alt Hacker NewsLeak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out
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This outcome was obvious. If you really let yourself rely on an LLM, it will steer you towards what its owners want; products and services provided by advertisers, the "right" social and moral values, etc. It will even "accidentally" steer you towards its own inflections and ways of thinking. This is one isn't overtly malicious, but is still insidious. Do these companies get to standardize thinking and speaking just so they can get ahead of a technology race?
It's incredible that Google is letting OpenAI eat their lunch by capturing users while Google focuses on ad revenue.
OpenAI offered ChatGPT for free to anyone—even if not their best model—without needing to be logged in. That's crucial for attracting and retaining casual users.
If you compare this to what Google was at the beginning, it was just a simple interface to search the web: no questions asked, no subscription, no login. That was one of the secrets that led people to adopt Google Search when it was new (the other being result quality). It was a refreshing, simple page where you typed something and got results without any friction.
Now, with Gemini, Google finally has an excellent LLM. But a casual user can't use it unless they: 1. have a Google account, and 2. are logged in.
One might ask, "What's the matter? Everyone has a Google account." But the login requirement isn't as harmless as it seems. For example, if you want to quickly show a friend Gemini on their PC, but they use Safari and aren't logged into Google—bummer, you can't show them. Or a colleague asks about Gemini, but you can't log in with a personal account on a work machine. Gemini is immediately excluded from the realm of possibility. In the good old days, anyone could use Google at work instantly.
Right now, the companies capturing users are OpenAI (with the accessible ChatGPT brand) and Microsoft (with Copilot integrated into Microsoft 365). My company, for instance, sent a memo stating we must use Copilot with our corporate accounts for data security.
Google has botched this. They don't seem to understand that they are losing this round. They still have a strong position with Search and Android, but it’s funny to watch them make this huge strategic mistake.
NOTE: Personally, I dislike ads unless they are privacy-friendly and discrete (like early Google). If OpenAI starts using invasive ads, I will stop using ChatGPT immediately, just as I stopped using Google Search in favor of Kagi.
I guess this could also have a knock-on effect, in that ChatGPT will steer it's users away from topics advertisers might find distasteful
Like it might not want to tell you about negative health effects from McDonalds, if McDonalds becomes a major source of ad revenue
I love this. Now I'll be able to read student papers with ads in the middle. "Are you enjoying our exploration of state Shinto in late nineteenth century Japan? Visit Kyoto with Japan Airlines this summer! Use the code 'JAL26' for special savings!"
I don't think anyone would be investing `billions and billions` into AI if their endgame wasn't putting an expert salesperson right in front of every human in the world. Someone who knows all about them and who can not just sell things, but make the target think it was their idea all along.
As an AI language model, I can not provide dangerous or illegal advice.
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Advertisers will freak out about having their ads on a YouTube video with swear words in the first five minutes but will put their ads alongside an LLM that can be manipulated into telling you how to make a nerve agent?
Seems like it was never about optics, but control.
It was unavoidable and inevitable.
Still it saddens me that we will be sitting here in a years time and discuss our experiences of being fed ads served as "objective information".
Today if I ask: "should I buy a store product or just use raw material X?" , gpt and others will gladly say you might as well just use the raw product.
Pretty sure that will change very quickly.
So basically they are admitting that not enough people will pay for it to be a profitable business. Also that they don’t have any significant improvements to the tech coming up.
It's too bad, because AI could be a new way of buying things.
It will probably still be a new way of buying things- I hope an AI assisted shopping experience continues to exist on some platform, because I want to use it.
I already use AI to make all kinds of buying decisions. If OpenAI were smart they would just monetize this instead of trying to corrupt the chat interface with ads.
I actually am fairly bullish on this, because in the competitive landscape of AI it seems like there will be a company out there willing to make an ad-free model that's good enough for reasons other than serving me an ad.
Just like Apple makes hardware that's ad-free and pro-privacy enough, just because it's a product differentiator. (I'm not under any illusion that Apple wouldn't sell my data if it was in their own interests).
Hoping this pushes a new generation of adblockers, but I'm skeptical it'll stay a fair fight. The next wave of ads will likely be far subtler than today's web ads - more integrated into content, harder to detect, and easier to normalize.
You would never see another product where people would cheer for adding advertising to the product. Like everyone has an equity in this product. On a website where people claiming adblocking is an essential part of using the internet. Oh the irony.
I wonder if we get agentic ads that are very adept at convincing addicts to keep drinking; gamblers to keep gambling.
"One more drink won't hurt you."
Do we think this is not already happening, but on an "unconscious" level? I mean, if ChatGPT is trained on the internet, wouldn't it make sense that most recommended content would be sponsored ads. This is a serious question because I don't really have a full understanding of how the training is done.
