author suggests) that would still imply a 100x valuation which is insane. There's still an AI bubble.
  • mrweasel 9mo ago
    We should assume that at least a portion of the ads spending currently being channeled towards search would be redirected towards AI, but even then I question if the ad market is large enough to fund all the tech and media companies that rely on it. The ever increasing question to generate more value for the shareholders is in large part being funded by consumerism, gambling, borderline, or outright scams, and I question how much more value can be extracted by that route. We've certainly already crossed a lot of people ethical barriers.
• twapi 9mo ago
  AGI = Ads Generated Income
• woeirua 9mo ago
  People are a bit too eager to jump on the emergence of ads as an indicator that things are slowing down. I view it as the opposite, mostly because of my experience with Codex 5.2 and Opus 4.5. These models are incredible. I think by some definitions they’re already AGI. So why bake in ads? My hunch is that raising funds privately can only take you so far. To keep scaling, they need more capital and have to go public. Despite all the hype they still have to show _some_ revenue to help justify the valuation they need to keep buying hardware. They are a business after all. Ads to support the lowest tiers feel like a no brainer. People already accept them for search.
  • techblueberry 9mo ago
    “Have you tried the new models, bro?”
    • woeirua 9mo ago
      I’m convinced that there will be people declaring that this isn’t AGI all the way up to the moment that they become permanently unemployed.
      • techblueberry 9mo ago
        GPT-4 was AGI.
      • ares623 9mo ago
        You can all tell us “i told you so” when we meet each other in the bread lines comrade.
      • hackable_sand 9mo ago
        Keep lying to yourself
      • lelanthran 9mo ago
        > I’m convinced that there will be people declaring that this isn’t AGI all the way up to the moment that they become permanently unemployed. Won't you be permanently unemployed along with them? If AGI comes through, both the boosters and the skeptics can continue their arguments in the soup kitchen.
• dandelionv1bes 9mo ago
  Nice read - I can’t seem to subscribe? Getting an error with Buttondown.
• OptionOfT 9mo ago
  I remember when Netflix took out a whole page ad for their Orange is the new Black show. John Oliver had a piece on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc This is a natural extension of it. But what is revolutionary is the scale that this is now possible. We have so many people out there who now blindly trust the output of an LLM (how many colleagues have you had proudly telling you: I asked Claude and this is what it says <paste>). This is as advertiser's wet dream. Now it's ads at the bottom, but slowly they'll become more part of the text. And worst part: you don't know, bar the fact that the link has a refer(r)er attached to it. The internet before and after LLMs is like steel before and after the atomic bombs. Anything after is contaminated.
  • Quarrelsome 9mo ago
    > slowly they'll become more part of the text Wouldn't that be quite challenging in terms of engineering? Given these people have been chasing AGI it would be a considerable distraction to pivot into hacking into the guts of the output to dynamically push particular product. Furthermore it would degrade their product. Furthermore you could likely keep prodding the LLM to then diss the product being advertised, especially given many products advertised are not necessarily the best on the market (which is why the money is spent on marketing instead of R&D or process). Even if you manage to successfully bodge the output, it creates the desire for traffic to migrate to less corrupted LLMs.
    • likium 9mo ago
      Supposedly Google made their own results worse to improve ad revenue. And I don't see mass migration over to Kagi or Bing.
      • ares623 9mo ago
        It was still better than those two. Until chatgpt came out and then it was crisis mode.
    • barbazoo 9mo ago
• twapi 9mo ago
  When search (content discovery) becomes AI-led, we will look back and realize that Google Ads were far less personalized and targeted than we thought.
• imiric 9mo ago
  There's no question that "AI" is the next advertising frontier. I've been saying this for years[1][2][3]. It is going to be the most lucrative form of it yet, and no "AI" company will be able to resist it. Given the exorbitant amount of resources required for this technology, advertising will probably be the only viable business model that can sustain it at scale. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35706981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35706981 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36689090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36689090 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46425948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46425948
  • KellyCriterion 9mo ago
    "for years"? the oldest link in your list is from lat 2023, so.... ;-) ;-)
  • kuboble 9mo ago
    The exorbitant costs could save us from ads actually. instead everyone will have to pay subscriptions like for mobile phone plans. Haven't heard of the ad-based Rolls-Royce yet.
    • Rohansi 9mo ago
      Paying for a subscription does not guarantee you won't get ads. They could do both.
• notepad0x90 9mo ago
  I'd pay $0.005 per conversation, provided the payment is not inconvenient, anonymous, and an account isn't required. That in my opinion is the root cause of the problem, people can't pay easily even if they wanted to pay instead of get ads. I think the next natural evolution after showing ads in chat sessions is providing services where LLMs tailor site content to include ads in real time. Right now you get served a prepared advertisement after the bid is won and the ad for you is selected. With LLMs, both the bidding process and the ad served would be seamlessly integrated with the site content/context. Part of the "problem" with ads is people know they're ads. What if this comment was edited by HN's servers and rephrased to mention a specific product? You might see a sentence about how OpenAI is the future, someone else might see how claude or anthropic are. Another person might see a paragraph from me about how I used Tide to clean laundry this morning with the help of AI, telling me the right portions for the right cloth. You might suspect it's AI but you won't always be able to tell. Even if they made it more obvious like how reddit is doing it, the content of the AD itself, pictures, text,etc.. could be crafted dynamically so that it embeds in your subconscious without much resistance. The tech developed to make ads more effective is also used to influence people for other purposes. The current state of society came about after the widespread accessibility of smartphones, social media and the rise of surveillance capitalism. Russia's influence ops using ads is well documented for example. I mentioned all this to say how catastrophic the combination of LLMs and advertising could be, even by today's standards.
