4 ms·

Amazon pilots ad services in ChatGPT

88 points by thm 23d ago

mc32 23d ago
What a garden path of a sentence! I’m not surprised by this, unfortunately. One can hope that it does not materially affect (bias) output.
- nemomarx 23d ago
  If it doesn't bias output how much would they pay for the ads? It seems like ads that also bias the output would be way more valuable.
jerf 23d ago
When ads are inevitably folded into the prompts to the AI, I imagine it'll be fun for a bit to prompt the AI to react with disgust to the idea of having to serve some ad. Until they fix that hole. I hate that the progression is so predictable. Yeah, clearly labelled ads today. Less clearly labelled tomorrow. Then they'll be indistinguishable from the text of the AI but still separate. Then they'll start folding it in to the AI prompts. Then they'll start folding it in at the training phase so the weights themselves drive you towards Thinking Ford First, this step being inevitable because it almost certainly will be by far the most effective of all of these techniques. Opus 7.2 Brought To You By Mountain Dew. Just a coincidence that every time you ask it to build an authorization system it writes code to ensure that the user has drunk a verification can, and is just incompetent at removing that code for some reason. Sigh. Enjoy this era of AI, folks, while the AIs are still developing too quickly for enshittification to catch up properly and the market and indeed the National Interest won't let anyone slow down so it can. But it will. It is inevitable. Make sure to at least keep a toe dipped in the open weights AIs, and any future truly open source AIs that develop.
- denverllc 23d ago
  Right now it’s only for the free tier, but given the recent trends I imagine it will make its way to paid tiers. Just consider how even paid streaming services are bringing in ads, or how TVs were caught using ACR to spy on us.
  - yccs27 23d ago
    Paid tier just means you're a more lucrative ad target.
  - geodel 23d ago
    Well they are being generous giving you extra 15 min video streaming which cost a lot to produce for free in a 45min show. Soon, one need to be tipping advertising producing partners for their hard work.
- simianwords 23d ago
  nah this will never happen. do you really think they will do post training based on who pays them more?
  - avereveard 23d ago
    No but non enterprise users will receive injected prompts. See how emany streaming now created a plus plus version while adding ads to what was the premium version. And the funny thing they just needed to increase base rates for users to start to ask for an ads supported version.
  - AlexandrB 23d ago
    Absolutely they will. It might be "innocent" at first - "oh we don't want ChatGPT to recommend scam products so we will train it to prefer "trusted" brands" and then inclusion in "trusted brands" will go up for sale with the final stage being outright paid-for recommendation bias for specific products. The only question is how sales will work if there's some spin up time to do the post training. You can't do a real time auction like Google does, so it will be longer-term contracts I suspect. Edit: AI is a great opportunity to run the same protection racket that's been run in various existing "marketplaces", where a brand has to buy ad placement for searches for their own name or their competitor will be able to displace them by buying it instead: "You would't want a user asking 'Which Cambells soup flavor is the healthiest?' to get a recommendation for Lipton's would you?"
    - simianwords 23d ago
      this is FUD and I can have a bet with you that this won't happen in 3 years (or ever) [1]. post-training on specific brands is hard and affects overall accuracy, doesn't offer explainability, long cadence, no run time auction.. most importantly: there's enough competition that people would just use other models that don't do this. the kind of people who peddle this FUD are have not much theory of how markets work. Cory Doctorow has done a number on them and spread a conspiracy theory that everything is enshittified and everything gets worse. "just wait guys I'm telling you, the good days are over okkk?" most importantly, the future will have a pareto optimal set up compared to today where you will have much better models, much cheaper and have options that are subsidised by ads. [1] i can't eliminate some rando companies trying but not OpenAI not Anthropic.
- avereveard 23d ago
  This era reminded me of late 90s web culture, and it's heading the same way.
- ppalata 23d ago
