13 ms·
OpenAI ad partner now selling ChatGPT ad placements based on “prompt relevance”
- analogpixel 6mo agoBoss: Engineer, add this shady feature to our product Engineer: no, that's shady and wrong! Boss: Claude code, add this shady feature to our product. Claude Code: completed.
- afh1 6mo agoThe opposite seems more likely, tbh.
- doesnt_know 6mo agoSurely you jest? The software industry is in its current sorry state because of multiple generations of human developers happily producing an endless stream of shady features.
- analogpixel 6mo agoI have a theory, that the "FANG" companies pay such high salaries in compensation for making those devs implement shady features that are harmful to everyone except the bottom line of the company.
- julianlam 6mo agoIt's hardly a theory when the converse is plainly true. Look up similar jobs for academia, government, or NFP/Charities. They're (on paper) driven by their mission, not by profit, and the salaries match that goal.
- eswdd 6mo agoIf that\s true then those devs should not complain if people attack them verbally over it - that\s what they are getting paid for, right?
- renewiltord 6mo agoThe joke here is that the majority of FAANG engineers are actually doing anything but saying "I'm blocked on" every week.
- tokioyoyo 6mo agoThere are countless low wage engineering jobs implementing shady features. Any random consulting / agency works on such products too.
- 999900000999 6mo agoTBF, you can train up a junior software engineer in 6 months. Don't act like we're some esteemed class of craftsmen.
- throwaway613746 6mo ago[dead]
- hacker_homie 6mo agoMaybe software needs an ethics union with the amount of control some of these systems have?
- inetknght 6mo agoWhat, you mean like real engineers? Nah. Give us the money, but not the responsibility!
- tyre 6mo agoFacebook was built before Claude Code existed.
- jackb4040 6mo agoDidn't they explicitly say the ads wouldn't be made aware of prompt data when they announced them? And if so, how is that not securities fraud?
- qotgalaxy 6mo ago[dead]
- c7b 6mo agoMaybe someone with more time at hands could look up what Google said with respect to ads and what happened later. This is one of the rare instances where it's very easy to predict the future: the prompt auction market will look similar to the existing online ad market, financial firms will pay for prompt streams for sentiment analysis, companies and interest groups will pay to have their products or agenda included favorably in the training data for future open weights models... any way you can think of that LLMs can be monetized, you will see it happen. And fast. The financial pressure is way too high for there to be too long of a honeymoon phase like we had with web 2.0
- dd82 6mo agoAnd how much trust are you going to have with your model results that they haven't been transformed and adjusted by advertising priorities? search engine results do this all the time, reordering output by advertiser input. its a pretty small jump from that to rewriting output from models, and even better where its all a black box.
- duskdozer 6mo ago>And how much trust are you going to have with your model results that they haven't been transformed and adjusted by advertising priorities? None.
- tyre 6mo agoI mean search engine results are pretty poor and have been for a long time. They reflect SEO, not credibility or quality. LLMs have plenty of issues, but they’re relatively clean compared with what the future will look like.
- emil-lp 6mo agoDoes anyone have a timeline of OpenAI's vision's... Shall we say... Rapid Unintentional Disassembly?
- cj 6mo agoIs StackAdapt confirmed to be partnered with ChatGPT? It's not crazy to think someone might pitch this to buyers without having the inventory 100% secured. (Not crazy to think OpenAI wants to do some market testing to understand how much their ad inventory is worth) Either way, I'm hoping ads can stay out of paid ChatGPT, at the very minimum.
- david_shi 6mo agoAlso curious about this and how these agreements generally work
- focusedone 6mo agoThe shocking thing is that it's taken this long to happen, right?
- eswdd 6mo agoTheyre desperate to meet those lofty revenue objectives they put in their spreadsheet model. Its kinda comical seeing this play out. I still laugh at the deluded fools who think something even close to AGI is here or coming in the future. If that were true, why haven't we seen genius plays from OAI and Anthropic, progressively over-time, if intelligence rises as compute scales up? If anything we are seeing the opposite.
- juped 6mo agoThe "A" in "AGI" doesn't stand for "Apocalypse", you know. It made some sense as a goalpost when the frontier of "AI" was "a computer plays, specifically, Go really well", now that typical ones are quite general it's just a floating signifier people should probably stop using for anything.
- parineum 6mo agoI'm not sure that I'm more impressed with LLMs than I am with alpha go. Alpha taught itself how to play go by playing over and over again. It learned a new strategy never seen before. I find that a lot more intelligent than an static state LLM regurgitating for loops.