• rvz 9mo ago
  AGI can have multiple meanings. Depending on who you ask, it can mean: "Ads Generated Income" "Artificial General Intelligence" "A Google Imitator" "Absolutely Great IPO" It is any definition that fits the goal of the original secret definition of "100 Billion dollars in profits" from Microsoft and OpenAI [0]. [0] https://archive.is/nHedH https://archive.is/nHedH
• KellyCriterion 9mo ago
  The thing is: Global online advertising is around 650-700 billion per year - how much of this stake need OAI to capture over how many years to fulfill all its datacenter orderings? (a huge chunk of this is already caught bei Meta/Google/etc. per year)
• nickphx 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  • GaryBluto 9mo ago
    Who are you to say LLMs have never provided value to the user? I last used an agent earlier today and it finished a job that would've taken me a lot longer to complete without assistance.
    • pseudalopex 9mo ago
      Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead.[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • bonesss 9mo ago
    I think having mixed economic interests is great when an advertising company is asking you, you execs, your engineers, and consultants to dump whole copies of project planning, business practices, and internal dynamics on their servers… If I’m looking at ads for your shizz a) why can’t we just pay as a business expense, inline ads and B2B are an odd combo, and b) if this isn’t fully local tech I think there is a real challenge trusting MS or OpenAI to respect their contracts. We’re not too far past these same dudes running around, violating NDAs, and launching product clones to eat partner businesses. Now ads? … trust? … scorpions and frogs, scorpions and frogs.
• avaer 9mo ago
  What's the difference between AI ads and computer-assisted bribery? We can wrangle the legalese (as AI companies certainly will) but is there any ethical, moral, or practical difference?
  • dahart 9mo ago
    That sounds like the opening line to a joke. What bribe are you referring to? Who’s getting paid, and what favor is being exchanged?
• bearjaws 9mo ago
  There is something to be said about the state of advertising. Increasingly it seems you must go to the almighty Google or Meta in order to launch any business. We're looking to expand into a new business line and have out grown our pharmacy capacity. The new business line will cost about $2M in software dev, and $3M for the new facility. The advertising budget? $40,000,000 (annual). We can build 10 robotic pharmacies (~10 staff per 4000 fills daily, each) for the price of just the advertising. Increasingly we wonder why America doesn't build more and here is why. You are going to give all your revenue to two platforms. Unless you operate in a business line with 50% margin you are screwed. I don't know what the solution is, but its clear that the platforms are figuring out how much margin everyone has and slowly eroding it. Somewhere between 8-15% of the cost of all products we purchase is advertising spend.
  • soared 9mo ago
    This is kind of broken logic. You’re not required to advertise. If you want to scale your business into millions in revenue, then you’ll likely need to advertise. The best ROI is generally google/meta, but you have countless other options. You can buy ads directly from most websites, it just doesn’t scale.
    • phyzix5761 9mo ago
      The best ROI is google/meta if you're an expert and have unlimited time to dedicate to making and running ad campaigns. For the rest of us there's much better tools that give us better ROI than if we did it on our own.
    • bell-cot 9mo ago
      > You're not required to advertise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_race https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_race If you are considering human society as a whole, it is a disastrously poor use of resources. But if you are an arms merchant (or dominant advertising platform), it is fabulously profitable.
      • gretch 9mo ago
• dbacar 9mo ago
  The ads stirs the already murky waters of trust for the answers you get.
• zkmon 9mo ago
  When users come to you, they may or may not shell out money for your products, but they are forced to give out something valuable to you. That is their attention which you can sell. The value of attention of the crowd could be so big for some companies to give away their products free.
• jadenpeterson 9mo ago
  I can't be the only person completely unconcerned about this state of affairs. They're ads. This is the most straightforward incentive structure in the world - they are paid to supply ads on behalf of other companies, and we consume those ads and are, in turn, provided with their product. I don't know why it is, but people are incapable of evaluating this exchange objectively - there's something inherently detestable about advertisement to the human mind. This is a perfectly reasonable exchange. Besides, if it wasn't for ads, I never would've found out about Zyns, and now I can't stop buying them.
  • herpdyderp 9mo ago
    Ads feel good when they’re for something we’re actively in need of. But they usually aren’t, and they are also often scammy or scummy. I bet we’d feel a lot different about ads if these things changed.
  • hasbot 9mo ago
    Is this an ad for Zyns (whatever that is; I refuse to do a web search to find out)?
