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OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads with Sponsored Agents
- 131hn 10d agoIt’s okay (i.e. understand able) having ads on a low cost subscription. Would i not want to be (part of) the product myself, i’d willing to pay premium price - and i do What’s wrong with this choice ?
- downrightmike 9d agoYou will never pay enough to cover the cost. That's why you don't see subscriptions in apps anymore, because ads pay more.
- crest 10d ago"Nuke the entire site from orbit ... it's the only way to be sure."
- grey-area 10d agoNone of this would be necessary if they thought they were actually anywhere near AGI...hmm.
- utopiah 10d agoWhat if their AGI/ASI told them the road to Humanity betterment (because you know that was OpenAI initial mission, just in case we forgot) was through more efficient ads ? /s
- dgellow 10d agoSounds like the plot of a Douglas Adam’s book
- andai 10d agoThey'll have to find a smarter species to emulate first. My money's on the octopus!
- tsunamifury 10d agoExcellent way to put it. It’s always he guys who steal the technology from the inventors that try to present the technology far beyond what it is. Signed, that guy at google who did some stuff about this and had it taken away.
- cyanydeez 10d agoTurns out, just like the Turing test, its easier to dumb down intelligent expectations than to improve intelligence. AGI makes a lot better argument if everyone is in idiocracy.
- taytus 10d agoI wish more people could read and appreciate that couple of sentences.
- palmotea 10d ago> AGI makes a lot better argument if everyone is in idiocracy. IIRC, a part of the backstory of Idiocracy is the development of pervasive and good enough AI/automation, which enabled society to get that dumb without immediately collapsing.
- herpdyderp 10d agoEven if it's not necessary, it brings more money.
- grey-area 10d agoIt’s pocket change compared to the money that could be made with real AGI. This move tells us they don’t think they’re anywhere near AGI, directly contradicting their bombast and puffery on the subject.
- theptip 10d agoDisagree, they need a lot of capital in the next couple years, and the more revenue they have today, the more data centers they can start building. Also investors (particularly non-AGI-pilled) want to see revenue number go up, regardless of AGI. This juices the IPO.
- grey-area 10d agoIf they need capital in the short term and were anywhere close to AGI, they could easily generate it, by spinning up their incredibly capable and intelligent agents to generate capital through doing useful work. They could also fire entire departments within their own org and replace them with agents, if they had something close to AGI. Instead they are selling a dream to the gullible, and advertisements to go along with that dream.
- theptip 10d agoWhat you describe is IMO “fully obtained AGI”, what I’m arguing for is consistent with “< 5 years to AGI” which I deem “close”. That said AGI is a fuzzy term and you’ll model the world poorly if you treat it as a binary state.
- grey-area 10d agoProminent figures in OpenAI have claimed they have already attained AGI. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/openai-releases-its-latest-model-says-it-marks-the-beginning-of-the-agi-era/ar-AA2bwhMf https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/openai-releases-its-lat... "OpenAI released its latest model, GPT-6 Astra, on Thursday, with company President Greg Brockman calling it the beginning of the artificial general intelligence (AGI) era." But they're still peddling ads instead of improving the world. How odd.
- theptip 10d agoSure, they claimed it, that doesn’t affect my world model above.
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- therealdrag0 10d agoThe “AGI” bar comments are so tiring.
- grey-area 10d agoWhen OpenAI (including Altman, Brockman etc) stop talking about AGI, we can all stop talking about AGI. I'd happily do so. Currently their actions completely contradict their claims of emergent intelligence.
- therealdrag0 10d agoThey can talk about AGI without claiming the current model is AI. They can talk about emergent intelligence without claiming it’s AGI. And businesses can work on multiple things with different goals without being contradictory.
- grey-area 10d agoThey have in fact claimed this. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/openai-releases-its-latest-model-says-it-marks-the-beginning-of-the-agi-era/ar-AA2bwhMf https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/openai-releases-its-lat...
- therealdrag0 9d agoIt’s a silly semantic debate. It’s an argument about what other peoples words mean in their mind and the smug comments about it are incredibly banal.