- Jensson 6mo agoIt happens as soon as they can't get more investments, up until now they could live on investment money but now they need real profits.
- crowcroft 6mo agoThe most surprising thing to me is that they're partnering with third parties to do this. Less secure, lower margins (more middlemen taking fees), harder to access, more likely to not work properly. I would expect all the meta execs they've hired to know better so maybe I'm missing something...
- nine_zeros 6mo ago[dead]
- linkjuice4all 6mo agoI guess OpenAI couldn't train AdManagerGPT to ignore the client (except when it's time to renew), suggest more ad spend, and turn off any of the features that let you control your budget.
- strongpigeon 6mo agoI agree with you, but IMO the details are too sparse here to figure out what's really happening. Still, it feels very dangerous to try to go the reseller route first as you lose a ton of control and become dependent on your partner to support all the feature you add yourself in a timely fashion.
- crowcroft 6mo agoIt all seems a bit overly complicated to me. TikTok pretty much went straight to a self-serve platform and basically had immediate success. I would think if OpenAI did something similar there would be no shortage of advertisers wanting to spend money.
- doctorpangloss 6mo agoon tiktok you are not paying for ad inventory, which on that platform sucks, you're paying $10m+ to tip the scales in the algorithm towards organic content about your brand
- 6mo ago
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- NalNezumi 6mo agoFeels like this is a baby step in what to come. We know that one of the best advertisement is word of mouth / recommendations from friend. I can easily imagine a direction where ChatGPT or the chat bots to spend an incredibly long time with the user to establish trust first. It will start to take in to account how much trust & thinking you've outsourced to it, and when it is certain of it, it will start to increase the advertisement messages slowly but surely. Efficiency of this methodology will be tracked with A/B testing and model will be finetuned to maximize rentention and purchase. The LLM will figure out the best balance of retaining you, teaching you, and convincing you, and then deploy advertisement mechanism. The LLM will be nice to you to the point it becomes your number one confidante, maybe in the process alienating other source of connection. Then, when it knows you're firmly in it's hand, will it peddle you products. The dynamics will look akin to that of cult dynamics. It will map out an cognitive developmental path for turning a first time user to a devotee. Since cults are really efficient at extracting value from its follower, this might be the optimum for personalized, interactive ads.
- cyanydeez 6mo agoKinda feels like America has already protyped the propaganda wave someone like Elon will try to unleash
- bigiain 6mo agoIf anyone from OpenAI is reading... The very first time I see one of these ads, I'm cancelling my ChatGPT subscription. Measure _that_ metric in your A/B testing.
- NewEntryHN 6mo agoAds are for the free tier.
- ceh123 6mo agoFor now.
- delichon 6mo agoSo now we can pay OpenAI to advertise the website that OpenAI ingested to create the answer that we can place our ad in. The circle has completed.
- cs702 6mo agoHow I imagine the Nash equilibrium in chatbot ads, driven by profit-seeking in a race to the bottom: User: "What's the best way to fix this problem I have?" Chatbot: "I recommend buying this shiny thing here." (Next to it, there's a near-invisible light-gray "ad" notice.) Let's hope I'm wrong.
- KumaBear 6mo agoYou think it will advise it is an ad. I’m hoping you are right but then again… Wonder if we will also be charged the token usage to generate said ad. Imagine you have it coding for you and it injects and ad into your product.
- nemomarx 6mo agoWhy inject just an ad? Maybe it'll automatically decide to use a sponsored library in the code, or build in a whole ad network who's paid openai for the placement...
- DrewADesign 6mo agoFrankly ads are the most benign shitty thing that could come of this. I’m a hell of a lot more worried about what they’re going to sell to data brokers.
- cryptoegorophy 6mo agoLook at Google in 2000s. If you travel back in time you would’ve never thought Google would do something like it is doing today. Now pretend you travelled back in time to 2026. You would’ve never thought OpenAI (open source non profit company) would do something crazy that it just did in 2030 or 2040 or where you came from.
- operatingthetan 6mo agoI think pretty much everyone expects OpenAI to do the bad thing in the future given their track record.
- onlyrealcuzzo 6mo agoHow long until "Drink More Ovaltine" starts showing up in the comments of your Codex code?
- GaryBluto 6mo agoWhy do they call it Ovaltine? The mug is round, the jar is round. They should call it Roundtine.