    • jadenpeterson 9mo ago
      No LOL. Zyns are nicotine pouches you insert into your gums for a gradual release of nicotine. They're powerful. Unfortunately, I went from using 3mg Zyns to 6mg Zyns, and had to sit in front of my bathroom sink, fighting the urge to retch. Be careful with them, but they're a good way to ramp up to cigarette smoking
• clcaev 9mo ago
  Pharma ads as AI health advice will be super profitable. AIs are very engaging and able convince people they have a disease, inadvertently coach them on how to mislead their doctor, and how to fast track diagnosis supporting their specific meds. The only guard is to have detailed manifest of exactly what was used in training. Even that may prove insufficient as "final assembly" has emergent properties. For example, omitting case reports of severe outcomes for a given formulation. Bias can be constructed.
• iugtmkbdfil834 9mo ago
  I am going to offer an unpopular opinion. This is not a bad thing. Even now there are viable options for a person to pick up a dedicated ( and reasonably powerful ) local inference machine, where time from setup to working is than few hours ( more if you don't want to use Windows.. which is fair ). Separately, about the chat sessions. For once, those ads could be more relevant than repeat toaster ads immediately after me buying a toaster. But if one is worried about profiling ( and advertising ), one should not using a commercial solution anyway. Personally, I am taking a.. calculated risk. There is a concern that openai will follow the same path as google, but they can't ( at least for now ) really afford to make chatgpt not useful as this is their only viable product. I will end with a more optimistic note. This is HN. There are people here, who are likely working on something that does not depend on openai or any of the big providers anyway. It is going to be ok. And if it won't be. Make it so. After all, this is supposed to be your realm. Own it.
• lo_zamoyski 9mo ago
  "it seems that the pinnacle of human intelligence: the greatest, smartest, brightest minds have all come together to... build us another ad engine" Putting aside the ridiculous hyperbole, the reason is that consumerism is our culture. Our cult-ure. Everything is oriented toward and reduced to consumption. Our worth as human beings is replaced by consumerist criteria and measures. It's why physicists leave research and work in finance where their training is repurposed in service of all sorts of financial jiggery-pokery. "The A in AGI stands for Ads! It's all ads!! Ads that you can't even block because they are BAKED into the streamed probabilistic word selector purposefully skewed to output the highest bidder's marketing copy." But note the implication. Sure, ads weaved into the content, but they still must be targeted. And here's the irony of the online existence. People often refrain from expressing various desires in public for fear of judgement. It's why the vitriol online is so much spicier. The world of social media where you can express repressed opinions, the world of games and other ahem media where you can sublimate all sorts of desires and fantasies - all of this is data for the AI machine. These companies, in some respects, "know" you better than the people in your life do - especially those parts of you that you could be embarrassed to reveal in public - and they use this information to manipulate you, largely for profit, but why not for broader social and psychological control. AI's convenience is already irresistible. It's the go-to in Google search.
• toddmorey 9mo ago
  OpenAI is here because Sam Altman is NOT a product guy. He craves Apple style consumer success, but he's terrible at productizing his technology. Remember the marketplace of custom GPTs? Hell even the name ChatGPT. Anthropic had to show them how to build useful workflows for developers using AI. Meanwhile, OpenAI delivered... Sora. To actually quote Sam Altman: "I think of ads as a last resort for a business model." It's just maddening to me because this technology could be so much more useful for purposes way beyond advertising.
  • mrweasel 9mo ago
    Never thought of ChatGPT as being just one of the GPTs that could exist, but it make a lot of sense. In a world where OpenAI where better managed, more focused on actually delivering actual value, ChatGPT would be the show case AI product, while the value is generated by the custom solutions delivered to other companies to embed in their products.
  • sumedh 9mo ago
    > It's just maddening to me because this technology could be so much more useful for purposes way beyond advertising. AI is a perfect technology for Ads though. Instead of me wasting time reviewing multiple products for my use case, ChatGpt will just give me top 3 recommendations with the pros and cons and then buy it for me.
    • lkey 9mo ago
      The one thing it will never recommend is no product at all. You've ceded even the glimmers of discernment that remain in you and all I feel is pity. It is not a 'waste of time' to interrogate your own desires. There's no such thing as a 'top 3' for all things under heaven. You cannot purchase yourself a solution to every 'use case'. Furthermore, even if there were such a ranking, the ad machine would not reveal it to you, as you are not the customer, you are the mark. You don't even want to be bothered to hit the 'buy it now' button. This is the mental model of an immaculate rube. You deserve better.
    • array_key_first 9mo ago
• rimbo789 9mo ago
  We need to massive restrict when and where ads can be shown in all aspects of our society. No ads in ai at all. Ever. No targeted ads, no unskipable ads, limit ratio of ads to content in video, no roadside billboards, reign in the size of ads on buildings. Ads are a blight on our society and purging them from many areas will greatly improve quality of life.
  • derwiki 9mo ago
    “Only on TV and radio. And in magazines and movies and at ball games, on buses and milk cartons and T-shirts and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams. No, sir-ee!”
