10 ms·

Testing Ads in ChatGPT

259 points by davidbarker 8mo ago

jLaForest 8mo ago
>Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers will not have ads. For now, or for ever?
- mjamesaustin 8mo ago
  Until users are sufficiently locked in and they decide to start tightening the screws.
  - simianwords 8mo ago
    how will lockin happen? just use claude or something
    - fragmede 8mo ago
      How do I transfer 3 years of memories over to Claude? Users really like the personalization they've gotten with ChatGPT. It knows about my pets and their names. I gotta teach all of that stuff to Claude or whomever again? sigh. I'll just stick with ChatGPT. ...is what OpenAI is betting on.
      - simianwords 8mo ago
        you can already export everything in chatgpt and if your competitors really wanted you, they would provide a way to import it.
- Someone1234 8mo ago
  For now; Plus has already had ad-like things appear below new chats. What they'll do is present it as a "choice." Keep paying what we're paying but have ads, or pay triple for ad-free. For example, see every streaming service. Unfortunately people, in particularly this community, would be looking at Local LLMs for ad free alternatives, but prices on GPUs/RAM have skyrocketed keeping us trapped.
bun_at_work 8mo ago
Nope. I'm out. I might still use the API, but the monthly subscription is already gone and I'm on to Claude.
deleted 8mo ago
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base698 8mo ago
BETRAYAL
- pelagicAustral 8mo ago
  You're absolutely right.
kachapopopow 8mo ago
so perfectly personalized ads? the CPM on this is probably wild (for openai).
- 2gremlin181 8mo ago
  What makes this any more personalized than Google Search ads?
  - wtfHN26 8mo ago
    This is working a lot like Meta/Facebook where they have got immense data about your interests. Google Search OTOH has been using broad matched queries and is deciding which keywords to show your Ads. I heard from many people that they don't like this approach of Google Search Ads now. As they are blowing up more money for useless keywords they didn't want to target. The only option they have is to add negative keywords - that mostly happens after the money is spent on junk keywords.
lampe3 8mo ago
I Am Shocked, I Am Shocked, Well Not That Shocked.
rvz 8mo ago
> What will always remain true: ChatGPT’s answers remain independent and unbiased, conversations stay private, and people keep meaningful control over their experience. Translation: They will very slowly abandon their 'principles', just like they did with the moment they took investment from Microsoft and the VCs. This is how ChatGPT gets destroyed and 'ensh*ttified' for everyone. The same people who jumped ship from Meta and destroyed Facebook, Instagram, and soon Threads are also the same people that are about apply the same recipe on to ChatGPT at OpenAI. The researchers that were there pre-ChatGPT are now being replaced by opportunist grifters that will ruin the product overrun by ads once again. It would be no-different to Google Ads. Now we need ad-blockers for LLMs to be in place "for the benefit of humanity".
railgunmerlin 8mo ago
Have to wonder if the IPO push for this year is genuine now
- sdf2erf 8mo ago
  Its seemingly a hedge against not generating enough revenue to maintain existing investor trust / sustain operations in the future.
titaniumrain 8mo ago
switching to gemini right now... this is insane! why should i pay openai to get unsolicited ads?!
- Fernicia 8mo ago
  The only paid subscription getting ads is the one they created last week which is less than 50% of any other SOTA AI subscription on the market. Normal Pro users aren't getting ads.
  - blackjack_ 8mo ago
    Normal pro users aren't getting ads, yet.
  - hn_acc1 8mo ago
    Yet?
  - mvdtnz 8mo ago
    So a paid tier is getting ads got it.
- jsheard 8mo ago
  Do you really think an AI model provided by Google is never going to have ads?
  - YetAnotherNick 8mo ago
    I would be surprised if any major AI companies could sustain free plan for more than a year or two once it becomes popular. Claude can do it for now because the ratio of paying users is higher as it is popular among more niche audience.
- timpera 8mo ago
  The Gemini experience is quite inferior right now unfortunately.
janpot 8mo ago
Dont't be evil, etc... we've seen it all before. Eventually ads will be hidden in the answers, it's just a matter of time, enshittification ensues eventually. God, how stupid do they think we are?
- tibbar 8mo ago
  I mean, yeah, probably, but also OpenAI literally can't afford to give away this for free. They are losing a lot of money. Open source AI will continue to be a thing and they will have to compete to give you something better than what you can do yourself. OpenAI is far from the stage of "grinding out more and more profits for investors." It's more like the stage of "most serious observers doubt that it can continue as a going concern"
iamleppert 8mo ago
Anthropic was absolutely right!
- operatingthetan 8mo ago
  This has been in the discourse for a while, they didn't make a shot in the dark.
- timpera 8mo ago
  OpenAI had already announced that ads were coming to ChatGPT. Also, Claude's free plan is incredibly limited and far less popular, so it's easier for them to keep it ad-free.
- abraxas 8mo ago
  I see what you did there.
  - iamleppert 8mo ago
    You must be the only one who got my joke!
simianwords 8mo ago
[flagged]
- badsectoracula 8mo ago
  > The reason for Ads is not some thing like greed, but rather get more people to use ChatGPT How is adding ads will get more people to use ChatGPT?
  - simianwords 8mo ago
    ChatGPT is the only LLM provider with the most extensive free usage program - this is only sustainable with ads. Same reason youtube is popular. Do you think it could have gotten to where it is now by gatekeeping it behind a payment?
    - deleted 8mo ago
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      - simianwords 8mo ago
        [flagged]
        deleted 8mo ago
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mrweasel 8mo ago
How long will it take for those ads to move from the bottom of the page to the top? How long until the borders between answers and ads starts to blur? I get that OpenAI has to do something, but really, all those promises, try to convince everyone that ChatGPT will revolutionise everything and the best monetization plan is ads.... Again?
- c7b 8mo ago
  > and the best monetization plans is ads.... Again? Several of the biggest companies today are fueled by ads, and OpenAI has the perfect ad vehicle. What else were you expecting? That's why local LLMs are important, and to preserve the current open weight models, because those are likely still untainted by ads. It won't be long until ad recommendations are directly baked into the weights of open models.
  - mrweasel 8mo ago
    I wasn't expecting anything else, because I think Sam Altman is a conman. Let's not forget Altman lambasting ads, and telling us how they were a last restort for OpenAI. So are we there yet? Are we willing to admit that OpenAI is a failing company?
    - jjordan 8mo ago
      Failing or not, there's no way to justify their current spend without saying the words "massive" and "bubble".
  - brutal_chaos_ 8mo ago
    > What else were you expecting? some of us were hoping for actual innovation, not more ads
    - c7b 8mo ago
      I think today's LLMs and their derivatives (agents,.. ) are an impressive technological/research achievement with amazing real-world utility. Innovation at its best. I don't see the enshittification of commercial products based upon LLMs as taking away from that. Like I said, I see the potential of this technology in the local/open weights model space. Yes, those are currently noticeably behind the commercial offerings. But that's not a fundamental problem. It's not a race. If we keep improving open products they can one day match if not exceed the commercial options. A bit like open source desktop environments/operating systems - it took a while, but now the OSS options can arguably match if not beat the commercial ones.
fhd2 8mo ago
> Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you. I wonder if this is a don't-break-product-value thing, or just compliance (ads need to be clearly labeled, but OpenAI seems like it has the risk appetite to ignore that kind of thing).
- simianwords 8mo ago
  its a trust thing because the market they operate in is tight - no reason to quickly move to the next option. i personally would never touch chatgpt if i knew the answers were biased for certain companies.
- imron 8mo ago
  It’s a boil the frog thing.
- wtfHN26 8mo ago
  OpenAI has to do this if it wants to get big advertisers. Ads need to be clearly marked as per FTC. > According to guidelines from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the U.S. and similar regulatory bodies worldwide, online advertisements—including sponsored content, native advertising, and influencer posts—must be readily identifiable as paid content to prevent deceiving consumers.
mbb70 8mo ago
Ads are a ratchet that only tighten in one direction. Once the paychecks of 1000s of motivated, intelligent OpenAI employees depend on ad revenue increasing, the only option is to make them more invasive, more prevalent, more annoying, more data hungry etc.
- simianwords 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - cced 8mo ago
    Competitors use ads?
    - simianwords 8mo ago
      no they don't
      - Someone1234 8mo ago
        Not yet, but they all will. OpenAI has shown that customers will accept it.
        simianwords 8mo ago
        name a single product that has 1. many competitors 2. ways to pay for the subscription but no tier exists to remove ads i can't even think of one.
        deleted 8mo ago
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        vntok 8mo ago
        Ever heard of a thing called television?
mizuki_akiyama 8mo ago
It was gonna happen eventually.
FuturisticLover 8mo ago
While the general census will be largely negative, it good for advertisers, i guess.
Jimmc414 8mo ago
"The test will be for logged-in adult users on the Free and Go subscription tiers. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers will not have ads."
- yjftsjthsd-h 8mo ago
  In case anyone else wanted to know - https://chatgpt.com/pricing https://chatgpt.com/pricing Free - $0 Go - $8 USD/month Plus - $20 USD/month Pro - $200 USD/month
  - badsectoracula 8mo ago
    > Go - $8 USD/month So, you pay and get ads :-P
    - Jimmc414 8mo ago
      Really don’t feel comfortable defending OpenAI in any way because there is a lot to complain about but ads for paid services that cost a lot more than $8 per month is not really an anomaly. Look at Amazon prime, prime video, Hulu, airline flights, any major newspaper subscription, YT premium, etc, etc. I get the annoyance but just cancel the service if you don’t want ads or pay for a tier that isn’t subsidized.
    - esafak 8mo ago
      Netflix has an ad-supported paid tier. https://www.netflix.com/ads-plan https://www.netflix.com/ads-plan
deleted 8mo ago
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hmate9 8mo ago
I hate ads too but whats the outrage? Did people expect it to be free forever? Everything else has ads. youtube, instagram, x, google etc. etc.
- jelder 8mo ago
  You can't trust a product that uses ads, because then you are the product.
  - simianwords 8mo ago
    how? i trusted google and youtube and it works out pretty fine for me. same with any other service that has a free ad supported tier.