- datakan 10d agoThis sounds awful. AI Chatbots will be everywhere Shopify is. I just see a lot of popups in our future with fake names and faces pretending to be people asking us how they can help us.
- andai 10d ago2036 Synthetic humans wearing the faces of your loved ones surreptitiously cross your path, and casually mention their favorite products and services.
- nomagicbullet 10d agoThis is one of the subplots of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die. Great film.
- hirvi74 10d agoThat's pretty much most T1 support already. I feel like all I do is talk to bots.
- mcintyre1994 10d agoI think we're already there with that stupid AI customer support widget every obnoxious website has now.
- pjc50 10d agoAs usual with AI customer interaction, I have to ask who is liable for misleading advertising or unmet promises? The advertiser who isn't really in control of the chatbot, or OpenAI? (Law on this goes all the way back to Carbolic Smoke Ball)
- utopiah 10d agoLiability... come on what's this pesky detail when it's an arm race with China (or whatever the weekly scapegoat is), don't you want the good guys to win? /s
- dgellow 10d agoIt cannot be the AI vendor, according to what they say they are purely passive, think of them like a very large harness for their AI models. It’s not the advertising companies of course, as you said they don’t control the system. And it cannot be the models, because they don’t have personhood. So, I guess it’s on nobody? Funny how those things happen to work, uh /s
- pjc50 10d agoCheck out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine on this topic, available at all good bookstores near you.
- nlawalker 9d agoJust wanted to say thanks for this rec, I'll be picking it up. Unaccountability - generally, everywhere in society, the workplace, government etc. - has been on my mind a lot recently.
- cmiles8 10d agoWell to date when this has come up it’s been the company that put the AI in from of their customers that’s held liable in the first instance. See Air Canada case where an AI made up non existent policies that courts ruled Air Canada even had to honor. Naturally then the company could turn around and sue the maker of the AI for damages and this is the bit that’s less tested to date. But it’s clear the answer isn’t “nobody” is liable. So if this AI marketing widget makes up false claims about a product that’s going to be a big problem for companies that put an AI in front of their customers.
- haaz 10d agoHonestly I wish every ad had this. If I search for meal delivery services in my area and a sponsored result comes up, I would much rather ask an AI to trawl through the website to find out how much the meals cost, how much meat, protein, calories, etc are in them rather than do it myself
- dbdr 10d agoYou can already do that without ads. The point of ads is that one of those services will pay openai so that their services will be more prominent than the others.
- tsunamifury 10d agoNo you can’t. Not without MCP
- o_m 10d agoMost agents can search the web nowadays
- tsunamifury 10d agoMy guy executing tasks like navigating door dashes app and getting a full basket price reliably pretty much needs MCP. Sure you can have some agents try to do this via web but realistically most fail.
- brendoelfrendo 10d agoYeah, but why would you trust the answers from a sponsored agent? Why would you assume it is giving you real, accurate, and complete information rather than selectively giving you what it thinks is most likely to make you click the "buy" button?
- rodonn 10d agoI agree that it won't be an unbiased source of information, but should be roughly same level of trustworthiness as clicking on the link and reading the information on the advertiser's website.
- sigmar 10d agoI'm definitely more pro ad than the average HN user (I think they occasionally show me products I want to buy), but this seems bad and one step closer to "the LLM is biased by openai's financial interests." In the example of a "sponsored agent" at the top, how many people are going to think "chat with us" is just a way to continue the conversation? How soon before openai removes the friction of clicking that entirely? this is what openai said before: "Ads do not influence ChatGPT’s answers. Ads run on separate systems from our chat model, and advertisers have no ability to shape, rank, or alter ChatGPT’s responses. Ads are separate and clearly labeled." https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt Do they need to rewrite that section? Because in the video there's an LLM chatbot inside the chatgpt app writing answers on behalf of "Heirloom grocery"
- tsunamifury 10d agoDisagree. I pitched this exact model to Google Search when we first started making LLMs. The idea was the bots were separate clearly from the core model so you’ll know when you were having a branded experience or not. And it s useful beyond ads. It can be for customer service or MCP interaction with the service directly.