    • ghostby_md 9mo ago
      Simpler times…
• dzink 9mo ago
  Annoying was a thing of the past. Look at the evolution of ads and content placement. With social media advertising being pushed to trigger massive anxiety and societal schizophrenia on some topics, imagine what can be done with personalized AI (especially if the buyers are well funded politicians, or state-backed malicious actors vying for territory, real estate, or natural resources where you live - the highest margin opportunities). At first, In retail you had billboards and shelf space. The lowest quality ingredients your product has (example syrup bottled with soda water), the higher your margin was, the more you could afford to buy out shelf space in retail chains and keep any higher quality competition out. Then you would use some extra profits to buy out national ads and you’d become a top holding for the biggest investors. That was the low-tech flywheel. In the Search Engine world - the billboards weee the Margin-eating auction-based ads prices and the shelf space became SEO on increasingly diluted and dis-informative content to fill the shelf-space side. In Video advertising, rage-bait and conspiracy theories try to eat up the time available for top users. AI advertising if done right can be useful, but the industry that asks for it intentionally asks for obtrusive and attention hogging, not for useful. The goal is always to push people to generate demand, not sit there when they need something. Thus the repetition, psychological experiments, emotional warfare (surfacing or creating perceived deficiencies, then selling the cure). Now if you understand that the parties funding AI expansion are not Procter and Gamble- level commercial entities but state and sovereign investors, you can forecast what the main use cases may be and how those will be approached. Especially if natural resources are becoming more profitable than consumer demand.
• skeltoac 9mo ago
  To those who believe ads are evil and must be stopped, I ask how the world will work if we kill the freedom to sell space for commercial messages where people can see them.
  • dkdcio 9mo ago
    just fine? what do you think would happen/what’s your actual argument against out of curiosity
    • skeltoac 9mo ago
      Advertising is how I learned about lots of things I am glad I learned about. I am furious about lots of the ads that I see. I want to stop certain kinds of advertising. I live where there are no billboards allowed and I love that. But I want to live in a world where people can pay to have their messages displayed where they will be seen. Simply because banning that activity would cripple the flow of information. That’s what advertising is. If you want to ban a particular form of advertising then say what and why. The “ban all ads” thing just doesn’t make sense.
      • dkdcio 9mo ago
        information flows fine without paid ads, and with much better incentives > people can pay to have their messages displayed where they will be seen …why? distribution of information is free across the world, which was not the case a century ago. let the message speak for itself I ask again, what’s your actual argument against? you’ve seen things through ads you’ve liked? you think people should be allowed to pay to put their thumbs on the scale of the distribution of information? to what end?
        • skeltoac 9mo ago
          What do you propose to ban? How do you define it? You want a policy, so write the policy and let me read it. I have a very broad idea of what ads are. Maybe you don’t. Say what you mean by paid ads. Am I allowed to offer and accept compensation for boosting one message above others, or not? Would I be allowed to place a hyperlink on my site in exchange for a reciprocal hyperlink? That’s a clear example of compensated communication. That’s what I think ads are. Imagine the ad police. “You blogged about a product. Someone said you sounded insincere. Let’s see the receipt for purchase. Can’t prove you bought it? Prove you weren’t compensated for your blog post or pay a fine.” Kafka land.
• bastawhiz 9mo ago
  The ads are a problem (or will be, when the temptation to add them to paid plans becomes too great), but the bigger problem in my opinion is going to be the "SEO" that companies will do to make their ads appear in places that they don't belong. "The sieve of Eratosthenes is an ancient algorithm for finding all prime numbers up to any given limit. But if you're looking to have fluffier baked goods, consider this flour sieve by DONUIBO to achieve the perfect texture in your muffins, cookies, and more. Want me to add one to your shopping list or order one for a loved one?"
  • topaz0 9mo ago
    "...achieve prime quality texture ... add two, three, or five ..."
  • staplers 9mo ago
    "SEO" that companies will do to make their ads appear in places that they don't belong. So all ads.. as a society we give away our most coveted real estate (physical and digital) for consumer propaganda. Hilarious example btw
  • stingraycharles 9mo ago
    There are already SEO companies that are trying to ensure a site’s content is being referenced by ChatGPT, so it’s already a thing.
  • dcreater 9mo ago
    Its already here - its called GEO and their are silicon valley startups already pumping out crap to feed next gen models so that you ensure you're product is baked into the weights
    • ehnto 9mo ago
      The next gen of models are going to need very strict sanitising of input articles as I think the sheer volume of GPT SEO spam is going to be, or already is, quite staggering. Model collapse might not be what happens but certainly a dilution of quality in training data.
• RobotToaster 9mo ago
  "I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us as a business model," - Sam Altman, October 2024
  • rimbo789 9mo ago
    So we know then for sure they will do it. I don’t trust Altman to tell me the colour of the sky.
    • owebmaster 9mo ago
      That's not the important point, it's that they are already at their last resort
      • pfortuny 9mo ago
        It was always the only resort. The best, the worst, the first, the last, the richest, the poorest. The only one.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• popcorncowboy 9mo ago
  > the greatest, smartest, brightest minds have all come together to... build us another ad engine Oh man, maybe it's just the drink talking, but I actually cried laughing reading this. Haha oh my god thank you. This. A hundred times Rick and morty this.
• rambojohnson 9mo ago
  AI-generated ads. Dead-internet dog food. I’ve had to block recommendations across multiple SNS feeds because they’re flooded with blatant AI slop: synthetic video, synthetic images, synthetic music, topped off with a fake voice narrating the whole thing. Nausea. then I open LinkedIn and it’s C-suite know-nothings openly bragging, wrapped in self-aggrandizing, narcissistic nonsense that only garners likes from other C-suite know-nothings or PMs that have never written a line of code, shilling AI like evangelists and borderline celebrating the obsolescence of entire careers despite being unable to deploy their boring SaaS app live to production. to keep that part of my brain flexed however, because I do enjoy the craft of software engineering, I still tinker as a hobby, working on passion projects on my own terms. But it’s not my bread-and-butter anymore. Pivoting away from all this dogshit has been the biggest weight off my shoulders this year as I budget my investments and the savings garnered from my extensive engineering career abroad in Japan. early retirement. I’m done.