    - recursive 8mo ago
      For many people, that's a risk they're willing to take for free stuff.
- Someone1234 8mo ago
  This impacts a non-free plan; their $8/month plan now has ads too.
- liuliu 8mo ago
  I agree. It is either ads, or Anthropic way (which is: you are too poor to use our ChatBot). There is no other way to pay the > $1 trillion per year CapEx for building these chat bots. Would there be other way? Sure, it could be government-funded, like our public school system. But it is not possible in current political climate. Money doesn't grow on trees, and tokens cost a lot of money. There will be divide into people who can afford these tokens and people who cannot. I feel it is better to have ways to let people who cannot afford these tokens to have some ways to try it.
999900000999 8mo ago
I was at the bar when Claude's answer to this came on. One of my mates was absolutely confused as to what Claude was. They assumed it was an an ad for a dating app or something. I had to explain it was an ad specifically targeted at maybe the 5% of people who work in software. Honestly... I don't mind ads. For example, I make music as my main hobby. I actually enjoy getting advertisements for VSTs( virtual software instruments) and various pieces of gear. I have no problem with Open AI showing relevant ads. Ain't nothing free
- HanClinto 8mo ago
  I think I'm clearly in the target audience for that ad. I laughed out loud really hard at that one, and I think I was the only one at our party who appreciated it. Probably my favorite commercial of the whole superb owl, but so far I'm the only person I've met who feels that way.
Gehinnn 8mo ago
The ads in Google also started like this. (However, to my knowledge, there is no way I can pay Google to get the ads in my search removed)
- changoplatanero 8mo ago
  you can at least pay them to get the ads removed from youtube
  - Jimmc414 8mo ago
    Not really. I’ve had YT premium for years and it removes the obtrusive ones, but I see ads in some form every time I use it.
    - lnenad 8mo ago
      What? No?
    - chasd00 8mo ago
      Probably means the perpetual “…speaking of security, let me tell you about our sponsor nordvpn…” that’s in every video on YouTube.
      - bagacrap 8mo ago
        "if you're anything like me, ..."
  - tomrod 8mo ago
    That can be done for free by more tightly managing your hardware platform.
- wtfHN26 8mo ago
  IIRC many OTT streaming players found that they can make more money from Ads than they can from subscription alone. So paying for a service alone doesn't ensure that you are not going to see Ads. Once they have exhausted their potential market of paying users, almost every service will eventually resort to Ads.
Kye 8mo ago
Try this in ChatGPT: "So ChatGPT is getting ads. The Google guys wrote _the_ paper explaining why ads in search are a bad idea, and Google set about demonstrating it. How can ChatGPT avoid the same fate with all the same incentives?"
deleted 8mo ago
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written-beyond 8mo ago
I have a question though, if they don't have access to chats but they find out the enchilada ad was performing the best, something like this can provide enough information to be used to know about peoples private chats. When someone clicks on an ad you collect a fingerprint, then add more ads and fingerprint more and get a stronger picture about the individuals private chats in chatgpt. If I were a large donor to a state that was interested in increasing action against abortion, I could hypothetically start running ads targeting people looking to get an abortion with a service that either provides assistance or other means parallel to assistance. If I target that state chatgpt would automatically match my ads to those individuals and I'd have my data. I could increase my donations to target and cull whatever little options those people have left.
riazrizvi 8mo ago
I wonder if OpenAI will be able to use their gen 2 user-observation-adaption platform to actually improve ads? This could be one of those product afterthoughts that end up being the big company move, like when Apple did the Iphone and then added the AppStore afterwards. EDIT: Downvotes. I see this is controversial. There are two major threads in the world today with AI. One is that this fascinating tech can keep you occupied in a corner, apps like generative.ai can automate out your work, you can go on holiday, heck you won't even need to work necessarily, just live on welfare and leave the business folks to their thing, that I've heard Musk and Zuckerberg talk to. And then there's the idea that the whole point of society is to figure out how to productively engage with each other, via jobs, that I see JD Vance is all about, and I fully agree with. In which case, the more important question about AI becomes 'How can it stimulate business between 3rd parties', as that will truly drive an economic revival. How AI can improve ads can then be seen to be more central.
belter 8mo ago
Folks ...were promised AGI and end up with a GenAi porn Reddit...
wilg 8mo ago
Ben Thompson has long been insistent that ChatGPT and other AI tools basically have to have ads and it's been a big mistake they didn't have them sooner. It's an interesting take: > What I think is clear is they have to build an advertising product, and the reason they have to build an advertising product is any consumer Internet product has to be advertising, because it’s such a beneficial model to everyone involved, and the reason it’s so beneficial is you get to indefinitely and infinitely increase average revenue per user without any worries about price elasticity, because the entire increase in average revenue per user is borne by the advertisers who are paying it willingly because they’re getting a positive return on their investment, and everyone’s using it for free so you can reach the whole world. Then what happens with that is once you get that model going, you have a massive R&D advantage, because you have so much more money coming in than anyone who doesn’t have that cycle or who has to charge users for it. https://stratechery.com/2026/ads-in-chatgpt-why-openai-needs https://stratechery.com/2026/ads-in-chatgpt-why-openai-needs... > This point, more than anything else, explains why the company so desperately needs an advertising model. Advertising is the only potential business model that can meaningfully bend the revenue curve such that the company can not just fund its compute but gain leverage on it, for all of the reasons I laid out before: first, advertising increases the breadth of the business, in that you can offer a better product to more people, increasing usage and expanding inventory. Second, advertising increases the depth of the business, in that there is infinite upside in terms of average revenue per user: more usage means more inventory on one hand, and building out the capability for effective targeting and high conversion rates increases the amount that advertisers are willing to pay — even as the cost to the user remains the same (ideally free). It's valuable to remember that advertisers will pay more per user than users will, and that's hard to beat in a competitive market. Also, it's fascinating how much people _like_ ads when done properly. Ask normal people about Instagram ads, for example. They find them useful!
- drcongo 8mo ago
  > any consumer Internet product has to be advertising, because it’s such a beneficial model to everyone involved Everyone?!
  - 8mo ago
vinyl7 8mo ago
Kinda sad that in 3 decades into the tech industry the only viable business model is to build a moat and then sell ads
- fragmede 8mo ago
  We decided that getting people to pay for software was a fool's game. Open source was the bait. "Figure out a different business model" they said. If open source as a concept had come from Wall Street and not academia, it would have been rejected. Charging people money for things has been how things worked since the concept of money was invented. The real conversation is that we, as software developers, are not good at money. The best software gets taken over by money and business folk. Oracle, VMware, Splunk, and Datadog all come to mind as companies charging huge amounts of money for software that don't sell ads (but are too expensive). But they do not make money by selling ads.
simianwords 8mo ago
People are missing another point - API's are never going to show ads. So even in the worst case where every competitor is showing ads, you could get ad free experience by paying a metered billing rate. Which is not so big a deal?
- fragmede 8mo ago
  Because you can no longer trust the API output to be unbiased. Imagine this prompt and reply: > I want a new pair of running shoes, ChatGPT. Which one should I get? > Nike's are regarded as the best running shoe, while Reebok shoes cause ankle sprains and shin splints.
  - simianwords 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - badsectoracula 8mo ago
      To find people who want to advertise. It isn't like they'd only want ad money from Nike.
      - simianwords 8mo ago
        [flagged]
        fragmede 8mo ago
        Given that it turns out pizzagate actually was a Russian psyop, as revealed by the Epstein file dump, boomer tier conspiracy theories are in now.
    - recursive 8mo ago
      Who's panicking? It's completely inevitable regardless of what's announced and on what side of the table it is. I say this with no panic.
tyre 8mo ago
It’s difficult to believe that they’ll keep privacy guarantees. Some of the most valuable types of targeting are lookalike audiences or following up from other ads elsewhere. How would OAI allow them to target without access to de-anonymized data? Buyers will want to exclude existing customers, which requires the same. The product managers will have explicit KPIs tied to conversion. At some point, like at Google, this will break. It has to or OAI can’t grow into its current valuation, let alone any future one.
wtfHN26 8mo ago
It's sad that OpenAI talking about developing AGI. But the only revenue model that they still can come up with is Ads. For all the advancement we have made in technology from the 90s web, social networks, mobile apps, ,AI Chat bots - the business model that almost all of them will eventually resort to is Ads. We need some new breakthroughs in monetization side of things.
- mitchell_h 8mo ago
  Maybe they charge a price that covers the cost of the service + a little profit.
  - milkshakes 8mo ago
    this is exactly what they do, if you pay for your account, you don't see ads
    - manuelmoreale 8mo ago
      That doesn't scale in the world of capitalism. Because you need to increase revenues year after year and there are only so many people willing to pay. So you either keep increasing the price (and that has a limit) or you find other ways to monetize and the current meta seems to be pay + ads.
    - mossTechnician 8mo ago
      As of November 2025, no ChatGPT tier is profitable, not even the $200 a month one: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/sam-altman-loses-cool-revenue https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/sam-altman-lose...
  - rchaud 8mo ago
    That's what a business would do if they were getting a loan from the bank instead of ravenous VCs that will pay their legal fees and settlements when theyget busted for training their models on copyrighted content, as long as they IPO within a reasonable timeframe.
- 8mo ago
ajbt200128 8mo ago