Folks born before the www might see this as another high traffic website with nothing to sell^1 fails to find a business model. They might recognise this pattern today as a "solution" looking for problems to "solve"
Folks born after the www might see data collection, surveillance and ads as a "business model". They might see "Big Tech" as some sort of Holy Grail
In either case, like other high traffic websites before it, there was an initial reluctance to adopt this "business model" and, for at least some, or perhaps many, it may come with a sense of dread
1. OpenAI does not produce physical or tangible goods or services, whatever it produces is not something people are willing to pay for in sufficient volume and/or at prices to yield sufficient profits
When my plan expired 3 weeks ago, I exported all my chats, then went into Data controls > Delete all chats and clicked the button "Delete all".
It behaved odd, most messages were no longer accessible, but still in the sidebar. after some time, they were all readable again.
In short: Their "Delete all chats"-feature is broken.
I just hope that they don't mine my chats in order to use the data for advertising.
Paying $200 for Pro at the moment. If a single ad shows up anywhere I'm out. In the free tier? Well.. it's sad but inevitable.
"that could redefine the web economy" I don't think that ads in ChatGPT are that disruptive, it's just another channel. I think ChatGPT apps are an order magnitude more game changing, as they are not a new markting channel but a new distribution channel for software. Your next ad will still be an ad, but your next SaaS might be a ChatGPT App.
Few open questions
- ads only on free version?
- why the need for ads at all if llms can literally get you to the exact product? push vs pull marketing
- will models be rlhf'd to align towards preferred products or would the advertisements run ads at the prompt level? (based on some dynamic opaque configuration)
my predictions
- yes
- i assume they are trying both ends but need to justify free tier someway
- i think there will be some type of commitment to not bias the model itself and keep it clean. maybe a separation? i'm also curious as to how they will ensure this during training when the user data itself would be biased towards past ads
Wow, ads and smut in the same month? Cory Doctorow will have to invent a new term for this. Wait, he did 3 years ago, we can reuse it.
A platform that regularly hallucinates responses is going to have - uh - interesting issues with a reliable ad roll out.
This actually made me smile. The reason should be explained.
I hate ads, so I was sold on e. g. ublock origin from the get go - it is a general content blocker, before Google declared total war against and disabled the extension (karma will come back to Google eventually, but that is a separate story). I decide to want to live an ad-free life, naturally including on the world wide web. All ads must go. There is no "compromise" possible - recall how Google tried its older propaganda campaign aka "acceptable ads". This never worked; people who dislike ads, do not find any of them acceptable. Ever.
So greed is the motivation for ads.
Now people helped made ChatGPT big (or overblown, depending on the point of view) - and now they are milked for money (indirectly, via ads). So their time is now wasted with this. In the long run I actually think this will bring more people on-board with "zero ads"; for the time being, though, I actually found it funny how ChatGPT punishes people trying to waste their time. Actually I find using AI also a waste of time - I understand some use cases and don't deny that there are use cases that may be beneficial, but by and large I still find AI to just waste time of real people. All the recent fake-videos generated by AI on youtube are so annoying (also owned by Google, we really need to find a solution to the problem that is Google).
It is no surprise, somehow they need to earn money. It will be interesting though how much the response of the LLM will be adapted. At least legally advertisement need to be marked for users. So either the response of an LLM will be extended with ad content or replaced by ad content.
Building an AI product for kids right now. Went with subscriptions specifically to avoid ads. Kids are especially vulnerable to advertising and parents are increasingly suspicious of ad-supported "free" products. Curious to see if OpenAI carves out any age-based protections.
If you're not paying for a product (the full price), then you are the product.
If you're not paying for the product, and you aren't the product, you're in the start-up phase and just eating the bait. And man, people have been eating a lot of bait.
I want them to fail miserably in all of their endeavours.
ChatGPT will already help you items to buy. Google does this as well, but thanks to BrainFartNoMore you to can create content that will help you make millions. I wonder if the ads will drive away users or not. And once ChatGPT does it, then all the others will follow. The free era of AI is over.
At one point there was probably a notion that upselling better models would work, and I’m sure to some small extent it has. But to the general public the goodness of the model is too nuanced I’m guessing. And it’s not like OpenAI can offer a “bad” base model or it would be a reputation hit
all that spend on gpu's to eventually sell ads.
something is broken, I can't say what.
Now we just have to wait and see whether it’s…
“I’d be happy to answer your question… right after a word from our sponsor: Xyeniceli. Side effects may include ...”
OR
ChatGPT: “Why don't you let me fix you some of this Mococoa drink? All natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners.”
User: “What the hell are you talking about? Who are you talking to?”
ChatGPT: “I've tasted other cocoas. This is the best.”
Serving ads is a great business when your related expenses are low.