- sigmar 10d agoyeah, I can see it as useful in customer service, but they're adding these sponsored agents directly in the chatgpt app. the word "ad" or "sponsored" isn't visible after you click "chat with us" at 0:15 in the video, only "learn more about business chats" which is vague. and if you scroll down you won't even see that, if someone switches apps for 20 minutes are they going to remember that this chat window is an ad?
- tsunamifury 10d agoIt’s not an ad. It’s a business agent. The entrance is an ad. This isn’t that hard to understand.
- strongpigeon 10d agoThis is awfully unimaginative. I don’t see people using this. Where is the incentive to continue your conversation with the sponsored agent as opposed to, you know, the one you’re already talking to.
- khalic 10d agoThe fact that it requires a user action to initiate is better than the previous solution, but that's a pretty low bar to have
- Imnimo 10d ago>Ads in ChatGPT help people find what they’re looking for or discover something they hadn’t considered. Here I foolishly thought that that was the job of ChatGPT itself.
- hightrix 10d agoThis is the lie advertisers tell themselves to be able to sleep at night. Ads are cancer on content. No one wants them. They only serve to make the presentation of useful content worse.
- subarctic 10d agoAds are useful, they help you reach customers
- probably_wrong 10d agoThe fact that ads are one of two types of content for which people regularly install blockers (with porn coming second) speaks volumes about how useful they really are.
- tene80i 10d agoYou're both right. Some people hate ads. Some people find ads (usually well-targeted ads) helpful for discovering new things that could help them. Different people find different things helpful / intolerable.
- preg_match 9d agoAds are universally bad, even for the people who like them. They don’t actually like ads, they like consumerism and the act of spending money when they don’t need to. Which isn’t surprising, it feels good. So, why isn’t “discovering new things” a real defense? Because ads are not ranked by quality or usefulness. The “new thing” you see has no bearing on how good it actually is. If you wanted to discover a new thing you need for a purpose, you’d look up products around that purpose. Then, you’d choose based off of quality, price, and typical consumer decision making. Seeing an ad destroys that decision making. It’s just served to you. So, you typically buy worse products, at a worse price, that serve you less. So, even if you wanted to find new things, ads are the worst way to do that. That’s because the key purpose of ads is to manipulate people to spend money they wouldn’t otherwise spend. That’s their singular purpose. Well, if the product was good and useful, then you would’ve spent the money anyway. What does that leave? Only products you don’t want very much, but can be manipulated into buying anyway. That serves no consumers.
- pluc 10d agoHow else are they to monetize text outputs? This was always the plan and it's going to get much worse (or better depending on which side of the fence you're on). Google did the same thing when it controlled web indexation: ads, sponsored results and SEO. All of these things will be coming to agents: you will be monetized or you will be paying not to be.
- wat10000 10d agoThey could stick to taking payment in exchange for service like some weird old-fashioned business, but I guess that doesn't get the sort of growth that justifies a trillion-dollar valuation.
- DonsDiscountGas 10d agoIt has for Anthropic. Consumer vs enterprise though I guess.
- bogzz 10d agoWithout the pesky training costs or stock compensation taken into account, yes.
- bogzz 10d agoBy making more money from inference subscriptions than they lose on compute, training, and other costs?
- baggachipz 10d ago> How else are they to monetize text outputs? I thought AGI was supposed to replace most knowledge workers and they'd pocket the savings that their customers enjoyed by not having to pay a work force. That's what their valuation is based upon.
- probably_wrong 10d ago> How else are they to monetize text outputs? Sam Altman famously said in 2024 "I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model." So perhaps we could ask him first what his other plans were and why they didn't work.
- ownerr 10d agoIt's funny that at first OpenAI didn't want to add ads, but if they are adding them, they will be as dystopian as possible.
- cmiles8 10d agoWho actually wants this? I guess we’re about to find out if this helps put out the massive pile of burning cash that OpenAI is trying to deal with, but I know nobody that wants this. OpenAI claims we’re near AGI and this is the best strategy they have? Oy vey!