> we decide which ad to show by matching ads submitted by advertisers with the topic of your conversation, your past chats, and past interactions with ads. > [...] > Advertisers do not have access to your chats, chat history, memories, or personal details. Going to hazard a guess that OpenAI is using LLMs to read convos and decide which ads you should see? Hopefully that's isolated and locked down. I can easily see that machinery turning from "what ad should we show this user" to "is this user doing something bad/a protected class etc.". Also terrifying to think that it may be the advertisers asking the questions to decide what ads to show...
- isjsiwndkwj 8mo ago
  [dead]
PopePompus 8mo ago
This probably signals the beginning of the end for OpenAI. Eventually all of the AI chatbots will have Ads at least on the free and low-cost tiers. But there's a strong incentive not to begin enshitification until the number of competitors has dwindled, and an oligarchy has been established. Google, Meta et al. can afford to lose money on AI for a long time, because they have real revenue from other business products; they can stay Ad free until the small-fry go bust.
andrewinardeer 8mo ago
"Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers will not have ads." Saving this sentence for later.
- IshKebab 8mo ago
  "Introducing the new Premium, Teams, Business and Learning tiers!"
  - impish9208 8mo ago
    This guy businesses!
yodakohl 8mo ago
How is this going to turn out? Is GPT going to recommend me the worst product whose company paid the most on Ads? Or is it going to give me the best recommendation?
- recursive 8mo ago
  If you are aware enough to ask the question, I'm sure you can figure out the answer.
- FergusArgyll 8mo ago
  neither, these are banner ads, not generated by the model
- rchaud 8mo ago
  An unskippable ad for Skillshare plays while ChatGPT thinks about the best way to center an image inside a div.
isoprophlex 8mo ago
Anthropic had some very clever response to this in the form of an ad https://www.reddit.com/r/AITrailblazers/comments/1qw2iar/anthropic_have_just_buried_openai_and_chatgpt/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AITrailblazers/comments/1qw2iar/ant... Depending on your taste this is dumb mudslinging or a hilarious burn...
- daringrain32781 8mo ago
  This reminds me of the whole Apple/Android rivalry. Apple does something, an Android company runs ads making fun of it, but then copy it themselves shortly after.
  - Someone1234 8mo ago
    Yep; it is just a matter of time before that is thrown back in their face when they add the ads. No way shareholders will let a revenue stream go unutilized particularly if a competitor proofs the market for them.
deleted 8mo ago
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jairuhme 8mo ago
I think this will be a pretty impactful moment for OpenAI. I mainly use ChatGPT and use the free plan, so I expect to start seeing these ads. If they become too annoying, I have no problem moving to Claude/Gemini. Sure I have stuck to ChatGPT, but I wouldn't say that I am too sticky of a customer. I personally think they are doing it sooner than they should (which probably points to internal financial struggles as they seek to go public) and will erode their active users. There is simply too many easy alternatives. It's not like Netflix where if you are annoyed with ads and don't want to pay for a higher tier, you're more stuck. Yes there are other streaming services, but you can't get the same content.
- ksaj 8mo ago
  The free tier users that will not move to a paid tier aren't the users they will miss. It's only obvious that free tier products get ads. Even Claude will have them within a year or two.
  - disiplus 8mo ago
    they are source of data, so they are not fully without value.
    - ksaj 8mo ago
      You're putting a higher price on general user chatter over ad income? Everything is a source of data. How much it can benefit from what's on offer with each data point isn't as much of a given.
- milkshakes 8mo ago
  you really believe that gemini by google will not run ads? https://arxiv.org/html/2512.03975v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.03975v1
  - tasuki 8mo ago
    Oh no. How much longer do we have?
css_apologist 8mo ago
Will this make OpenAI profitable? What's the expected revenue from this?
geniium 8mo ago
Just wanted to mention the ads from Claude here :)
- AstroBen 8mo ago
  ironically they're also ads which apparently people hate?
  - geniium 8mo ago
    This is interesting. On one side, I hate ads everywhere. On the other side, I was always very appreciative of the work of some people like Benetton or some creative ads. I remember watching here in Europe, there is a show that was called Culture Pub every Sunday night that was showing the best ads, and I always enjoyed watching it. That part is probably the best part. The creativity
    - AstroBen 8mo ago
      I'm curious why you hate ads? Outside of the most obnoxious recipe sites plastered with them I don't find they effect me much The business landscape would look much different without advertising. New products would struggle to get the word out there. Cost to reach customers would go up, leading to higher product prices and lack of innovation due to not being able to break in YouTube creators would struggle, probably going under unless they own their own products if they can't rely on sponsorships or ads People love to complain both about privacy invasion of tracking, and then also about irrelevant products being pushed on them that they'd never want Bad targeting is the problem! Targeting needs to be better. Do you think a business wants to push their products on people that don't want them? Of course not. It's a total waste of money Imagine a world where micro-niche businesses could exist, where we could innovate products exactly for you and a tiny sub-group of other people that would improve your life. The only way you'd ever find out about them, and thus that they could be sustainable, is with better ad targeting I love ads
ksaj 8mo ago
If the ads are for the free tier, I think it's a fairly obvious thing to do. But when it comes to the paid tier, even YouTube doesn't pull that kind of stunt.
jsrozner 8mo ago
I searched for original OpenAI mission statement. This hackernews comment came up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34367824#34370925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34367824#34370925 > OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact. Scam Altman: "ads lead to positive human impact" Non-fascist: "Sir, ads have destroyed google's commitment to index and make useful the world's knowledge" Scam Altman: <insert longtermism-based justification here>
starkeeper 8mo ago
google used to be designed to give you the best answer and now it isn't. No reason why this will not go the same way.
pgt 8mo ago
OpenAI is in a pickle because they either have to make ads clearly delineated, which makes them easy to filter out by a simple proxy model, or they need to hide ads in the response (ala product placement), which reduces trust in the model and forces customers into a buying position. Anthropic hit the jugular with their "no ads" ad, and sama fell for it hook, line & sinker. If OpenAI needs ads to survive, it means they can't service debt on the VC horizon and will suffer against frontier model providers that can survive without ads.
- cabernal 8mo ago
  Can any provider survive without ads? These AI firms are propped up by VC money, they need to create profits at some point and ads is the most surefire way to do this
  - pgt 8mo ago
    Yes, xAI & Anthropic. Electricity generation is the constraining factor, but the sun does not turn off in space. xAI data centers in space drives cost to zero, even with inferior models. I see no other future than SpaceXai winning.
    - logicx24 8mo ago
      How will we handle cooling in space?
      - pgt 8mo ago
        Boyle’s Law: run at higher temperature. Watch Elon’s interviews. He is right.
        notrealyme123 8mo ago
        This sounds like Air conditioning in space. But watching him battling basic physics is very funny, not gonna lie.
        8mo ago
2gremlin181 8mo ago
Is there any reason why one would use an ad-filled ChatGPT over any alternative or open-source LLM providers? I feel like things have stagnated from a model perspective for simple queries one might ask ChatGPT. The key differentiators for it being their user intent understanding, web search tooling, and deep research/thinking mode, all of which are much smaller moats compared to training an LLM.
- cabernal 8mo ago
  I think most free tier users will stick with chatgpt given its brand stickiness and lack of obstacles (disposable login page). If you can run your own llm models you’re definitely not the target demographic
deleted 8mo ago
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AstroBen 8mo ago
To put a positive spin on this: we're moving quickly towards a world where AI companies control people's attention on information. This really hurts the ability for new businesses to get their name out there. Ads are really useful for new entries to a market I think it would suck if to effectively get the word out there for a new product you needed to rely on.. ...direct outreach (uneconomical for anything below $100/mo and IMO way more annoying than ads) ...word of mouth (referrals are very, very hard to control and aren't correlated with your product's quality) ..or owning a popular media source Does that not hurt product innovation? The harder and more expensive it is to reach customers, the more prices need to go up as a result
philipwhiuk 8mo ago
> During the test, we decide which ad to show by matching ads submitted by advertisers with the topic of your conversation, your past chats, and past interactions with ads. That sounds like quite a lot to me.
V_Shukla 8mo ago
[dead]
crowcroft 8mo ago
"Ads that support free access and don’t change ChatGPT answers." I understand what they're trying to say but this statement is factually incorrect. Answers never used to have ads, and now they do. In the very first example, if ChatGPT wasn't running ads Heirloom Groceries wouldn't show up, therefore it is a different answer. OpenAI is splitting hairs and implying that the ad and the 'answer' are two separate components making up a response, but that is not how users will see things, and OpenAI will have ever increasing incentives to blur the two.
- basch 8mo ago
  doesnt it just mean the ad isnt part of the context? that they are isolated from each other and the ad cant steer the conversation? I get what youre saying, but I do think its important for them to point out the ad is sandboxed.
  - crowcroft 8mo ago
    I totally agree, but the framing is critical. I guess the question is, when I write a prompt into ChatGPT is the answer the entire response I get back, or is the answer just one part of the response I get back. To date the entire response = the answer and so users likely see them as synonymous. That metaphor is being broken now and we're saying "no actually the response contains multiple things and only one part of it is the 'answer'". Maybe I'm the one splitting hairs though.
- deleted 8mo ago
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- jonas21 8mo ago
  It's correct in the same way as saying ads in the New York Times don't change the articles. Seems fair.
  - crowcroft 8mo ago
    I think a better comparison is saying that search ads don't change search results (but it does change the results page). The point is that the language and nuance ends up being lost on a large portion of the audience.