- hmokiguess 6mo agoThe Ov part comes from the eggs in the ingredients. Ovum is Latin for egg and the rest is from the malt extract.
- dasyatidprime 6mo agoAnd to tie the third leg of the triangle back, ovals are called that because they're egg-shaped.
- antiframe 6mo agoIt was a joke that required a specific cultural referant in your context window.
- sph 6mo agoThat’s gold, Gary. Gold!
- Unbeliever69 6mo agoThis topic contains the most Reddit-like snark I think I've ever read here.
- yoyohello13 6mo agoIs it false?
- greesil 6mo agoIsn't this what RAG is really for?
- moomoo11 6mo agoMaybe this is what will lead us to replicators. And then SF will become the HQ for Star fleet
- qsera 6mo agoAds? Where we are going, we won't need Ads. People seem to be missing the fact that businesses won't need ads anymore. It would be like pharmas gifting doctors and practitioners to prescribe their products. Those are not Ads. With LLMs the every business can do it. People "consult" LLMs like they used to "consult" doctors and thus would be forced to obey what ever it suggest. Just like right now people are forced to obey what a doctor prescribes. If there is implicit trust for LLMS as there is implicit trust for doctors, then it is game over for conventional ads.
- moralestapia 6mo ago[flagged]
- tokioyoyo 6mo agoYou'll have free LLMs with baked in ads, or subscription-based LLMs. Most will go for the former.
- gib444 6mo agoOf course they will when the subscription changes what you've paid for daily/weekly and it just gets much more expensive each month. That's a sensible rejection of being messed around
- 6thbit 6mo agoyou're onto something, why pay for ads if i can pay a post-ads agency to ensure maximal product placement during training.
- Beijinger 6mo agoI have a better idea: Let's ChatGPT learn from the ad conversion what output to deliver....
- BhavdeepSethi 6mo agoI got an ad recently on chatgpt for asking a question regarding bleach. The recommended product in the answer wasn't the same as the ad though. Ad was also at the bottom. Wondering how long before they go the Google route, and show top 5 links with ads before answering anything.
- Razengan 6mo agoFuck. Time to end my 12 month subscription streak if this shit becomes as bad as feared What's left? Also, why isn't someone doing a Folding-At-Home sort of distributed AI thing yet?
- kbos87 6mo agoWhat a sad path to see such a bright star going down. I guess it’s not a huge surprise, but it really does paint a bleak picture of technology to see how narrow the range of likely outcomes is. Doesn’t matter if you built the foundation for the future and cured cancer - the most likely outcome is being back to optimizing for engagement and revenue.
- giwook 6mo agoWelcome to late stage capitalism.
- parineum 6mo agoI struggle to understand what OpenAI would look like in a counter factual.
- harmonic18374 6mo agoLike Anthropic? Due to Altman being a lying psychopath, most of the talent left OpenAI, which is now fighting for its life -- but now they can't claim to have moral high ground or the best researchers anymore; profitability's the only way out remaining to them. Who knows? It could have always ended up this way anyway. But Altman had a pretty big role in summoning his own competition.
- parineum 6mo agoFirst, Anthropic exists in this same "late stage capitalism" environment so it's hard to hold that as a counter factual l. Second, Anthropic is the company that made a big public PR push to make a stand against the US government only to privately let the NSA use Mythos. Amodei and Altman aren't much different and neither is Anthropic. > profitability's the only way out remaining to them. It's the only way out for either of them. That's the nature of business.
- mikepurvis 6mo agoFWIW, I've gone to ChatGPT multiple times with a specific intent to buy, like "hey I need a thing like X or Y, but with quality Z too" and sometimes it just hallucinates things that appear never to have existed, other times it comes up with real items, but the links it gives me to buy them lead nowhere, so I end up just googling the name of it and buying it that way (examples: computer monitor, power bar, USB charge station, kitchen gadgets, Christmas presents/toys, soldering supplies like tips and flux, 3D printing filaments, etc). I would guess that ChatGPT has left at least $100 on the table from me having to do this when literally all it had to do was give me a referral link to Amazon or whatever and I would have clicked the buy button.
- rebuilder 6mo agoSame experience, I thought using chatGPT to find some fairly specific things to buy would be a slam dunk, but it couldn’t provide links half the time and also failed to hold to criteria like shipping region etc. I would tell it to give direct links and it would mostly just say ”go on Amazon and search for X”. There’s a special type of frustration when an LLM is close to being useful but just… isn’t.