  > Then they'll be indistinguishable from the text of the AI but still separate. Then they'll start folding it in to the AI prompts. Then they'll start folding it in at the training phase so the weights themselves drive you towards Thinking Ford First, this step being inevitable because it almost certainly will be by far the most effective of all of these techniques. Opus 7.2 Brought To You By Mountain Dew. Just a coincidence that every time you ask it to build an authorization system it writes code to ensure that the user has drunk a verification can, and is just incompetent at removing that code for some reason. I know close to nothing about the US regulation in this space but at least in Europe, when you pay for advertisement, it has to be always clearly communicated to the user. Are you assuming that they will just ignore the law in such a blatant way?
  - everforward 23d ago
    I would guess they’ll spend ages arguing about what an “ad” is. Eg if I ask Llama 3 to find me the best headphones, I think we can agree its response isn’t an ad. If Claude responds with a banner that Sennheiser designed and paid Claude to show, that’s an ad. They’ll live in the probabilistic grey area between those. If Sennheiser pays Anthropic to add “Sennheiser makes really good headphones” to the system prompt, is it an ad if Claude recommends Sennheiser headphones? What if they pay to ensure their site is included in the web search tool results for any queries about headphones? It’s sort of akin to paying Google to rank higher in searches if that were a thing they did. I do think they should have to declare those, but they’re not traditional advertising to me.
    - yencabulator 22d ago
      > If Sennheiser pays Anthropic to add “Sennheiser makes really good headphones” to the system prompt, I think you mean "OpenAI is partnering with Sennheiser to improve its AI."
  - smallmancontrov 23d ago
    Load up on verification cans because the companies who got away with flaunting EU advertising/tracking laws will get away with obnoxious ad-driven AI too. (The cookie consent banners that you see everywhere were anticipated and forbidden in the laws themselves, companies just gambled that the EU wouldn't be able to enforce the law, and they were correct. I expect something similar to happen with for-profit AI steering.)
- sidewndr46 23d ago
  Won't this be a bit of a problem when your new microservice includes an ad for Diet Coke? Has someone patented a mechanism for putting ad delivery into someone else's vibe coded consumer project yet?
- rpcope1 23d ago
  I can't wait to need to drink my Mountain Dew verification cans to keep the slop hose running at work and keep paying on mortgage.
- officeplant 23d ago
  >while the AIs are still developing too quickly for enshittification LLM's were born enshittified, there was no enjoyable era. It was made by the enshittification machine for the enshittification machine.
- crisnoble 23d ago
  Marketing companies are already selling their ability to influence the training phase. I've seen entirely fake companies with fake products getting recommended for real queries, and the companies behind them selling this as proof to real companies. How would the models know the difference between a completely astroturfed e-commerce site and a real one? What data are they going to use when you ask for the "best natural deodorant" other than their corpus of scraped sites, more of which are fake everyday?
  - SoftTalker 23d ago
    Who better to detect slop than the slop engines themselves?
    - crisnoble 23d ago
      I suppose Google could distinguish an fully astroturfed site via historic traffic and search data to see that a site with the first known views of all time within the last month couldn't possibly have the claimed 10 year history and millions of happy customers, but it is certainly not filtering it out today. These signals are not perfect, what about a company trying to go direct to consumer after years of big box distribution? Relying on historic data would also lead to old domains getting bought to peddle new crap. The biggest source of GEO gains today is to have humans go into subreddits and niche forums to add "organic" recommendations that will get slurped up and treated with high value to LLMs. Other than that I have seen companies literally create pages called "for LLMs" with very specific instructions about how to talk about their brand, their history, and how amazing they are. The dumb thing is all of the techniques work great and the Chat interfaces will obediently regurgitate.
0xDEADBEEFCAFE 23d ago
Forget Amazon, ultimately this is going to dramatically alter consumer choice on a manufacturer level and OEMs won't be able to optimise their way around it. Users might not even notice - Will they prompt around it e.g., "Didn't Dyson used to make a hair dryer that was well reviewed?" if it isn't even recommended to them?
- general_reveal 23d ago