- outside1234 10d agoNobody wants this. We only need them to offer propaganda as a service and the enshitification will be complete.
- daveguy 10d agoIsn't that primarily what they offer anyway? So "subscription required" would check that box.
- nbaugh1 10d agoWho wants any ads?
- deleted 10d ago[deleted]
- taytus 10d ago>Who actually wants this? Investors
- brazukadev 10d ago> Who actually wants this? Sam Altman. It is his last resort, he said some time ago (which is not true, regulation/"slowing down the pace of AI" seems to be the latest).
- hodder 10d agoThis is a solution looking for a problem, built to satisfy the creator instead of serving the buyer. This is exactly what PG warns against doing. One would think Sam would know this too.
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- RugnirViking 10d agothe only person who ever interacts with these will be the person who accidentally clicked on them. Surely they know this?
- fwlr 10d agoI think that’s the real plan. Grandma taps “find out more” and continues conversing with the helpful robot, unaware it has become the FurnitureCo sales robot.
- luisln 10d ago[dead]
- feverzsj 10d agoSoon, everybody will live in Truman show.
- Nata_Elisym 10d agoI dont think its that bad. Another opportunity for businesses
- floatrock 10d agoLike Uber and Lyft showed in the last cycle, AI has now reached the milestone where the game shifts from "offer unreasonably cheap service by burning investor money and gain marketshare" to "shit we need to show a profit". Or, now lets what the enshittification movement can do to this space.
- moralestapia 10d ago>Like Uber and Lyft showed in the last cycle [...] Please elaborate, I missed that.
- altcognito 10d agoSo you can pay $8 a month and see ads while using the already pared down offering. I think pushing back with cancellations is the only way forward.
- dpmartinez 10d agoI wish ads never existed. The future is open source, no subscriptions, no purchases, 100% free and community supported. The sooner software gets to this point, the world will be a much more better place rather than everything being a subscription.
- ShadowOfThePit 10d agoChatGPT is already free to use? What, do you expect them to keep providing this without any return? Besides, who will pay for the compute of LLMs in your utopian future?
- saimiam 10d agoOnly a society which doesn't want anything, needs nothing, demands nothing can do without ads. While privacy invading ad tech is obviously a bad thing, ads - namely the thing used to introduce you and others like you to a new idea - is a good thing.
- FLeXMurphy 10d agoNeedlessly reductionist take that doesn't steelman what the OP is after, nor do they need a lesson in definition of the word ad. Ads in their current form are predominantly a nuisance and malware. Only incidentally do they help the person actually find what they are looking for. This has to change.
- 0x073 10d agoSo you want software from people for free, hope you share also your work power with others for free. I the end someone pays for open source and often it's some developer with his spare time. Yes to open source, but yes to money for the developers.
- dabinat 10d ago“I want someone to work for me but I don’t want to pay them” is exactly the kind of mindset that led to ads everywhere.
- bluepeter 10d agoFound this: > Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu accounts will not have ads. https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt
- doublerabbit 10d agoFor now.
- baggachipz 10d agoJust like cable tv, and Netflix, and Amazon Prime Video, and....
- denverllc 10d ago... and now the TV itself has ads!
- doublerabbit 9d agoas well as anti virus.
- ndiddy 10d agoIn the long run, the problem they'll run into with this is that the the people who have enough disposable income to pay for those plans are the people that advertisers will pay the most to show ads to. This is the same reason why the ads on daytime television are mainly for structured settlement cash-outs, drug class actions, and injury attorneys rather than for something that the viewer would have to pay money for.
- MisterMunchkin 10d agoThe problem with ads in AI, is that they're incredibly creepy. People have told the apps all kinds of sensitive information that they never would have told a normal service. Obviously the advertisers are creaming themselves at that, but it's a new level of creeping. It also allows them to subtly influence the messaging. It would be like if somebody tried to not bring out the Heinz at a family gathering. It just wouldn't be the same, because of the subtle messaging that has been inserted into the content. How could you trust them?