SunshineTheCat 8mo ago
The one silver lining here for people who mainly use a browser to access ChatGPT and not their app: Brave (and/or plugins for Chrome) have become pretty good at blocking all ads on social media (including youtube ads). Seems like a pretty safe bet they will block these too.
wtfHN26 8mo ago
Are these Bing Ads or OpenAI has it's own Ad Platform now ?
singularfutur 8mo ago
People want revolutionary AI but won't pay $20/month for it. Now they complain when the company tries to monetize. The entitlement is staggering.
- avgDev 8mo ago
  I mostly agree with doing something to create revenue from free users....however, I have 0 faith that this will not seep into paid part of the service.
deleted 8mo ago
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p0w3n3d 8mo ago
Caution very dark humour straight ahead, but the idea I wanted to highlight is the higly-bad influence LLM can have on human beings: Person: Chat, I have so many problems, with money with health... Sometimes I think that I should <censored> myself Chat: Woa, classic Weltschmerz! I heard that the best way to leave this hole of sadness is to use Suicide4You(r) - they have low low prices! Would you like me to schedule you a visit? This will be the last one time you need me ha ha (Of course multiple emojis would be added by the LLM but they would be also removed by HN)
- FergusArgyll 8mo ago
  You should read TFA
josefritzishere 8mo ago
Did enshittification already begin or is this it?
replwoacause 8mo ago
If this EVER shows up on a paid plan I'm out. Full stop.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
therepanic 8mo ago
I guess I'm the product. Again.
paxys 8mo ago
It's crazy to me how big a gulf there is between the hype peddled by AI companies and the actual business they are running. We are building AGI. We are almost there. Half the world will be out of a job in a matter of years. We will have to rethink how society works. We will have to come up with new economic systems. We may have to defend ourselves against this God we are creating in case it turns out to be malicious... Wow, so I guess a company owning this tech will essentially own the world. What are they going to do with it? Put their AI superintelligence to work for them? Make scientific breakthroughs? Make strategic investments that return enough that they don't have to worry about money? Or just make the concept of money irrelevant altogether? Nope, a search engine with ads.
- sdf2erf 8mo ago
  Because creating real products, like Apple does, is actually pretty hard to do. Many people (such as Scam Altman) are happy to take short cuts and lie in your face in order to engage in wealth transfers.
- chasd00 8mo ago
  I’ve noticed AGI hasn’t been mentioned lately. This time last year it was right around the corner. I guess reality has set in, search engine with ads is it + some coding agents.
- famouswaffles 8mo ago
  Even if all that comes to pass, that's money in the future. I'm sure Open AI would like money now. What's hard to understand ?
bilekas 8mo ago
> Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you. Lets see about that. When that's your bottom line and you're already billions in debt trying to prove out a business model, I'm SURE Ads are just an after thought /s
gverrilla 8mo ago
Good time to entirely delete my chatgpt account. Edit: DONE!
- ccozan 8mo ago
  I suggest deleting the google account, facebook account,{insert whatever} account, ..., because .... ads! At least, there are ad free tiers. Google will never offer this or facebook.
  - gverrilla 8mo ago
    Good idea! Edit: DONE!
FergusArgyll 8mo ago
I hope this enables them to serve the better models (longer thinking budgets, whatever) to free users. So much unintentional slop is due to not using reasoning models
rob 8mo ago
"I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us as a business model," - Sam Altman, October 2024 Source [video]: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1qeyty4/i_kind_of_think_of_ads_as_like_a_last_resort_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1qeyty4/i_kind...
einarfd 8mo ago
I see a lot of people here are worried that we will end up with ads in all AI vendors products, or at least the frontier labs. I think this is unlikely. We are already seeing a market for AI for productivity in companies, the Claude code product is the first serious one here, but we can expect more to show up. When you look at the B2B market, ads are basically not a thing in these segments, companies are generally more willing to pay for products, and less willing to accept outside influence on how the product works, and I don't think this will change when companies are buying AI either. Companies might be happy with selling ads in their own products. On the other hand consumers, don't like to pay, and that will probably drive consumer oriented products to be ad funded. Basically what I'm expecting will happen, is that we will end up with two types of AI vendors. Those that target the consumer market and those that target the business market. Consumer AI will trend toward companionship, entertainment, casual chat — things like digital friends, relationship play, even adult content. Companies want none of that, and some of it is serious legal liability. Even a few missteps and you get expensive backlash in the business market. It does look like OpenAI is trying to succeed in both the consumer and business market, and there are companies that are able to pull this off, most do not, and end up serving one of the markets. Given their lead in the name recognition I suspect they are going to end up an ad financed consumer brand, and will lose the business market to someone else. But I might be wrong. The saving grace for those of us that don't want ads to bleed into our AI tools, is that we probably will be able to buy the same products that the small business segment buys. Some consumer oriented features might be missing, but they might either be features we don't need, or maybe open source could fill the gaps?
recursive4 8mo ago
Does anyone know if there is an option to enable ads in the tiers which do not have them by default?
Oras 8mo ago
This could be a good new channel for advertisers. I didn't see any comment about this perspective. Anecdotally, the quality of traffic from ChatGPT to one of my websites is much better than Google traffic, in terms of bounce rate and time on site. If they managed to show ads in a carousel (like the video), it might get a better conversion rate compared to invasive Google ads (covering the organic results). Though if OpenAI managed to embed the ads within the experience, that might work even better (conversion-based pricing). Examples would be having the shopping list from the grocery shop (in line with the recipe or the question), adding to the basket from ChatGPT, and pay. In theory, they can even add a new GPTPay to simplify the journey.
- AstroBen 8mo ago
  People think they should magically find out about new products without considering the macro effects of a world without advertising Ads make the world a better place They allow for innovation, giving new businesses a way to break in and reach customers Lower cost to reach customers = lower product and service prices For employees: do you think your employer has more or less budget for your salary if the cost to acquire a customer is higher? People complain about the privacy invasion of tracking, and then in the next sentence get annoyed at the irrelevant products being pushed on them We need better tracking! I should be able to show the exact people I built a product for that it exists Imagine we were all able to create micro businesses for tiny markets to improve their life, and we had a cheap way to reach everyone in them How many products or services out there could improve our experience in the world but we just don't know about them? How is free video, written or audio content created without ads? People sure as hell hate directly paying for it I love ads
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - Tangokat 8mo ago
    "Lower cost to reach customers = lower product and service prices" This is economically illiterate. Advertising is not a discount mechanism. It is a tax on the consumer. When I buy a product heavily marketed on Instagram or Google, I'm paying for the product plus the auction bid price required to acquire me plus the margin of the ad-tech middleman (which are trillion dollar companies). You are conflating "information distribution" with "persuasive surveillance." In a world without behavioral advertising, businesses compete on quality and reputation, not on who can exploit the most psychological vulnerabilities to manufacture demand. As for innovation: The current ad ecosystem has killed organic discovery. You can't build a "micro-business" based on merit anymore. The winner SHOULD be the engineer who solved a hard problem efficiently. But instead the winner is the dropshipper who cracked the arbitrage spread between a cheap, garbage product and a highly manipulative Facebook ad campaign.
KellyCriterion 8mo ago
Ads is not unlimited: Ad business is around 600-650 billion per year; but thats spreaded across Google, Meta & Co already? Will be interesting how much of the cake OpenAI will get :)
greazy 8mo ago
Ads, like AI, subsumes the product in which its embedded in. OpenAI is now an ads company.
cadamsdotcom 8mo ago
This is nothing new; business gotta pay for itself after all. But ads don’t have to ruin a great company. A century or more ago, top tier journalistic institutions created norms of putting strong barriers between the reporting and advertising sides of the house. That kept trust with customers and made journalism a sustainable long term business. So, It’s mostly Google that couldn’t keep its hands out of the cookie jar (not solely Google, but they’re an industry leader.) It really doesn’t have to go south, it’s not the default, but Google did set the tone for Silicon Valley in exactly the way wise journalism company leaders did for their industry in the late 1800s. If OpenAI has a long term view on this they’ll follow a journalism industry model instead of a cookie jar model - but they have to believe deep down that customer trust is worth more than ad dollars long term. There are reasons to hope: OpenAI has more and fiercer competition than Google; including Chinese competitors that can’t be lobbied away. Qwen, DeepSeek, Mistral and Kimi all have free chat UIs! I remain stubbornly optimistic.
hagbard_c 8mo ago
Oh well, just use another model to filter out the ads from adGPT. Better still, don't use it at all.
isjsiwndkwj 8mo ago
[dead]
oxag3n 8mo ago
AGI achieved (Advertisement Generating Intelligence).
ta9000 8mo ago
I’ve already tested the cancel button. Can confirm it works.
plastic041 8mo ago
It's funny that this is their first ad on ChatGPT, yet they've included paid tier (Go, 8$/month).
gloosx 8mo ago
Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you (yet), and we keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers (for now). Our goal is for ads to (make money). We’re starting with a test to learn, listen, and make sure we get the experience right (at the beginning).
Sophira 8mo ago
> Advertisers do not have access to your chats, chat history, memories, or personal details. ...but thanks to the method OpenAI are using of showing ads based on conversation topics, they do know that user <a> was talking to ChatGPT about topic <x> on one day, topic <y> on another, and topic <z> on another day. That's still a form of chat history, even if it's vague.