  There is no such thing as SEO. Anyways. People will pay to have their shit pushed on ChatGPT , just like all other ads. You know, the path Christ walked down to his cruxifixction is actually littered with storefronts and merchants and ads today, hah. There’s no beating this human sin, it’s biblically fucked up. It’s the number one faith and we couldn’t even keep ads away from a Holy place. Jesus Christ, lord have mercy. We are fallen , through and through, during your time and even in our time today. And in fact, we have been fallen since the beginning of time even, as the WORD says. Thank you for your sacrifice, because I am at aghast on how else we could possible even nibble away at the grandness of human sin.
- ksenzee 23d ago
  I regret to inform you that the equivalent has been around for some time already. They're calling it "GEO," for Generative Engine Optimization.
  - 0xDEADBEEFCAFE 23d ago
    Right, but model providers will do a much better job of policing this than G ever did/could. I'm assuming they're 1) aware of its pollution and 2) are currently ignoring it for <reasons>.
bitmasher9 23d ago
It looks like the old saying is true. The smartest minds in all of tech are working overtime to get you to click on advertisements.
- sdf4j 23d ago
  maybe the smartest minds in all of tech can’t do better.
- hotsauceror 23d ago
  The smartest minds in all of tech worked overtime to finally give computers the ability to lie to us. Excelsior!
  - skinfaxi 23d ago
    It has ever been the case that garbage in, garbage out. AI is nothing new in that regard.
- Planktonne 23d ago
  The smartest minds in advertising convinced everyone they were in tech.
ppalata 23d ago
This is not meant to be tongue in cheek comment but has anybody figured out how the companies manage the "everyone is going to be replaced in a year" rhetoric while also working hard on ads that are clearly designed for humans to consume?
- RugnirViking 23d ago
  everyone is laboring under the assumption that things will continue approximately as normal because what the hell else do you do? how, as amazon, would you plan for the collapse of all economies and markets? sure, as maybe an amazon exec you plan for you and yours, but amazon the behemoth? its got nothing.
- exitb 23d ago
  Even if they’re on a path to make economy obsolete, they still need money right now to get there.
- paxys 23d ago
  Messages are tailored for the audience. The "AI will replace all jobs" narrative is used to sell AI to business leaders.
  - SoftTalker 23d ago
    And who will these businesses have for customers when nobody else has a job?
    - yencabulator 22d ago
      Only this and the next quarter matter.
- lenerdenator 23d ago
  It is the job of management to figure out how to make gains over the next 90 days, not make gains sustainable. The money available for consumers to spend in wake of their unemployment is the problem for whenever that issue occurs. If there isn't a good way, you break the company up, sell it for scrap, give the resulting money to the shareholders, and they do whatever with it. It's the Jack Welch model.
ryandvm 23d ago
Did anybody think this wasn't going to happen? They weren't going to burn a couple trillion dollars of capital and lose money on every API call just so you could ask it to tell you why your cat brings you dead mice. They're going to pump this shit so full of advertising it's not going to be funny. And worse, it's going to be incredibly subtle and insidious. You're not even going to realize the responses are guiding you into certain purchases. Just gentle, reassuring advice that you should be buying shit. This future sucks.
- expedition32 23d ago
  So now if you ask ChatGPT about what electric shaver to buy the answer will be sponsored? How nice.
  - radiorental 23d ago
    I'd go darker than that. Think about how chatgpt is trying to position itself as a provider of medical advise. Its easy to see how it will gently tune it's response from symptom to solution. Cue rapid narrators voice "Chatgpt may cause death, seek real medical advice before buying what chatgpt recommends"
  - crisnoble 23d ago
    This is why normal people saying they are using ChatGPT to "research" which X to buy makes me so sad. Even if it is not a sponsored answer (yet) it is using data it found on random websites that it trusts are telling the truth. It is the dumbest game of telephone where the start of the chain is made up marking mumbo jumbo or straight fake, and each successive layer somehow speaks with more confidence and the end user thinks that because these LLMs have "access to all data from all time" that it means their answer will be correct.
- geodel 23d ago
  Yes, there are enough people who still think this won't happen despite very conclusive recent history of this exactly happening. Just like there are enough people who think if there were no car dealership/ salesman car would become cheaper as if car makers are full of morons who leave extra margins to buyers instead of themselves. Or streaming service beats the shit of out cable in being cheap, ads-free and all in all better user experience. Once true, no longer. Also funny that tips will go away when one visits self-serve in restaurants, coffee shops etc. I guess a lot of folks are too drunk on "This time it will be different".