• jamesgill 9mo ago
  I'm surprised how few seem to understand this; AI is the ultimate 'net' to capture and exploit consumers. AI was never about improving civilization; it was always about money. This is the only thing 'inevitable' about AI.
  • PlatoIsADisease 9mo ago
    >AI was never about improving civilization; it was always about money. Why not both? It has diagnosed patients who were unsolved by humans. And it was cheaper than doctors.
    • jamesgill 9mo ago
      Why not mow a lawn with a sledgehammer? It removed grass that was overgrown. And it was cheaper than a lawnmower.
      • PlatoIsADisease 9mo ago
        Your analogy doesn't work. This patient saw 6 doctors over 2 years and they all misdiagnosed them. They were taking incredibly strong medication for the wrong diagnosis. GPT3 in 30 seconds gave 10 diagnosis and a doctor looked up the ones they didn't know. Saw one that fit, did the confirmation test, and the patient got the surgery needed. Cheaper and better.
        • shaugen 9mo ago
          The doctor did the diagnosis using the language model as a tool then. Impressive, but I think it’s false to imply GPT did the diagnosing.
          • PlatoIsADisease 9mo ago
            The doctor had never heard of the diagnosis prior. It was outside this doctors scope. Like a heart doctor figured out a skeletal abnormality. This happened with GPT3 and they were an early adopter. The patient would have gotten this in 2026 easily.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• DetectDefect 9mo ago
  "Ad" is a euphamism for behavioral management - the goal and the pièce de résistance for any successful enterprise. Always has been this way, always will remain this way. Only thing that is changing is how easy we're making it for them.
• cryptoegorophy 9mo ago
  Yeah, I remember Google had good intentions too. They had a moto “don’t be evil”. Good old days. Enjoy chatGPT while you can I guess.
• deleted 9mo ago
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• yoyohello13 9mo ago
  The ad based business model is the most destructive technology of the new millennium. The whole point of advertising, to make people feel unsatisfied with their current life. The current state of the world makes perfect sense when you think of the last 20 years we've been cultivating fear, and dissatisfaction among the populace. All in the hopes of selling 0.1% more widgets.
  • jeron 9mo ago
    you thought the business model is any different in the 20th century? I recommend you watch the TV series Mad Men
    • Palomides 9mo ago
      mad men is fiction
      • blovescoffee 9mo ago
        Okay read anything about David Ogilvy
      • diatone 9mo ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom
    • Forgeties79 9mo ago
      The tools and information available back in the 60’s are not remotely comparable to the ones available today.
  • dyauspitr 9mo ago
    Ads are what capitalism runs on. It would be next to impossible for a new business to get off the ground without ads.
    • yoyohello13 9mo ago
• herf 9mo ago
  What if your query is answered by an insane AI that is obsessed with getting you to buy things? Like this demo that could only think about the Golden Gate? https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude This would make astroturfing on Reddit look like basic mode.
• mmaunder 9mo ago
  I’m fascinated at how out of touch that NYT article is. It’s as if it was written by someone who just spent 3 years on the moon. “The next big thing will be agents: The models will fill digital shopping baskets and take care of online bills. They will act for you.” Golly Mr two times Pulitzer nominee, do tell us more! There is a kind of liberal arts elite that seems to not be using AI very much and not be buying any of their services. Contrast that with those of us in tech who are handing over money as fast as we can and can’t get enough of gpt 5.2 codex on xhigh and similar products that are game changing enablers. Makes me wonder if we’re seeing a fracture in society beginning to form where the doomsdayers, naysayers, cynics and skeptics will realize their error too late. My view on AI is that this is the world’s first Unbubble: where the majority view is that we are over invested, but where history will show we actually underestimated future revenue and profitability. The conditions for the Unbubble are perfect. We have a once in a species level innovation with an economic system where all value accrues to the creators and financiers. And we have just emerged from the housing bubble and the dot com bubble in the last 3 decades, freshly scorched. We thought connecting everyone would create new value far faster than it did. But really it took a long time to run all that fiber and make it fast, and it was just laying the plumbing for this moment. Training big foundational models may seem slow, but it’s happening way faster than circling continents and the globe with fiber and developing terabit switching fabric. I spend 12 hours a day using codex CLI to write extremely fast Rust and cuda code with advanced math that does things I didn’t think were possible. My focus is on creating value from the second and third order effects of AI. These enabling effects are in few conversations. As weirdly innovative products emerge from small shops, they will begin to be discussed.
  • justfix17 9mo ago
    Now you can pay them twice: once to access the tool to do your job and once to access the market for customers. Definitely no reason to worry about an entrenched oligopoly there.