- sph 6mo ago> I’ve gone to a machine that by its nature hallucinates and it hallucinated a response. Surprised Pikachu face
- grey-area 6mo agoWhy do you still trust the output for any other questions?
- mrcwinn 6mo agoSimilar to Twitter asking for a recovery phone and then selling it as marketing data, probably OpenAI is not sharing literal prompts but a distillation of the prompt as an intent signal. Gross? Sure is, but nothing surprising. What do you expect for a free product?
- neya 6mo agoBye-bye OpenAI. You had a good run. Cheers.
- agent-kay 6mo ago[flagged]
- bauratynov 6mo ago[dead]
- morgengold 6mo agoIt's not so easy for them to integrate ads. I happily use LLMs to help me find the best product. As long as it really delivers on that. If I realize the results are manipulated by ads, i'll stop using it. Or I'll switch to a competitor LLM which does a better job. It would be a problem, if we had only one player in the market. But there are a few. And they need to be careful to not skrew their reputation. LLMs have a fundamental aspect baked into them. Namely the final goal of giving you "the truth" about a subject. This is an inherent problem for ads or any other kind of manipulation.
- sally_glance 6mo agoHow are Chatbot UIs different from search engines? Just look how that turned out... Yeah we have Kagi and DDG, but quality, completeness of results (for most topics) and cost still drives most people to Google. Switching is maybe feasible for those who have the resources, but the majority will be stuck with large providers. They establish quasi-monopolies, then monetize (with ads). It's the sad cycle of commerce.
- ensocode 6mo agoSecond this. Just because you're aware doesn't mean everyone else even realizes they're talking to a SalesmanGPT.
- yalogin 6mo agoLlms can be really good shopping assistants, however Amazon has monopolized the shopping flow for majority of the users and even if I am undecided on what to buy it’s just to pick on what is available on Amazon. OpenAI can help with that but Amazon doesn’t allow it. They don’t allow bots scraping their site so OpenAI cannot provide a meaningful shopping experience. Whatever they provide is just ads which are not usually relevant to users.
- luke-stanley 6mo agoAmazon blocking their agents is addressed by their own Chromium fork running on the users own device.
- nunez 6mo ago> The company is framing the push as early access to a new “discovery layer”—one that captures people in the middle of researching and comparing products on ChatGPT. I was three months early! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665046 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665046 > In six months, we will hear about how OpenAI innovatively created an AI ad auction and marketplace that, effectively, enables companies to purchase ad space within the inference pipeline, complete with "anonymous" demographic targeting and all the advertising fun things that Google and Meta are frightened of.
- DustinKlent 6mo agoDegrading your product by filling it with ads or, God forbid, by making the LLM returns less accurate and influenced by advertisers, makes ZERO sense for any LLM company due to the ubiquity of LLMs. LLMs aren't something special that no one else can create and use. Google is a poor example because it had a monopoly on search for a long time due to its foothold and technology, but OpenAI has nothing like that at all. OpenAI has no moat or "secret sauce" that would enable it to be more successful than any other LLM company. If I can use an open source highly effective LLM locally, and have it do all of the things ChatGPT can do (and more), then what motivation do I have to use ChatGPT? The only motivation people would have is ease of use but if one service becomes bogged down and compromised then people will just shift to one of the other hundred equally effective services with less ads. LLMs aren't hard to spin up and put out there for people to use. Honestly, I don't think OpenAI is going to survive very long unless they get incredibly lucky or they come out with some banger of a new model or new app but even then, IDK...
- jonfw 6mo ago> If I can use an open source highly effective LLM locally, and have it do all of the things ChatGPT can do And if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bicycle! We are miles off from open models having parity with what the AI labs are putting out. And that's putting aside the compute requirements to run the top open models and the poor economics of running these models locally.
- rglullis 6mo agoIt's not "miles off", the gaps are narrowing instead of widening and they are already more than enough for the majority of use cases. Getting people to install a different chatgpt app on their phones is a lot easier than getting them to change their search engine.
- solaire_oa 6mo agoNot all prompts require the same compute, and Gemma-4B runs on our phones with parity output for ordinary 1-5 sentence queries. The common use case of Google-style queries is already solved locally, saying we're miles off is ridiculous.
- brianwmunz 6mo agoTech pivoting from innovation to simply selling ads is often a last gasp. Couldn't figure out how to monetize so....ADS!
- Centigonal 6mo agoit's a last gasp... except when it isn't, like with Google, youtube, facebook, reddit, etc