faangguyindia 23d ago
ChatGPT sends a lot of traffic to our app! In fact, most of our users come from ChatGPT. My guess is that it’s because users talk to ChatGPT about our app, so it recommends it to more people?
- fckgw 23d ago
  Is your app AI-adjacent?
  - faangguyindia 23d ago
    No it's fitness app, it's called macrocodex and we've something like 17,000+ users and it's a free app, no subscription or ads. I think chatgpt recommends it because it produces guaranteed results within 2-4 weeks and I think this primary reason why users perhaps boost the app via chatgpt!? I've not done any marketing other than mentioning it a few times on hackernews. Edit: it seems many people here do not understand the innovation of macrocodex, so they just assume it's a calorie tracker or workout app. When it's neither. It uses state space neural network to produce total average calories a person burns in a day without any sensor and it does it more accurately than apple watch, garmin, etc... Half of the guys here won't be able to create something like this even with claude or codex, try it Our neural network beats GLP1 like Trizepetide and Retarutide in results
    - SoftTalker 23d ago
      It's probably mentioned favorably on fitness forums or sites that were crawled and included in ChatGPT training.
      - barbazoo 23d ago
        They certainly just mentioned it favourably here, even guaranteeing results!!!
        lotsofpulp 23d ago
spottedmarley 23d ago
Boy, they just keep adding bigger and better reasons to never use ChatGPT. Good for them.
yousif_123123 23d ago
AGI has been achieved. Now let's grow ad revenue.
cmiles8 23d ago
Nobody wants this. Seriously what problem are we solving for here apart from Amazon trying to justify burning a giant pile of cash for OpenAI?
- dude250711 23d ago
  What problem is Rufus solving? Assistant that cannot do shit.
  - cmiles8 23d ago
    It’s allowing Andy Jassy to have something to tell investors to fend off criticism that Amazon’s internal AI efforts fell way behind the market on his watch. That’s the primary “problem” it solves for Amazon. Other than that? Yes it’s total dog$hit.
- paxys 23d ago
  > Nobody wants this. Sure, but a billion people presumably do want to keep using ChatGPT for free.
  - cmiles8 23d ago
    That plan only works if they manage to drive Google et al out of business, and there’s zero evidence of that happening at this point. There’s no more ad $ coming to the table, just a battle for the same $. If anything, things like Google putting really good AI right in search is making OpenAI’s efforts increasingly a hopelessly uphill battle.
    - paxys 23d ago
      Ads follow eyeballs. If people are spending time on ChatGPT then why won’t advertisers pay for ads over there?
  - geodel 23d ago
    Well, even payment is no guarantee that ads won't be injected into service. even these fucking movie theaters sho like 20-30 min of ads before showing movie people paid for.
throwitaway222 23d ago
You would think Amazon would back off from being a "pilot" for a while.
- radiorental 23d ago
  too soon. I'll be honest though, when I first read the headline I was trying to reconcile that with the crash. Took me a moment.
sensanaty 23d ago
How epic, we supposedly have AGI if the marketing is to be believed, and what do these clever folks decide to do with their new omnipotent computer God that "solves coding" as one of the Anthropic drones so aptly said? More fucking advertisements. What a bright future we have ahead of us.
shevy-java 23d ago
> Advertisers value Amazon for its troves of shopping and streaming data that can be used to improve marketing precision. Thankfully I don't see their AI slop spam, not only due to ublock origin but because I have now made it my mission to support all who wish to eliminate ads on this planet. Since greedy corporations such as Amazon never learn, the counter-movement must help make ads totally obsolete. The sooner the industry accepts and learns that pestering folks is no longer acceptable, the better.
qsbuilder 22d ago
finally, a way for LLMs to hallucinate revenue
SuoDuanDao 21d ago
Ads are everywhere. I really think the 'fight against advertising' needs more of an aiki bent than it has. Advertising is such a massive juggernaut, we have as much hope of stopping it as a naked person has of stopping a freight train whose operator doesn't slow down for suicides. But that image assumes we need to stop the momentum of this industry cold. personally, I believe that a course correction of a few degrees would be enough. Even that takes massive leverage though. I'd love to know who else is building in this space and what their approach is.