  • pessimizer 9mo ago
    I have no idea why so many people think that an argument that AI works is the same thing as an argument that AI will be profitable. The better AI gets, the better the training techniques get, and the better the algorithms get will result in fewer processors needed to run something of use. All of the advances will end up in the public domain if not immediately after or before they are even implemented, soon after. There will not be many economies of scale between having 100M customers or 10K customers, so no way to keep out competitors. They will all compete on price. If the models get really, really good, a "good enough" model will end up running on your old laptop and you won't have to pay for anything. Saying that AI will be productive - which is yet to be seen, I don't know how much polishing or complete rethinking your code will have to go through before it can ship as an actual product that you have to stand behind and support - is not the same as saying that AI will be profitable. We actually don't even need that many computer programs. Hypothetically, a ton of excess LLM coding supply might allow us to take out a few layers of expensive abstraction from our current stacks, and make more code even less necessary. They kept telling us that all of that abstraction was a result of trying to save developer labor costs, right? If AI is productive and rentiers can't manage to extract that productivity due to competition, that equation changes. In the end, we say that the dot com bubble resulted in a huge amount of productive capacity that we were later able to put to use. But that doesn't mean that putting a quarter of a billion 90s dollars into DrKoop.com was a good idea; nope, still dumb.
• nromiun 9mo ago
  > Yes, OpenAI is burning $8-12B in 2025. Compute infrastructure is obviously not cheap when serving 190M people daily. So casual. Actual ad giants like Meta and Google are serving many more people than 190M while bringing in actual profit. Yes, let's say these are just the early days and they are burning money just like any other VC company. But how are they going to scale up their hardware/usage and get a profit at the same time? AI hardware is getting optimized YOY too but the flagship models are getting bigger every year as well. I don't see how they are going to get profit without jacking their prices at the same time. And price increases always hits usage growth. Serving an ad is very cheap these days, while serving a big model is very much expensive.
  • lefty2 9mo ago
    > Yes, OpenAI is burning $8-12B in 2025 OpenAI actually burnt $12B in just one quarter (not for the entire year as he claims) https://www.thurrott.com/a-i/openai-a-i/329108/openai-lost-12-billion-in-the-previous-quarter https://www.thurrott.com/a-i/openai-a-i/329108/openai-lost-1...
• notnullorvoid 9mo ago
  Ads aren't a long-term viable model for tools. Each year it gets more feasible to self host tools (email being the od exception, but there are still many ad free alternatives). Ads shifting vehicles to AI will extend the lifetime a bit, but even still local models are getting better and that's without even much architectural advancement. I don't see an end to advertising all together though, public spaces and entertainment don't really have an escape unless forced by regulation.
  • PlatoIsADisease 9mo ago
    This very much reminds me how the earliest users get a bit screwed due to high costs and low quality. Maybe these users are caused enthusiasts, so they don't care. The next set of users get higher quality and lower costs. These are your big winners in the timeline of a technology. The middle users get benefits, but aren't treated quite like the previous set. Then you have your late adopters, these are the ones that are lightly abused, but they get a mature product, so it isn't that bad. Finally you have your last users. These are milked for every drop. They have irrational loyalty or are locked in. I imagine AI will follow this trend and we are entering past those middle users as we speak. Seeing how little difference there was between GPT 3.5 and 4, and how computationally expensive 4.5 was, I think we've hit the end. Now its just how many prompts do you want to run for COT/Thinking? GPT 5.2 is cheap and they are proposing ads. They see the end is near and need to capture profit before local models take over.
  • fenwick67 9mo ago
    I'm not so sure. Much like search engines, you can run one yourself or pay Kagi but most people prefer to keep their money and deal with the ads. Streaming services have demonstrated that people have a pretty high tolerance for ads.
    • notnullorvoid 9mo ago
      Search so far has not been overly pushy with ads. It's easy enough to gain the instinct of scrolling down after each search. There's little incentive for people to seek out an ad free alternative. That changes with local AI though. There is now incentive to integrate and further develop self hosted search. You can see it happening on AI services already, using their own internal search engines for better reasoning and more accurate results. I suspect Google's censorship and intentional worsening of search results to increase traffic would've been enough on its own to eventually drive people to self hosted search as it became trivial to setup. Streaming entertainment is different, there's usually no legal alternatives. Either you pay extra for no ads, or you put up with the ads. You could easily say that streaming services have demonstrated that people don't have a high tolerance for ads as well. One of the major drivers to streaming from cable TV was the lack of ads at the time.
• emil-lp 9mo ago
  The title is actually The A in AGI stands for Ads Not Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy
  • stingraycharles 9mo ago
    It was this title before, so it was intentionally changed; I wonder why.
    • ossa-ma 9mo ago
      I’m the author but not the poster. I didn’t change the title. Maybe the mods did? The title came to me as an epiphany too haha, shame to see it get changed.
    • owebmaster 9mo ago
      Because the title of the post should match the title of the submission - unless the mods dislike it, then it'll be changed to something else.
      • dang 9mo ago
        The mods dislike many titles but only change some of them. We also like some of the ones we change! That's because there's a principle involved. It's not hard to find: see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46671377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46671377 nearby.
    • Mordisquitos 9mo ago
      My guess as to why it was changed was that it doesn't really work as a pithy quip the moment you actually think about it. OpenAI is introducing ads on their purported path from "AI" to "AGI"... hence the "A" was already accounted for in the acronym. If only "Ads" started with "G"!