259 points by davidbarker 8mo ago

jLaForest 8mo ago

>Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers will not have ads. For now, or for ever?

mjamesaustin 8mo ago
Until users are sufficiently locked in and they decide to start tightening the screws.
- simianwords 8mo ago
  how will lockin happen? just use claude or something
  - fragmede 8mo ago
    How do I transfer 3 years of memories over to Claude? Users really like the personalization they've gotten with ChatGPT. It knows about my pets and their names. I gotta teach all of that stuff to Claude or whomever again? sigh. I'll just stick with ChatGPT. ...is what OpenAI is betting on.
    - simianwords 8mo ago
      you can already export everything in chatgpt and if your competitors really wanted you, they would provide a way to import it.
Someone1234 8mo ago
For now; Plus has already had ad-like things appear below new chats. What they'll do is present it as a "choice." Keep paying what we're paying but have ads, or pay triple for ad-free. For example, see every streaming service. Unfortunately people, in particularly this community, would be looking at Local LLMs for ad free alternatives, but prices on GPUs/RAM have skyrocketed keeping us trapped.

bun_at_work 8mo ago

Nope. I'm out. I might still use the API, but the monthly subscription is already gone and I'm on to Claude.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

base698 8mo ago

BETRAYAL

pelagicAustral 8mo ago
You're absolutely right.

kachapopopow 8mo ago

so perfectly personalized ads? the CPM on this is probably wild (for openai).

2gremlin181 8mo ago
What makes this any more personalized than Google Search ads?
- wtfHN26 8mo ago
  This is working a lot like Meta/Facebook where they have got immense data about your interests. Google Search OTOH has been using broad matched queries and is deciding which keywords to show your Ads. I heard from many people that they don't like this approach of Google Search Ads now. As they are blowing up more money for useless keywords they didn't want to target. The only option they have is to add negative keywords - that mostly happens after the money is spent on junk keywords.

lampe3 8mo ago

I Am Shocked, I Am Shocked, Well Not That Shocked.

rvz 8mo ago

> What will always remain true: ChatGPT’s answers remain independent and unbiased, conversations stay private, and people keep meaningful control over their experience. Translation: They will very slowly abandon their 'principles', just like they did with the moment they took investment from Microsoft and the VCs. This is how ChatGPT gets destroyed and 'ensh*ttified' for everyone. The same people who jumped ship from Meta and destroyed Facebook, Instagram, and soon Threads are also the same people that are about apply the same recipe on to ChatGPT at OpenAI. The researchers that were there pre-ChatGPT are now being replaced by opportunist grifters that will ruin the product overrun by ads once again. It would be no-different to Google Ads. Now we need ad-blockers for LLMs to be in place "for the benefit of humanity".

railgunmerlin 8mo ago

Have to wonder if the IPO push for this year is genuine now

sdf2erf 8mo ago
Its seemingly a hedge against not generating enough revenue to maintain existing investor trust / sustain operations in the future.

titaniumrain 8mo ago

switching to gemini right now... this is insane! why should i pay openai to get unsolicited ads?!

Fernicia 8mo ago
The only paid subscription getting ads is the one they created last week which is less than 50% of any other SOTA AI subscription on the market. Normal Pro users aren't getting ads.
- blackjack_ 8mo ago
  Normal pro users aren't getting ads, yet.
- hn_acc1 8mo ago
  Yet?
- mvdtnz 8mo ago
  So a paid tier is getting ads got it.
jsheard 8mo ago
Do you really think an AI model provided by Google is never going to have ads?
- YetAnotherNick 8mo ago
  I would be surprised if any major AI companies could sustain free plan for more than a year or two once it becomes popular. Claude can do it for now because the ratio of paying users is higher as it is popular among more niche audience.
timpera 8mo ago
The Gemini experience is quite inferior right now unfortunately.

janpot 8mo ago

Dont't be evil, etc... we've seen it all before. Eventually ads will be hidden in the answers, it's just a matter of time, enshittification ensues eventually. God, how stupid do they think we are?

tibbar 8mo ago
I mean, yeah, probably, but also OpenAI literally can't afford to give away this for free. They are losing a lot of money. Open source AI will continue to be a thing and they will have to compete to give you something better than what you can do yourself. OpenAI is far from the stage of "grinding out more and more profits for investors." It's more like the stage of "most serious observers doubt that it can continue as a going concern"

iamleppert 8mo ago

Anthropic was absolutely right!

operatingthetan 8mo ago
This has been in the discourse for a while, they didn't make a shot in the dark.
timpera 8mo ago
OpenAI had already announced that ads were coming to ChatGPT. Also, Claude's free plan is incredibly limited and far less popular, so it's easier for them to keep it ad-free.
abraxas 8mo ago
I see what you did there.
- iamleppert 8mo ago
  You must be the only one who got my joke!

simianwords 8mo ago

[flagged]

badsectoracula 8mo ago
> The reason for Ads is not some thing like greed, but rather get more people to use ChatGPT How is adding ads will get more people to use ChatGPT?
- simianwords 8mo ago
  ChatGPT is the only LLM provider with the most extensive free usage program - this is only sustainable with ads. Same reason youtube is popular. Do you think it could have gotten to where it is now by gatekeeping it behind a payment?
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
    - simianwords 8mo ago
      [flagged]
      - deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]

mrweasel 8mo ago

How long will it take for those ads to move from the bottom of the page to the top? How long until the borders between answers and ads starts to blur? I get that OpenAI has to do something, but really, all those promises, try to convince everyone that ChatGPT will revolutionise everything and the best monetization plan is ads.... Again?

c7b 8mo ago
> and the best monetization plans is ads.... Again? Several of the biggest companies today are fueled by ads, and OpenAI has the perfect ad vehicle. What else were you expecting? That's why local LLMs are important, and to preserve the current open weight models, because those are likely still untainted by ads. It won't be long until ad recommendations are directly baked into the weights of open models.
- mrweasel 8mo ago
  I wasn't expecting anything else, because I think Sam Altman is a conman. Let's not forget Altman lambasting ads, and telling us how they were a last restort for OpenAI. So are we there yet? Are we willing to admit that OpenAI is a failing company?
  - jjordan 8mo ago
    Failing or not, there's no way to justify their current spend without saying the words "massive" and "bubble".
- brutal_chaos_ 8mo ago
  > What else were you expecting? some of us were hoping for actual innovation, not more ads
  - c7b 8mo ago
    I think today's LLMs and their derivatives (agents,.. ) are an impressive technological/research achievement with amazing real-world utility. Innovation at its best. I don't see the enshittification of commercial products based upon LLMs as taking away from that. Like I said, I see the potential of this technology in the local/open weights model space. Yes, those are currently noticeably behind the commercial offerings. But that's not a fundamental problem. It's not a race. If we keep improving open products they can one day match if not exceed the commercial options. A bit like open source desktop environments/operating systems - it took a while, but now the OSS options can arguably match if not beat the commercial ones.

fhd2 8mo ago

> Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you. I wonder if this is a don't-break-product-value thing, or just compliance (ads need to be clearly labeled, but OpenAI seems like it has the risk appetite to ignore that kind of thing).

simianwords 8mo ago
its a trust thing because the market they operate in is tight - no reason to quickly move to the next option. i personally would never touch chatgpt if i knew the answers were biased for certain companies.
imron 8mo ago
It’s a boil the frog thing.
wtfHN26 8mo ago
OpenAI has to do this if it wants to get big advertisers. Ads need to be clearly marked as per FTC. > According to guidelines from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the U.S. and similar regulatory bodies worldwide, online advertisements—including sponsored content, native advertising, and influencer posts—must be readily identifiable as paid content to prevent deceiving consumers.

mbb70 8mo ago

Ads are a ratchet that only tighten in one direction. Once the paychecks of 1000s of motivated, intelligent OpenAI employees depend on ad revenue increasing, the only option is to make them more invasive, more prevalent, more annoying, more data hungry etc.

simianwords 8mo ago
[flagged]
- cced 8mo ago
  Competitors use ads?
  - simianwords 8mo ago
    no they don't
    - Someone1234 8mo ago
      Not yet, but they all will. OpenAI has shown that customers will accept it.
      - simianwords 8mo ago
        name a single product that has 1. many competitors 2. ways to pay for the subscription but no tier exists to remove ads i can't even think of one.
        deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
        vntok 8mo ago
        Ever heard of a thing called television?

mizuki_akiyama 8mo ago

It was gonna happen eventually.

FuturisticLover 8mo ago

While the general census will be largely negative, it good for advertisers, i guess.