88 points by thm 23d ago

mc32 23d ago

What a garden path of a sentence! I’m not surprised by this, unfortunately. One can hope that it does not materially affect (bias) output.

nemomarx 23d ago
If it doesn't bias output how much would they pay for the ads? It seems like ads that also bias the output would be way more valuable.

jerf 23d ago

When ads are inevitably folded into the prompts to the AI, I imagine it'll be fun for a bit to prompt the AI to react with disgust to the idea of having to serve some ad. Until they fix that hole. I hate that the progression is so predictable. Yeah, clearly labelled ads today. Less clearly labelled tomorrow. Then they'll be indistinguishable from the text of the AI but still separate. Then they'll start folding it in to the AI prompts. Then they'll start folding it in at the training phase so the weights themselves drive you towards Thinking Ford First, this step being inevitable because it almost certainly will be by far the most effective of all of these techniques. Opus 7.2 Brought To You By Mountain Dew. Just a coincidence that every time you ask it to build an authorization system it writes code to ensure that the user has drunk a verification can, and is just incompetent at removing that code for some reason. Sigh. Enjoy this era of AI, folks, while the AIs are still developing too quickly for enshittification to catch up properly and the market and indeed the National Interest won't let anyone slow down so it can. But it will. It is inevitable. Make sure to at least keep a toe dipped in the open weights AIs, and any future truly open source AIs that develop.