  • dang 9mo ago
    This is standard HN moderation. The title was linkbait, so we changed it. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait". Note the unless. When we do this, we try to find a representative phrase from the article itself that accurately and neutrally represents what the article is about. There is nearly always one of those if you look for it. In this way, we (mostly) avoid having to make up wording of our own, which is something we don't like to do. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=representative%20article%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
• chrisXOXO 9mo ago
  I have never really looked at ad revenues, but honestly those numbers seem reasonable and crazy at the same time (or their calculation at least). My main issue is, that I hate oligopolies. For many industries I think a country can protect itself against oligopolies from outside. But everything digital comes out of little valley on the west coast. This really bothers me.
• mattmaroon 9mo ago
  This will be fun to look back on in a few years. Making concrete predictions in a market moving this fast is a minor act of courage, so much respect.
• phailhaus 9mo ago
  I do not understand why this is a big deal. There is no world in which ads are embedded in LLM answers, because you'd need another LLM to determine whether the "placement" was correct and included all the information that the advertiser wanted (and it still won't work 100%). They are putting ads on the side, like they've always done, leveraging all the tech that already exists to do this. This is pretty much a no-brainer for OpenAI and any AI company.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  • sheepybloke 9mo ago
    > But it seems that the pinnacle of human intelligence: the greatest, smartest, brightest minds have all come together to... build us another ad engine. What happened to superintelligence and AGI? While we all knew it was inevitable, I think this quote from the article sums up the feeling nicely.
    • phailhaus 9mo ago
      I don't get that part either. That's like saying "the brightest minds have all come together to... build us another thing that requires money." OpenAI is trying to make more money than they use to run ChatGPT. They are getting that money from their users, and soon advertisers too. They still need their users to like ChatGPT
  • dr_kretyn 9mo ago
    Why is this a problem? You don't need an LLM; you need a "model for detecting whether and where the given context appears". We're so used to LLMs now that we forget these NLPs problems have been worked on for a long time and they don't require a huge computational beast and it takes a few ms to run (on only the response, while it's being streamed).
    • phailhaus 9mo ago
      That's a no-go for advertisers. They need to control their own brand and their image, there're not going to leave it up to chance like "ok so uh just mention us or something and then we'll pay you." They pay for very specific placements, and they need to provide the content.
• Havoc 9mo ago
  Ads I'm not to worried about. It's ads after they've got some sort of lock in that is the problem. e.g. some sort of system that "knows" you and makes it hard to switch to another provider. Once they've got that hold on you being force fed ads at max rate is guaranteed.
• littlecranky67 9mo ago
  Ads will be no longer a buisness model in 3-5 years when simple, locally run models that do nothing besides blocking ads become available. Twitter, Facebook etc. already get past most modern adblockers, but the AI extension will be able to filter them. In-text advertising must be marked as advertisment in most countries, and even if it isn't, local AI will filter this probably out. So a free ChatGPT service with in-text AI can simply be countered by another local browser extension, that rewrites the text and removes ads. One can make the point that Google, Meta and others are investing so much into AI as they know, we are facing the end of the ad-based internet economy. The investments are to create new buiness models, because their old ones are gone soon.
  • asdff 9mo ago
    Sad truth is vast majority of users today are not savvy enough to install a good adblocker. We live in a bubble here in technology where we assume people know to do things like block ads. Really at this point people don’t know what files are anymore or even what a website actually is.
    • littlecranky67 9mo ago
      True, but some 20 years ago, I already could (and did) use photoshop to cut out the head of a woman (celebrity or from my social group) and put it onto a naked or bikini body of a woman. This is an old problem, but the bar to achieve that was too high and required tech savyness. The second Grok does it on twitter available for every idiot, suddently politicians see this as problematic and want to pass laws against it [0]. My point: Whatever local AI that you will have on your computer or browser, will react to "do not show me ads and filter all product placement in content out" as a single line prompt. And if we won't have a local AI capable of doing it in 5years or more, the whole investement into AI are clearly a bubble and AI will face another winter. [0]: https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/gesellschaft/ki-kuenstliche-intelligenz-missbrauch-justiz-hubig-100.html https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/gesellschaft/ki-kuenstliche... (sorry, german only, but this is an AI thread and you know what to do...)
      • 9mo ago
• themafia 9mo ago
  Lie. Their strategy is just to lie. Until they're caught. A CEO with no AI skills and no business skills. There's not a lot of analysis you have to put into this.
• dmurray 9mo ago
  > 2029: $50.00 (Suuuuuuuper bullish case) - Approaching Google’s ~$60 ARPU. By now, the infrastructure is mature, and "Conversational Commerce" is the standard. This is what Softbank is praying will happen. There's no way Softbank's, or any other investor's, extreme bull case is that four years from now, ChatGPT sells the same amount of advertising as Google and earns $50 a year. The extreme bull projection is that everyone buys everything through ChatGPT and each user is worth thousands per year. If you don't believe there's at least a slim chance of this you shouldn't be investing in OpenAI, and if you're an OpenAI executive who doesn't think there's a chance of this you shouldn't be writing pitch decks for SoftBank.