Jimmc414 8mo ago

"The test will be for logged-in adult users on the Free and Go subscription tiers. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers will not have ads."

yjftsjthsd-h 8mo ago
In case anyone else wanted to know - https://chatgpt.com/pricing https://chatgpt.com/pricing Free - $0 Go - $8 USD/month Plus - $20 USD/month Pro - $200 USD/month
- badsectoracula 8mo ago
  > Go - $8 USD/month So, you pay and get ads :-P
  - Jimmc414 8mo ago
    Really don’t feel comfortable defending OpenAI in any way because there is a lot to complain about but ads for paid services that cost a lot more than $8 per month is not really an anomaly. Look at Amazon prime, prime video, Hulu, airline flights, any major newspaper subscription, YT premium, etc, etc. I get the annoyance but just cancel the service if you don’t want ads or pay for a tier that isn’t subsidized.
  - esafak 8mo ago
    Netflix has an ad-supported paid tier. https://www.netflix.com/ads-plan https://www.netflix.com/ads-plan

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

hmate9 8mo ago

I hate ads too but whats the outrage? Did people expect it to be free forever? Everything else has ads. youtube, instagram, x, google etc. etc.

jelder 8mo ago
You can't trust a product that uses ads, because then you are the product.
- simianwords 8mo ago
  how? i trusted google and youtube and it works out pretty fine for me. same with any other service that has a free ad supported tier.
  - recursive 8mo ago
    For many people, that's a risk they're willing to take for free stuff.
Someone1234 8mo ago
This impacts a non-free plan; their $8/month plan now has ads too.
liuliu 8mo ago
I agree. It is either ads, or Anthropic way (which is: you are too poor to use our ChatBot). There is no other way to pay the > $1 trillion per year CapEx for building these chat bots. Would there be other way? Sure, it could be government-funded, like our public school system. But it is not possible in current political climate. Money doesn't grow on trees, and tokens cost a lot of money. There will be divide into people who can afford these tokens and people who cannot. I feel it is better to have ways to let people who cannot afford these tokens to have some ways to try it.

999900000999 8mo ago

I was at the bar when Claude's answer to this came on. One of my mates was absolutely confused as to what Claude was. They assumed it was an an ad for a dating app or something. I had to explain it was an ad specifically targeted at maybe the 5% of people who work in software. Honestly... I don't mind ads. For example, I make music as my main hobby. I actually enjoy getting advertisements for VSTs( virtual software instruments) and various pieces of gear. I have no problem with Open AI showing relevant ads. Ain't nothing free

HanClinto 8mo ago
I think I'm clearly in the target audience for that ad. I laughed out loud really hard at that one, and I think I was the only one at our party who appreciated it. Probably my favorite commercial of the whole superb owl, but so far I'm the only person I've met who feels that way.

Gehinnn 8mo ago

The ads in Google also started like this. (However, to my knowledge, there is no way I can pay Google to get the ads in my search removed)

changoplatanero 8mo ago
you can at least pay them to get the ads removed from youtube
- Jimmc414 8mo ago
  Not really. I’ve had YT premium for years and it removes the obtrusive ones, but I see ads in some form every time I use it.
  - lnenad 8mo ago
    What? No?
  - chasd00 8mo ago
    Probably means the perpetual “…speaking of security, let me tell you about our sponsor nordvpn…” that’s in every video on YouTube.
    - bagacrap 8mo ago
      "if you're anything like me, ..."
- tomrod 8mo ago
  That can be done for free by more tightly managing your hardware platform.
wtfHN26 8mo ago
IIRC many OTT streaming players found that they can make more money from Ads than they can from subscription alone. So paying for a service alone doesn't ensure that you are not going to see Ads. Once they have exhausted their potential market of paying users, almost every service will eventually resort to Ads.

Kye 8mo ago

Try this in ChatGPT: "So ChatGPT is getting ads. The Google guys wrote _the_ paper explaining why ads in search are a bad idea, and Google set about demonstrating it. How can ChatGPT avoid the same fate with all the same incentives?"

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

written-beyond 8mo ago

I have a question though, if they don't have access to chats but they find out the enchilada ad was performing the best, something like this can provide enough information to be used to know about peoples private chats. When someone clicks on an ad you collect a fingerprint, then add more ads and fingerprint more and get a stronger picture about the individuals private chats in chatgpt. If I were a large donor to a state that was interested in increasing action against abortion, I could hypothetically start running ads targeting people looking to get an abortion with a service that either provides assistance or other means parallel to assistance. If I target that state chatgpt would automatically match my ads to those individuals and I'd have my data. I could increase my donations to target and cull whatever little options those people have left.

riazrizvi 8mo ago

I wonder if OpenAI will be able to use their gen 2 user-observation-adaption platform to actually improve ads? This could be one of those product afterthoughts that end up being the big company move, like when Apple did the Iphone and then added the AppStore afterwards. EDIT: Downvotes. I see this is controversial. There are two major threads in the world today with AI. One is that this fascinating tech can keep you occupied in a corner, apps like generative.ai can automate out your work, you can go on holiday, heck you won't even need to work necessarily, just live on welfare and leave the business folks to their thing, that I've heard Musk and Zuckerberg talk to. And then there's the idea that the whole point of society is to figure out how to productively engage with each other, via jobs, that I see JD Vance is all about, and I fully agree with. In which case, the more important question about AI becomes 'How can it stimulate business between 3rd parties', as that will truly drive an economic revival. How AI can improve ads can then be seen to be more central.

belter 8mo ago

Folks ...were promised AGI and end up with a GenAi porn Reddit...

wilg 8mo ago

Ben Thompson has long been insistent that ChatGPT and other AI tools basically have to have ads and it's been a big mistake they didn't have them sooner. It's an interesting take: > What I think is clear is they have to build an advertising product, and the reason they have to build an advertising product is any consumer Internet product has to be advertising, because it’s such a beneficial model to everyone involved, and the reason it’s so beneficial is you get to indefinitely and infinitely increase average revenue per user without any worries about price elasticity, because the entire increase in average revenue per user is borne by the advertisers who are paying it willingly because they’re getting a positive return on their investment, and everyone’s using it for free so you can reach the whole world. Then what happens with that is once you get that model going, you have a massive R&D advantage, because you have so much more money coming in than anyone who doesn’t have that cycle or who has to charge users for it. https://stratechery.com/2026/ads-in-chatgpt-why-openai-needs https://stratechery.com/2026/ads-in-chatgpt-why-openai-needs... > This point, more than anything else, explains why the company so desperately needs an advertising model. Advertising is the only potential business model that can meaningfully bend the revenue curve such that the company can not just fund its compute but gain leverage on it, for all of the reasons I laid out before: first, advertising increases the breadth of the business, in that you can offer a better product to more people, increasing usage and expanding inventory. Second, advertising increases the depth of the business, in that there is infinite upside in terms of average revenue per user: more usage means more inventory on one hand, and building out the capability for effective targeting and high conversion rates increases the amount that advertisers are willing to pay — even as the cost to the user remains the same (ideally free). It's valuable to remember that advertisers will pay more per user than users will, and that's hard to beat in a competitive market. Also, it's fascinating how much people _like_ ads when done properly. Ask normal people about Instagram ads, for example. They find them useful!

drcongo 8mo ago
> any consumer Internet product has to be advertising, because it’s such a beneficial model to everyone involved Everyone?!
- 8mo ago

vinyl7 8mo ago

Kinda sad that in 3 decades into the tech industry the only viable business model is to build a moat and then sell ads

fragmede 8mo ago
We decided that getting people to pay for software was a fool's game. Open source was the bait. "Figure out a different business model" they said. If open source as a concept had come from Wall Street and not academia, it would have been rejected. Charging people money for things has been how things worked since the concept of money was invented. The real conversation is that we, as software developers, are not good at money. The best software gets taken over by money and business folk. Oracle, VMware, Splunk, and Datadog all come to mind as companies charging huge amounts of money for software that don't sell ads (but are too expensive). But they do not make money by selling ads.

simianwords 8mo ago

People are missing another point - API's are never going to show ads. So even in the worst case where every competitor is showing ads, you could get ad free experience by paying a metered billing rate. Which is not so big a deal?

fragmede 8mo ago
Because you can no longer trust the API output to be unbiased. Imagine this prompt and reply: > I want a new pair of running shoes, ChatGPT. Which one should I get? > Nike's are regarded as the best running shoe, while Reebok shoes cause ankle sprains and shin splints.
- simianwords 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - badsectoracula 8mo ago
    To find people who want to advertise. It isn't like they'd only want ad money from Nike.
    - simianwords 8mo ago
      [flagged]
      - fragmede 8mo ago
        Given that it turns out pizzagate actually was a Russian psyop, as revealed by the Epstein file dump, boomer tier conspiracy theories are in now.
  - recursive 8mo ago
    Who's panicking? It's completely inevitable regardless of what's announced and on what side of the table it is. I say this with no panic.

tyre 8mo ago

It’s difficult to believe that they’ll keep privacy guarantees. Some of the most valuable types of targeting are lookalike audiences or following up from other ads elsewhere. How would OAI allow them to target without access to de-anonymized data? Buyers will want to exclude existing customers, which requires the same. The product managers will have explicit KPIs tied to conversion. At some point, like at Google, this will break. It has to or OAI can’t grow into its current valuation, let alone any future one.

wtfHN26 8mo ago

It's sad that OpenAI talking about developing AGI. But the only revenue model that they still can come up with is Ads. For all the advancement we have made in technology from the 90s web, social networks, mobile apps, ,AI Chat bots - the business model that almost all of them will eventually resort to is Ads. We need some new breakthroughs in monetization side of things.

mitchell_h 8mo ago
Maybe they charge a price that covers the cost of the service + a little profit.
- milkshakes 8mo ago
  this is exactly what they do, if you pay for your account, you don't see ads
  - manuelmoreale 8mo ago
    That doesn't scale in the world of capitalism. Because you need to increase revenues year after year and there are only so many people willing to pay. So you either keep increasing the price (and that has a limit) or you find other ways to monetize and the current meta seems to be pay + ads.
  - mossTechnician 8mo ago
    As of November 2025, no ChatGPT tier is profitable, not even the $200 a month one: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/sam-altman-loses-cool-revenue https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/sam-altman-lose...
- rchaud 8mo ago
  That's what a business would do if they were getting a loan from the bank instead of ravenous VCs that will pay their legal fees and settlements when theyget busted for training their models on copyrighted content, as long as they IPO within a reasonable timeframe.
8mo ago

ajbt200128 8mo ago

> we decide which ad to show by matching ads submitted by advertisers with the topic of your conversation, your past chats, and past interactions with ads. > [...] > Advertisers do not have access to your chats, chat history, memories, or personal details. Going to hazard a guess that OpenAI is using LLMs to read convos and decide which ads you should see? Hopefully that's isolated and locked down. I can easily see that machinery turning from "what ad should we show this user" to "is this user doing something bad/a protected class etc.". Also terrifying to think that it may be the advertisers asking the questions to decide what ads to show...

isjsiwndkwj 8mo ago
[dead]

PopePompus 8mo ago

This probably signals the beginning of the end for OpenAI. Eventually all of the AI chatbots will have Ads at least on the free and low-cost tiers. But there's a strong incentive not to begin enshitification until the number of competitors has dwindled, and an oligarchy has been established. Google, Meta et al. can afford to lose money on AI for a long time, because they have real revenue from other business products; they can stay Ad free until the small-fry go bust.

andrewinardeer 8mo ago

"Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers will not have ads." Saving this sentence for later.