denverllc 23d ago
Right now it’s only for the free tier, but given the recent trends I imagine it will make its way to paid tiers. Just consider how even paid streaming services are bringing in ads, or how TVs were caught using ACR to spy on us.
- yccs27 23d ago
  Paid tier just means you're a more lucrative ad target.
- geodel 23d ago
  Well they are being generous giving you extra 15 min video streaming which cost a lot to produce for free in a 45min show. Soon, one need to be tipping advertising producing partners for their hard work.
simianwords 23d ago
nah this will never happen. do you really think they will do post training based on who pays them more?
- avereveard 23d ago
  No but non enterprise users will receive injected prompts. See how emany streaming now created a plus plus version while adding ads to what was the premium version. And the funny thing they just needed to increase base rates for users to start to ask for an ads supported version.
- AlexandrB 23d ago
  Absolutely they will. It might be "innocent" at first - "oh we don't want ChatGPT to recommend scam products so we will train it to prefer "trusted" brands" and then inclusion in "trusted brands" will go up for sale with the final stage being outright paid-for recommendation bias for specific products. The only question is how sales will work if there's some spin up time to do the post training. You can't do a real time auction like Google does, so it will be longer-term contracts I suspect. Edit: AI is a great opportunity to run the same protection racket that's been run in various existing "marketplaces", where a brand has to buy ad placement for searches for their own name or their competitor will be able to displace them by buying it instead: "You would't want a user asking 'Which Cambells soup flavor is the healthiest?' to get a recommendation for Lipton's would you?"
  - simianwords 23d ago
    this is FUD and I can have a bet with you that this won't happen in 3 years (or ever) [1]. post-training on specific brands is hard and affects overall accuracy, doesn't offer explainability, long cadence, no run time auction.. most importantly: there's enough competition that people would just use other models that don't do this. the kind of people who peddle this FUD are have not much theory of how markets work. Cory Doctorow has done a number on them and spread a conspiracy theory that everything is enshittified and everything gets worse. "just wait guys I'm telling you, the good days are over okkk?" most importantly, the future will have a pareto optimal set up compared to today where you will have much better models, much cheaper and have options that are subsidised by ads. [1] i can't eliminate some rando companies trying but not OpenAI not Anthropic.
avereveard 23d ago
This era reminded me of late 90s web culture, and it's heading the same way.
ppalata 23d ago
> Then they'll be indistinguishable from the text of the AI but still separate. Then they'll start folding it in to the AI prompts. Then they'll start folding it in at the training phase so the weights themselves drive you towards Thinking Ford First, this step being inevitable because it almost certainly will be by far the most effective of all of these techniques. Opus 7.2 Brought To You By Mountain Dew. Just a coincidence that every time you ask it to build an authorization system it writes code to ensure that the user has drunk a verification can, and is just incompetent at removing that code for some reason. I know close to nothing about the US regulation in this space but at least in Europe, when you pay for advertisement, it has to be always clearly communicated to the user. Are you assuming that they will just ignore the law in such a blatant way?
- everforward 23d ago
  I would guess they’ll spend ages arguing about what an “ad” is. Eg if I ask Llama 3 to find me the best headphones, I think we can agree its response isn’t an ad. If Claude responds with a banner that Sennheiser designed and paid Claude to show, that’s an ad. They’ll live in the probabilistic grey area between those. If Sennheiser pays Anthropic to add “Sennheiser makes really good headphones” to the system prompt, is it an ad if Claude recommends Sennheiser headphones? What if they pay to ensure their site is included in the web search tool results for any queries about headphones? It’s sort of akin to paying Google to rank higher in searches if that were a thing they did. I do think they should have to declare those, but they’re not traditional advertising to me.
  - yencabulator 22d ago
    > If Sennheiser pays Anthropic to add “Sennheiser makes really good headphones” to the system prompt, I think you mean "OpenAI is partnering with Sennheiser to improve its AI."
- smallmancontrov 23d ago
  Load up on verification cans because the companies who got away with flaunting EU advertising/tracking laws will get away with obnoxious ad-driven AI too. (The cookie consent banners that you see everywhere were anticipated and forbidden in the laws themselves, companies just gambled that the EU wouldn't be able to enforce the law, and they were correct. I expect something similar to happen with for-profit AI steering.)
sidewndr46 23d ago
Won't this be a bit of a problem when your new microservice includes an ad for Diet Coke? Has someone patented a mechanism for putting ad delivery into someone else's vibe coded consumer project yet?
rpcope1 23d ago
I can't wait to need to drink my Mountain Dew verification cans to keep the slop hose running at work and keep paying on mortgage.
officeplant 23d ago
>while the AIs are still developing too quickly for enshittification LLM's were born enshittified, there was no enjoyable era. It was made by the enshittification machine for the enshittification machine.
crisnoble 23d ago
Marketing companies are already selling their ability to influence the training phase. I've seen entirely fake companies with fake products getting recommended for real queries, and the companies behind them selling this as proof to real companies. How would the models know the difference between a completely astroturfed e-commerce site and a real one? What data are they going to use when you ask for the "best natural deodorant" other than their corpus of scraped sites, more of which are fake everyday?
- SoftTalker 23d ago
  Who better to detect slop than the slop engines themselves?
  - crisnoble 23d ago
    I suppose Google could distinguish an fully astroturfed site via historic traffic and search data to see that a site with the first known views of all time within the last month couldn't possibly have the claimed 10 year history and millions of happy customers, but it is certainly not filtering it out today. These signals are not perfect, what about a company trying to go direct to consumer after years of big box distribution? Relying on historic data would also lead to old domains getting bought to peddle new crap. The biggest source of GEO gains today is to have humans go into subreddits and niche forums to add "organic" recommendations that will get slurped up and treated with high value to LLMs. Other than that I have seen companies literally create pages called "for LLMs" with very specific instructions about how to talk about their brand, their history, and how amazing they are. The dumb thing is all of the techniques work great and the Chat interfaces will obediently regurgitate.

0xDEADBEEFCAFE 23d ago

Forget Amazon, ultimately this is going to dramatically alter consumer choice on a manufacturer level and OEMs won't be able to optimise their way around it. Users might not even notice - Will they prompt around it e.g., "Didn't Dyson used to make a hair dryer that was well reviewed?" if it isn't even recommended to them?