- ambicapter 10d agoI think the level of invasiveness is probably closer to existing ads than you think. Not that that's a good thing, mind you, I think your disgust level here is probably pretty accurate to the level of personalized data that is currently being hawked by data brokers all over the internet.
- lynx97 10d agoWhats creepy to me is people telling all sorts of sensitive information to a chatbot and NOT expecting weird consequences. The level of cope is massive.
- nickyvdicarlo 10d agoYeah, I'm sure people do it, but I'm having a hard time picturing why...
- theptip 10d agoI agree with the general point on AI ads being a slippery slope and potentially creepy (though ChayGPT shows them as banners and if implemented honestly I don’t see anything misleading). TFA is connecting you with an official sales rep after you click an ad. Maybe best to consider this a play to take over market share from the existing sales bots? (And thence likely support chatbots too.)
- karim79 10d agoNice so we're getting closer to Black Mirror in real life.
- alansaber 10d agoI guess you can pay OpenAI for the privilege of hosting a RAG database rather than having their agents trawl your site.
- baalimago 10d ago[flagged]
- arionhardison 10d agoSo you cant control the agents you have, and now they will be sponsored so at least they make money off the chaos?
- delegate 10d agoHere we go again.. Tell me a story of when a service introduced ads and that ended up being a great thing for users ? Because I don't know any. Instead I know many stories where ads poisoned and destroyed the service and turned the Internet into a shit show. Oh, but in this case, dystopia is highly unlikely, right ?
- iAMkenough 10d agoMany users of the Super Bowl find entertainment in the displayed advertisements.
- pdyc 10d agoi am not clear what exactly will these agents do? are they like ai sales rep for brand for talking to user if they want to explore the product further?
- rodonn 10d agoYeah, basically this. Some people really do click on ads that are relevant to their interests and might want to learn more or be able to ask questions about the product. I'm not confident about how well it will work in practice, but I could imagine cases where this would be more helpful than clicking on the ad link and needing to explore the resulting website to find the information I want.
- deleted 10d ago[deleted]
- perks_12 10d agoLooks like your average ad with a chat interface after you click it. For most online shopping, I consider this stuff annoying. Top of funnel is more sensible IMHO. Advise me on what product to buy, and help me make an informed decision, but I guess that is not where the ad dollars sit.
- lostmsu 10d agoI am surprised nobody brought up Accelerando yet.
- drivebyhooting 10d agoI pay $200/month for ChatGPT. Maybe people should just pay for the service instead of relying of freebies? It’s worth it. Already saved me more than $30,000 in a business transaction by negotiating for me. I’m not going to use a CPA in the coming tax seasons either. I’m determined to not pay for any white collar labor if I can avoid it.
- rodonn 10d agoI totally agree about the subscription being worth it for most heavy users, but there are a lot of people in the developing world for whom $20/month is hard to stomach. I think it's good that those people have an option to get more access to AI with lower out of pocket price.
- thrance 10d ago> make ads more useful for people I don't understand why they still insist on inserting this line in every talk about advertising. Just be honest and address your piece to advertisers, no need to keep doing this pathetic and laughable sugarcoating.
- sehw 10d agoCan I pay them to fuck off?
- stanfordkid 10d agoThis isn't that different from the chat interfaces already available on Amazon regarding a particular product.
- tnrich 10d agostart enshittification now
- Jzuckerman 9d ago[dead]
- suttontom 9d agoWhat's old is new again: earth-shattering, never-before-seen company ends up making money off ads and its main product ends up being a developer tool (Codex).
- unujwal 9d agoCurious how merchants will eval these agents. Classic CTR is the wrong KPI; you need conversation-quality + constraint adherence + “did we invent a SKU?” checks before you scale spend.
- unujwal 9d agoCurious how merchants will eval Sponsored Agents. We built the ops layer for Shopify+Stripe: structured Findings, $ impact, synthesis briefing — not another alert firehose. https://github.com/eunujwal/PaymentsAgents https://github.com/eunujwal/PaymentsAgents
- KellyCriterion 9d agoIm always stunning how "creative" all these business people are! Its like: "if you have traction, we will somehow figure out later who pays" :-D
- cindyllm 9d ago[dead]