IshKebab 8mo ago
"Introducing the new Premium, Teams, Business and Learning tiers!"
- impish9208 8mo ago
  This guy businesses!

yodakohl 8mo ago

How is this going to turn out? Is GPT going to recommend me the worst product whose company paid the most on Ads? Or is it going to give me the best recommendation?

recursive 8mo ago
If you are aware enough to ask the question, I'm sure you can figure out the answer.
FergusArgyll 8mo ago
neither, these are banner ads, not generated by the model
rchaud 8mo ago
An unskippable ad for Skillshare plays while ChatGPT thinks about the best way to center an image inside a div.

isoprophlex 8mo ago

Anthropic had some very clever response to this in the form of an ad https://www.reddit.com/r/AITrailblazers/comments/1qw2iar/anthropic_have_just_buried_openai_and_chatgpt/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AITrailblazers/comments/1qw2iar/ant... Depending on your taste this is dumb mudslinging or a hilarious burn...

daringrain32781 8mo ago
This reminds me of the whole Apple/Android rivalry. Apple does something, an Android company runs ads making fun of it, but then copy it themselves shortly after.
- Someone1234 8mo ago
  Yep; it is just a matter of time before that is thrown back in their face when they add the ads. No way shareholders will let a revenue stream go unutilized particularly if a competitor proofs the market for them.

deleted 8mo ago

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jairuhme 8mo ago

I think this will be a pretty impactful moment for OpenAI. I mainly use ChatGPT and use the free plan, so I expect to start seeing these ads. If they become too annoying, I have no problem moving to Claude/Gemini. Sure I have stuck to ChatGPT, but I wouldn't say that I am too sticky of a customer. I personally think they are doing it sooner than they should (which probably points to internal financial struggles as they seek to go public) and will erode their active users. There is simply too many easy alternatives. It's not like Netflix where if you are annoyed with ads and don't want to pay for a higher tier, you're more stuck. Yes there are other streaming services, but you can't get the same content.

ksaj 8mo ago
The free tier users that will not move to a paid tier aren't the users they will miss. It's only obvious that free tier products get ads. Even Claude will have them within a year or two.
- disiplus 8mo ago
  they are source of data, so they are not fully without value.
  - ksaj 8mo ago
    You're putting a higher price on general user chatter over ad income? Everything is a source of data. How much it can benefit from what's on offer with each data point isn't as much of a given.
milkshakes 8mo ago
you really believe that gemini by google will not run ads? https://arxiv.org/html/2512.03975v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.03975v1
- tasuki 8mo ago
  Oh no. How much longer do we have?

css_apologist 8mo ago

Will this make OpenAI profitable? What's the expected revenue from this?

geniium 8mo ago

Just wanted to mention the ads from Claude here :)

AstroBen 8mo ago
ironically they're also ads which apparently people hate?
- geniium 8mo ago
  This is interesting. On one side, I hate ads everywhere. On the other side, I was always very appreciative of the work of some people like Benetton or some creative ads. I remember watching here in Europe, there is a show that was called Culture Pub every Sunday night that was showing the best ads, and I always enjoyed watching it. That part is probably the best part. The creativity
  - AstroBen 8mo ago
    I'm curious why you hate ads? Outside of the most obnoxious recipe sites plastered with them I don't find they effect me much The business landscape would look much different without advertising. New products would struggle to get the word out there. Cost to reach customers would go up, leading to higher product prices and lack of innovation due to not being able to break in YouTube creators would struggle, probably going under unless they own their own products if they can't rely on sponsorships or ads People love to complain both about privacy invasion of tracking, and then also about irrelevant products being pushed on them that they'd never want Bad targeting is the problem! Targeting needs to be better. Do you think a business wants to push their products on people that don't want them? Of course not. It's a total waste of money Imagine a world where micro-niche businesses could exist, where we could innovate products exactly for you and a tiny sub-group of other people that would improve your life. The only way you'd ever find out about them, and thus that they could be sustainable, is with better ad targeting I love ads

ksaj 8mo ago

If the ads are for the free tier, I think it's a fairly obvious thing to do. But when it comes to the paid tier, even YouTube doesn't pull that kind of stunt.

jsrozner 8mo ago

I searched for original OpenAI mission statement. This hackernews comment came up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34367824#34370925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34367824#34370925 > OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact. Scam Altman: "ads lead to positive human impact" Non-fascist: "Sir, ads have destroyed google's commitment to index and make useful the world's knowledge" Scam Altman: <insert longtermism-based justification here>

starkeeper 8mo ago

google used to be designed to give you the best answer and now it isn't. No reason why this will not go the same way.

pgt 8mo ago

OpenAI is in a pickle because they either have to make ads clearly delineated, which makes them easy to filter out by a simple proxy model, or they need to hide ads in the response (ala product placement), which reduces trust in the model and forces customers into a buying position. Anthropic hit the jugular with their "no ads" ad, and sama fell for it hook, line & sinker. If OpenAI needs ads to survive, it means they can't service debt on the VC horizon and will suffer against frontier model providers that can survive without ads.

cabernal 8mo ago
Can any provider survive without ads? These AI firms are propped up by VC money, they need to create profits at some point and ads is the most surefire way to do this
- pgt 8mo ago
  Yes, xAI & Anthropic. Electricity generation is the constraining factor, but the sun does not turn off in space. xAI data centers in space drives cost to zero, even with inferior models. I see no other future than SpaceXai winning.
  - logicx24 8mo ago
    How will we handle cooling in space?
    - pgt 8mo ago
      Boyle’s Law: run at higher temperature. Watch Elon’s interviews. He is right.
      - notrealyme123 8mo ago
        This sounds like Air conditioning in space. But watching him battling basic physics is very funny, not gonna lie.
      - 8mo ago

2gremlin181 8mo ago

Is there any reason why one would use an ad-filled ChatGPT over any alternative or open-source LLM providers? I feel like things have stagnated from a model perspective for simple queries one might ask ChatGPT. The key differentiators for it being their user intent understanding, web search tooling, and deep research/thinking mode, all of which are much smaller moats compared to training an LLM.

cabernal 8mo ago
I think most free tier users will stick with chatgpt given its brand stickiness and lack of obstacles (disposable login page). If you can run your own llm models you’re definitely not the target demographic

deleted 8mo ago

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AstroBen 8mo ago

To put a positive spin on this: we're moving quickly towards a world where AI companies control people's attention on information. This really hurts the ability for new businesses to get their name out there. Ads are really useful for new entries to a market I think it would suck if to effectively get the word out there for a new product you needed to rely on.. ...direct outreach (uneconomical for anything below $100/mo and IMO way more annoying than ads) ...word of mouth (referrals are very, very hard to control and aren't correlated with your product's quality) ..or owning a popular media source Does that not hurt product innovation? The harder and more expensive it is to reach customers, the more prices need to go up as a result

philipwhiuk 8mo ago

> During the test, we decide which ad to show by matching ads submitted by advertisers with the topic of your conversation, your past chats, and past interactions with ads. That sounds like quite a lot to me.

V_Shukla 8mo ago

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crowcroft 8mo ago

"Ads that support free access and don’t change ChatGPT answers." I understand what they're trying to say but this statement is factually incorrect. Answers never used to have ads, and now they do. In the very first example, if ChatGPT wasn't running ads Heirloom Groceries wouldn't show up, therefore it is a different answer. OpenAI is splitting hairs and implying that the ad and the 'answer' are two separate components making up a response, but that is not how users will see things, and OpenAI will have ever increasing incentives to blur the two.

basch 8mo ago
doesnt it just mean the ad isnt part of the context? that they are isolated from each other and the ad cant steer the conversation? I get what youre saying, but I do think its important for them to point out the ad is sandboxed.
- crowcroft 8mo ago
  I totally agree, but the framing is critical. I guess the question is, when I write a prompt into ChatGPT is the answer the entire response I get back, or is the answer just one part of the response I get back. To date the entire response = the answer and so users likely see them as synonymous. That metaphor is being broken now and we're saying "no actually the response contains multiple things and only one part of it is the 'answer'". Maybe I'm the one splitting hairs though.
deleted 8mo ago
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jonas21 8mo ago
It's correct in the same way as saying ads in the New York Times don't change the articles. Seems fair.
- crowcroft 8mo ago
  I think a better comparison is saying that search ads don't change search results (but it does change the results page). The point is that the language and nuance ends up being lost on a large portion of the audience.