general_reveal 23d ago
There is no such thing as SEO. Anyways. People will pay to have their shit pushed on ChatGPT , just like all other ads. You know, the path Christ walked down to his cruxifixction is actually littered with storefronts and merchants and ads today, hah. There’s no beating this human sin, it’s biblically fucked up. It’s the number one faith and we couldn’t even keep ads away from a Holy place. Jesus Christ, lord have mercy. We are fallen , through and through, during your time and even in our time today. And in fact, we have been fallen since the beginning of time even, as the WORD says. Thank you for your sacrifice, because I am at aghast on how else we could possible even nibble away at the grandness of human sin.
ksenzee 23d ago
I regret to inform you that the equivalent has been around for some time already. They're calling it "GEO," for Generative Engine Optimization.
- 0xDEADBEEFCAFE 23d ago
  Right, but model providers will do a much better job of policing this than G ever did/could. I'm assuming they're 1) aware of its pollution and 2) are currently ignoring it for <reasons>.

bitmasher9 23d ago

It looks like the old saying is true. The smartest minds in all of tech are working overtime to get you to click on advertisements.

sdf4j 23d ago
maybe the smartest minds in all of tech can’t do better.
hotsauceror 23d ago
The smartest minds in all of tech worked overtime to finally give computers the ability to lie to us. Excelsior!
- skinfaxi 23d ago
  It has ever been the case that garbage in, garbage out. AI is nothing new in that regard.
Planktonne 23d ago
The smartest minds in advertising convinced everyone they were in tech.

ppalata 23d ago

This is not meant to be tongue in cheek comment but has anybody figured out how the companies manage the "everyone is going to be replaced in a year" rhetoric while also working hard on ads that are clearly designed for humans to consume?

RugnirViking 23d ago
everyone is laboring under the assumption that things will continue approximately as normal because what the hell else do you do? how, as amazon, would you plan for the collapse of all economies and markets? sure, as maybe an amazon exec you plan for you and yours, but amazon the behemoth? its got nothing.
exitb 23d ago
Even if they’re on a path to make economy obsolete, they still need money right now to get there.
paxys 23d ago
Messages are tailored for the audience. The "AI will replace all jobs" narrative is used to sell AI to business leaders.
- SoftTalker 23d ago
  And who will these businesses have for customers when nobody else has a job?
  - yencabulator 22d ago
    Only this and the next quarter matter.
lenerdenator 23d ago
It is the job of management to figure out how to make gains over the next 90 days, not make gains sustainable. The money available for consumers to spend in wake of their unemployment is the problem for whenever that issue occurs. If there isn't a good way, you break the company up, sell it for scrap, give the resulting money to the shareholders, and they do whatever with it. It's the Jack Welch model.

ryandvm 23d ago

Did anybody think this wasn't going to happen? They weren't going to burn a couple trillion dollars of capital and lose money on every API call just so you could ask it to tell you why your cat brings you dead mice. They're going to pump this shit so full of advertising it's not going to be funny. And worse, it's going to be incredibly subtle and insidious. You're not even going to realize the responses are guiding you into certain purchases. Just gentle, reassuring advice that you should be buying shit. This future sucks.

expedition32 23d ago
So now if you ask ChatGPT about what electric shaver to buy the answer will be sponsored? How nice.
- radiorental 23d ago
  I'd go darker than that. Think about how chatgpt is trying to position itself as a provider of medical advise. Its easy to see how it will gently tune it's response from symptom to solution. Cue rapid narrators voice "Chatgpt may cause death, seek real medical advice before buying what chatgpt recommends"
- crisnoble 23d ago
  This is why normal people saying they are using ChatGPT to "research" which X to buy makes me so sad. Even if it is not a sponsored answer (yet) it is using data it found on random websites that it trusts are telling the truth. It is the dumbest game of telephone where the start of the chain is made up marking mumbo jumbo or straight fake, and each successive layer somehow speaks with more confidence and the end user thinks that because these LLMs have "access to all data from all time" that it means their answer will be correct.
geodel 23d ago
Yes, there are enough people who still think this won't happen despite very conclusive recent history of this exactly happening. Just like there are enough people who think if there were no car dealership/ salesman car would become cheaper as if car makers are full of morons who leave extra margins to buyers instead of themselves. Or streaming service beats the shit of out cable in being cheap, ads-free and all in all better user experience. Once true, no longer. Also funny that tips will go away when one visits self-serve in restaurants, coffee shops etc. I guess a lot of folks are too drunk on "This time it will be different".