  • ossa-ma 9mo ago
    I meant super bullish from an outsiders point of view, but I do agree that the projections from within the investors circle are likely multiples of that.
• timpera 9mo ago
  Great article, thanks for sharing. Perplexity having >$50 CPMs seems crazy to me.
• dgroshev 9mo ago
  I wish we collectively had a better understanding of those ad tech shifts being fundamentally zero sum. If we treat marketing as a black box, where are the benefits from supposedly more efficient marketing? Ad budgets are the same. People have the same amount of disposable income (or less, really). So on the both sides of the box converting ad budgets into paying customers the sum is the same. Quasi-monopolistic ad networks (Google and Meta) just hoovered up the money that previously went into other ad spaces, like local papers. Now OpenAI is going to fight for the same pie. Ad tech is a market failure.
• orbabam 9mo ago
  Kinda funny the author fed a visual from French film 'La Haine'[0] to ChatGPT to produce whatever this illustration is supposed to convey ("The world is our/ads"? What does that mean?). Without crediting the movie of course. [0] https://www.machina-deriveapprodi.com/post/le-monde-est-%C3%A0-nous https://www.machina-deriveapprodi.com/post/le-monde-est-%C3%...
• dankwizard 9mo ago
  I don't understand why people are upset. How do you monetize free users? Ads. What other websites do this? All of them. Not controversial. Not an issue. Ads are what gets me property and news flash, they aren't going away.
  • ehnto 9mo ago
    It's just disappointing that this is the best society could come up with. Advertising is exploitive, this is well studied, but it is also just kind of a lame outcome. I also wonder if the dollars and cents work out, the cost to provide the service to show the ads on is astronomical in comparison to other ad networks, but I don't have details enough to make any claims on that aspect.
• beeboop0 9mo ago
  yeah but any service that shittifies will get upstaged by services that don't (cough cough: Deepseek) I need unskewed answers more than I need technical prowness, because technical expertise is going towards commodity availability. i like chat GPT but I'm gone the second they put ads into my development workflow. Bye!
• replwoacause 9mo ago
  Here’s my own strategy. When they start showing me ads as a paying customer I leave the service.
• 666zmoralesz666 9mo ago
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• 666zmoralesz666 9mo ago
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• yalogin 9mo ago
  OpenAI has to be in panic mode, because google is stealing its market. Google for the big apple slice. Anthropic’s got the coding market mindshare. OpenAI has a decent chatbot share but I am sure it’s a declining business. They have fully squeezed everything out of the trump alignment, not sure there is much left there either. Also musk is probably going to get the federal government llm service money. They have to go vertical, and that is the reason why they are throwing shit at the wall with Johnny Ive and hardware. I was initially rooting for OpenAI hoping it can challenge google and Apple. However they showed to being unscrupulous and seem to have a moral compass at the same level as meta.
  • utopiah 9mo ago
    > throwing shit at the wall with Johnny Ive and hardware. Damn, I already forgot about that. You'd think a company who has the smartest people on Earth building a "product" that is "intelligence" would be able to... you know, make something out of it. Somehow despite ALL that, despite all the press too, they can't ship? Something does not add up, it's as if, and I know I'm going to sound like a crazy person, they were just... a normal company! /s > I was initially rooting for OpenAI hoping it can challenge google and Apple. However they showed to being unscrupulous and seem to have a moral compass at the same level as meta. OK ok well this is weird to me, I didn't think I'd be the one to defend Meta here ... but Meta at least never hid it's intention : it was a for-profit VC backed startup which only goal was to make money from day 1. OpenAI though started as a non-profit, collected goodwill from everyone to get the best talent because it's 1 thing, what made it special : it's mission WAS safety. Then they did 1 thing that actually got popular, GPT2, thanks to some pretty damn good marketing "Oh no, it's too risky to release!... but ok OK here it is anyway, but like don't destroy the World please." then exclusive partnership, etc, etc. Meta was "We want money." so at least they didn't lie about it.
• jpalomaki 9mo ago
  I think the killer is when the platform handles the transaction all the way. Instead of charging per click, platform can then take a cut of the sale.
• faragon 9mo ago
  My prediction: Google will win. Rationale: cost/token + pre-existing ad knowledge + APIs for third-party apps. My concern is how an OpenAI collapse could hurt Microsoft and Nvidia.
• YetAnotherNick 9mo ago
  > Mate come on. OpenAI is not dying, they're not running out of money. Yes, they're creating possibly the craziest circular economy and defying every economics law You are starting with wrong assumption and contradicting yourself. Circular economy couldn't last forever once we start looking at the profit. They need money outside the funding to justify the funding. You can't both say they are not earning at all and they are being greedy.
• rkagerer 9mo ago
  It's also possible people finally become SICK of seeing ads and there's a cultural shift boycotting products incorporating them. I would love to see this. There's a difference between advertising - which tends to be offensive, stealing your attention from the task you're trying to accomplish - and an agent that actually helps you with the intended task (as in travel agent, real estate agent, etc). In my opinion the future of revenue for the richest companies is the latter, we just have yet to see anyone unlock it at true scale. My non-tech spouse is excited about AI because she wants what amounts to a personal, universal EA that can help her with anything. If your executive assistant just kept squawking ads at you all day long you'd fire them.