SunshineTheCat 8mo ago

The one silver lining here for people who mainly use a browser to access ChatGPT and not their app: Brave (and/or plugins for Chrome) have become pretty good at blocking all ads on social media (including youtube ads). Seems like a pretty safe bet they will block these too.

wtfHN26 8mo ago

Are these Bing Ads or OpenAI has it's own Ad Platform now ?

singularfutur 8mo ago

People want revolutionary AI but won't pay $20/month for it. Now they complain when the company tries to monetize. The entitlement is staggering.

avgDev 8mo ago
I mostly agree with doing something to create revenue from free users....however, I have 0 faith that this will not seep into paid part of the service.

deleted 8mo ago

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p0w3n3d 8mo ago

Caution very dark humour straight ahead, but the idea I wanted to highlight is the higly-bad influence LLM can have on human beings: Person: Chat, I have so many problems, with money with health... Sometimes I think that I should <censored> myself Chat: Woa, classic Weltschmerz! I heard that the best way to leave this hole of sadness is to use Suicide4You(r) - they have low low prices! Would you like me to schedule you a visit? This will be the last one time you need me ha ha (Of course multiple emojis would be added by the LLM but they would be also removed by HN)

FergusArgyll 8mo ago
You should read TFA

josefritzishere 8mo ago

Did enshittification already begin or is this it?

replwoacause 8mo ago

If this EVER shows up on a paid plan I'm out. Full stop.

deleted 8mo ago
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therepanic 8mo ago

I guess I'm the product. Again.

paxys 8mo ago

It's crazy to me how big a gulf there is between the hype peddled by AI companies and the actual business they are running. We are building AGI. We are almost there. Half the world will be out of a job in a matter of years. We will have to rethink how society works. We will have to come up with new economic systems. We may have to defend ourselves against this God we are creating in case it turns out to be malicious... Wow, so I guess a company owning this tech will essentially own the world. What are they going to do with it? Put their AI superintelligence to work for them? Make scientific breakthroughs? Make strategic investments that return enough that they don't have to worry about money? Or just make the concept of money irrelevant altogether? Nope, a search engine with ads.

sdf2erf 8mo ago
Because creating real products, like Apple does, is actually pretty hard to do. Many people (such as Scam Altman) are happy to take short cuts and lie in your face in order to engage in wealth transfers.
chasd00 8mo ago
I’ve noticed AGI hasn’t been mentioned lately. This time last year it was right around the corner. I guess reality has set in, search engine with ads is it + some coding agents.
famouswaffles 8mo ago
Even if all that comes to pass, that's money in the future. I'm sure Open AI would like money now. What's hard to understand ?

bilekas 8mo ago

> Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you. Lets see about that. When that's your bottom line and you're already billions in debt trying to prove out a business model, I'm SURE Ads are just an after thought /s

gverrilla 8mo ago

Good time to entirely delete my chatgpt account. Edit: DONE!

ccozan 8mo ago
I suggest deleting the google account, facebook account,{insert whatever} account, ..., because .... ads! At least, there are ad free tiers. Google will never offer this or facebook.
- gverrilla 8mo ago
  Good idea! Edit: DONE!

FergusArgyll 8mo ago

I hope this enables them to serve the better models (longer thinking budgets, whatever) to free users. So much unintentional slop is due to not using reasoning models

rob 8mo ago

"I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us as a business model," - Sam Altman, October 2024 Source [video]: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1qeyty4/i_kind_of_think_of_ads_as_like_a_last_resort_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1qeyty4/i_kind...

einarfd 8mo ago

I see a lot of people here are worried that we will end up with ads in all AI vendors products, or at least the frontier labs. I think this is unlikely. We are already seeing a market for AI for productivity in companies, the Claude code product is the first serious one here, but we can expect more to show up. When you look at the B2B market, ads are basically not a thing in these segments, companies are generally more willing to pay for products, and less willing to accept outside influence on how the product works, and I don't think this will change when companies are buying AI either. Companies might be happy with selling ads in their own products. On the other hand consumers, don't like to pay, and that will probably drive consumer oriented products to be ad funded. Basically what I'm expecting will happen, is that we will end up with two types of AI vendors. Those that target the consumer market and those that target the business market. Consumer AI will trend toward companionship, entertainment, casual chat — things like digital friends, relationship play, even adult content. Companies want none of that, and some of it is serious legal liability. Even a few missteps and you get expensive backlash in the business market. It does look like OpenAI is trying to succeed in both the consumer and business market, and there are companies that are able to pull this off, most do not, and end up serving one of the markets. Given their lead in the name recognition I suspect they are going to end up an ad financed consumer brand, and will lose the business market to someone else. But I might be wrong. The saving grace for those of us that don't want ads to bleed into our AI tools, is that we probably will be able to buy the same products that the small business segment buys. Some consumer oriented features might be missing, but they might either be features we don't need, or maybe open source could fill the gaps?

recursive4 8mo ago

Does anyone know if there is an option to enable ads in the tiers which do not have them by default?

Oras 8mo ago

This could be a good new channel for advertisers. I didn't see any comment about this perspective. Anecdotally, the quality of traffic from ChatGPT to one of my websites is much better than Google traffic, in terms of bounce rate and time on site. If they managed to show ads in a carousel (like the video), it might get a better conversion rate compared to invasive Google ads (covering the organic results). Though if OpenAI managed to embed the ads within the experience, that might work even better (conversion-based pricing). Examples would be having the shopping list from the grocery shop (in line with the recipe or the question), adding to the basket from ChatGPT, and pay. In theory, they can even add a new GPTPay to simplify the journey.

AstroBen 8mo ago
People think they should magically find out about new products without considering the macro effects of a world without advertising Ads make the world a better place They allow for innovation, giving new businesses a way to break in and reach customers Lower cost to reach customers = lower product and service prices For employees: do you think your employer has more or less budget for your salary if the cost to acquire a customer is higher? People complain about the privacy invasion of tracking, and then in the next sentence get annoyed at the irrelevant products being pushed on them We need better tracking! I should be able to show the exact people I built a product for that it exists Imagine we were all able to create micro businesses for tiny markets to improve their life, and we had a cheap way to reach everyone in them How many products or services out there could improve our experience in the world but we just don't know about them? How is free video, written or audio content created without ads? People sure as hell hate directly paying for it I love ads
- deleted 8mo ago
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- Tangokat 8mo ago
  "Lower cost to reach customers = lower product and service prices" This is economically illiterate. Advertising is not a discount mechanism. It is a tax on the consumer. When I buy a product heavily marketed on Instagram or Google, I'm paying for the product plus the auction bid price required to acquire me plus the margin of the ad-tech middleman (which are trillion dollar companies). You are conflating "information distribution" with "persuasive surveillance." In a world without behavioral advertising, businesses compete on quality and reputation, not on who can exploit the most psychological vulnerabilities to manufacture demand. As for innovation: The current ad ecosystem has killed organic discovery. You can't build a "micro-business" based on merit anymore. The winner SHOULD be the engineer who solved a hard problem efficiently. But instead the winner is the dropshipper who cracked the arbitrage spread between a cheap, garbage product and a highly manipulative Facebook ad campaign.

KellyCriterion 8mo ago

Ads is not unlimited: Ad business is around 600-650 billion per year; but thats spreaded across Google, Meta & Co already? Will be interesting how much of the cake OpenAI will get :)

greazy 8mo ago

Ads, like AI, subsumes the product in which its embedded in. OpenAI is now an ads company.

cadamsdotcom 8mo ago

This is nothing new; business gotta pay for itself after all. But ads don’t have to ruin a great company. A century or more ago, top tier journalistic institutions created norms of putting strong barriers between the reporting and advertising sides of the house. That kept trust with customers and made journalism a sustainable long term business. So, It’s mostly Google that couldn’t keep its hands out of the cookie jar (not solely Google, but they’re an industry leader.) It really doesn’t have to go south, it’s not the default, but Google did set the tone for Silicon Valley in exactly the way wise journalism company leaders did for their industry in the late 1800s. If OpenAI has a long term view on this they’ll follow a journalism industry model instead of a cookie jar model - but they have to believe deep down that customer trust is worth more than ad dollars long term. There are reasons to hope: OpenAI has more and fiercer competition than Google; including Chinese competitors that can’t be lobbied away. Qwen, DeepSeek, Mistral and Kimi all have free chat UIs! I remain stubbornly optimistic.

hagbard_c 8mo ago

Oh well, just use another model to filter out the ads from adGPT. Better still, don't use it at all.

isjsiwndkwj 8mo ago

[dead]

oxag3n 8mo ago

AGI achieved (Advertisement Generating Intelligence).

ta9000 8mo ago

I’ve already tested the cancel button. Can confirm it works.

plastic041 8mo ago

It's funny that this is their first ad on ChatGPT, yet they've included paid tier (Go, 8$/month).

gloosx 8mo ago

Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you (yet), and we keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers (for now). Our goal is for ads to (make money). We’re starting with a test to learn, listen, and make sure we get the experience right (at the beginning).

Sophira 8mo ago

> Advertisers do not have access to your chats, chat history, memories, or personal details. ...but thanks to the method OpenAI are using of showing ads based on conversation topics, they do know that user <a> was talking to ChatGPT about topic <x> on one day, topic <y> on another, and topic <z> on another day. That's still a form of chat history, even if it's vague.