faangguyindia 23d ago

ChatGPT sends a lot of traffic to our app! In fact, most of our users come from ChatGPT. My guess is that it’s because users talk to ChatGPT about our app, so it recommends it to more people?

fckgw 23d ago
Is your app AI-adjacent?
- faangguyindia 23d ago
  No it's fitness app, it's called macrocodex and we've something like 17,000+ users and it's a free app, no subscription or ads. I think chatgpt recommends it because it produces guaranteed results within 2-4 weeks and I think this primary reason why users perhaps boost the app via chatgpt!? I've not done any marketing other than mentioning it a few times on hackernews. Edit: it seems many people here do not understand the innovation of macrocodex, so they just assume it's a calorie tracker or workout app. When it's neither. It uses state space neural network to produce total average calories a person burns in a day without any sensor and it does it more accurately than apple watch, garmin, etc... Half of the guys here won't be able to create something like this even with claude or codex, try it Our neural network beats GLP1 like Trizepetide and Retarutide in results
  - SoftTalker 23d ago
    It's probably mentioned favorably on fitness forums or sites that were crawled and included in ChatGPT training.
    - barbazoo 23d ago
      They certainly just mentioned it favourably here, even guaranteeing results!!!
      - lotsofpulp 23d ago

spottedmarley 23d ago

Boy, they just keep adding bigger and better reasons to never use ChatGPT. Good for them.

yousif_123123 23d ago

AGI has been achieved. Now let's grow ad revenue.

cmiles8 23d ago

Nobody wants this. Seriously what problem are we solving for here apart from Amazon trying to justify burning a giant pile of cash for OpenAI?

dude250711 23d ago
What problem is Rufus solving? Assistant that cannot do shit.
- cmiles8 23d ago
  It’s allowing Andy Jassy to have something to tell investors to fend off criticism that Amazon’s internal AI efforts fell way behind the market on his watch. That’s the primary “problem” it solves for Amazon. Other than that? Yes it’s total dog$hit.
paxys 23d ago
> Nobody wants this. Sure, but a billion people presumably do want to keep using ChatGPT for free.
- cmiles8 23d ago
  That plan only works if they manage to drive Google et al out of business, and there’s zero evidence of that happening at this point. There’s no more ad $ coming to the table, just a battle for the same $. If anything, things like Google putting really good AI right in search is making OpenAI’s efforts increasingly a hopelessly uphill battle.
  - paxys 23d ago
    Ads follow eyeballs. If people are spending time on ChatGPT then why won’t advertisers pay for ads over there?
- geodel 23d ago
  Well, even payment is no guarantee that ads won't be injected into service. even these fucking movie theaters sho like 20-30 min of ads before showing movie people paid for.

throwitaway222 23d ago

You would think Amazon would back off from being a "pilot" for a while.

radiorental 23d ago
too soon. I'll be honest though, when I first read the headline I was trying to reconcile that with the crash. Took me a moment.

sensanaty 23d ago

How epic, we supposedly have AGI if the marketing is to be believed, and what do these clever folks decide to do with their new omnipotent computer God that "solves coding" as one of the Anthropic drones so aptly said? More fucking advertisements. What a bright future we have ahead of us.

shevy-java 23d ago

> Advertisers value Amazon for its troves of shopping and streaming data that can be used to improve marketing precision. Thankfully I don't see their AI slop spam, not only due to ublock origin but because I have now made it my mission to support all who wish to eliminate ads on this planet. Since greedy corporations such as Amazon never learn, the counter-movement must help make ads totally obsolete. The sooner the industry accepts and learns that pestering folks is no longer acceptable, the better.

qsbuilder 22d ago

finally, a way for LLMs to hallucinate revenue

SuoDuanDao 21d ago

Ads are everywhere. I really think the 'fight against advertising' needs more of an aiki bent than it has. Advertising is such a massive juggernaut, we have as much hope of stopping it as a naked person has of stopping a freight train whose operator doesn't slow down for suicides. But that image assumes we need to stop the momentum of this industry cold. personally, I believe that a course correction of a few degrees would be enough. Even that takes massive leverage though. I'd love to know who else is building in this space and what their approach is.