I'm not sure how it'll work out when your computing expenses are much higher. It certainly won't make them profitable using traditional models.
I'm curious how the unit economics actually play out here compared to traditional search. With Google, the compute cost to serve a query is negligible, so even low-CPM ads are profitable.
With an LLM, the inference cost per query is orders of magnitude higher. Unless thy have a way to command significantly higher CPMs -- perhaps by arguing intent signal is stringer in a conversation than a keyword search -- it feels like a difficult margin to sustain.
Can you imagine how annoying ads in the voice interface would look like? Ugh
So there are two broad models for ad monetization:
1. In-result or first-party ads; and
2. Display or third-party ads.
In Google terms, (1) is SERPS ads and (2) is DoubleClick/AdSense. (1) is still ~10x the size of (2) for Google.
I'm skeptical of the effectiveness of inserting ads into an AI chat mode. I think this will be a terrible user experience and will cause people to really dislike AI assistants. Part of the problem here is that conversation isn't a great medium for conveying ads. If you look at a Google search result, there are ads strategically placed on the top and side but they don't waste that much time because you can scan with your eyes to the organic search results.
So would OpenAI ads be part of the conversation or would there be a sidebar? If it's a sidebar, what happens when the interface inevitably switches to voice-first?
To be clear, I'm not anti-ads on Google search results. If I search for "Ryzen 9800X3D" a site selling CPUs is a relevant result, for example.
Intent here is the biggest part of ad effectiveness. By doing a search the user wants to know or get something. That's huge. But another part is all the context and behavioural information. Where you are, inferred demographics and interests, etc.
People will say OpenAI knows a lot about you but I'm not sure that's true. For a start, LLMs have a context window beyond which they remember nothing. I'm sure people are working on taking that context and summarizing it down into base knowledge for the LLM a bit like what happens with your Google activity. I would guess this approach has a long way to go.
So this brings us to display and having essentially an OpenAI pixel. This has the same issue of compressing your context down into characteristics but I actually think this could be pretty successful but it would still have to compete with Google. And that's not easy to do. Google has significant ad buying and selling infrastructure and a deep marketplace.
But remember too that display ads are a fraction of Google's other markets and I don't htink you get to the required revenue OpenAI needs on display alone.
Of course it's worth adding that with unlimited money and the brightest minds of our generation all we can come up with for monetization is advertising.
This is the new search and OpenAI is at the forefront, probably they want to become the biggest ad network.
Will the ads be sewn into the content, like, “what is the best brand of soap?” Or will the user be served ads?
The former is what worries me.
So we had this short period of ad-free time on ChatGPT. A tiny bubble where things were not polluted yet. And of course, now they are going down the exact same path as everyone else.
Same story with Amazon Prime Video. We had a few wonderful years without ads. Now I pay them 2.99 a month just to not see ads, and even then some shows are marked as “only with ads.” It is absurd.
And honestly, I am just tired of this pattern. Every service launches clean. They talk about user experience. They talk about trust. They talk about building something new. Then, the moment they have enough users locked in, the ad creep begins. First a little banner, then a “sponsored” thing, then pre-rolls, then mid-rolls, then “pay extra to remove the ads we just added.”
It feels like everything on the internet eventually devolves into the same dark pattern: take a good service, inject ads, charge to remove the ads, slowly add more ads anyway, and hope nobody leaves because the alternatives are just as bad.
The internet used to feel like innovation. Now half of it feels like airport TV: loud, annoying, and impossible to escape unless you pay for yet another upgrade.
Edit: Need to setup a raspberry pi.
maybe it can serve ads for programming courses and books to ppl asking it to write code :')
So glad to have developed my own chat interface, with interchangeable models. Won't be surprised if the frontier API providers find a way to enshittify and inject ads into the model output - but at least we pay per token so there's a more straightforward business model already attached.
Cool. I'll just go ahead and delete my account.
Too late. Browser-use local LLMs are already a thing
Not at all surprising. Google, Meta and many others have made billions selling an ads - I’m sure OpenAI wants a piece of that pie.
This isn't a leak or a surprise.
This already happened a while ago with specific shopping queries.
Imagine if the Roman Empire had financed itself via advertising. What wonderful art they would have left behind. Or the Incas. Or the Egyptians.
On the other hand, with the money they would have made ... hm.
"I'm sorry Dave, your plan doesn't include any more open source examples this month. Please choose which vendor you would like and I'll walk you through setting up an account and we'll get coding! Don't forget to use #GPT20 at checkout for an additional 20% off!"
Just deleted my ChatGPT account.
Wow! That was quick. Earlier than I expected.
- ~1 billion users in just 3 years
- Extremely personal data on users
- Novel way of introducing and learning more about sponsored products
- Strong branding for non-techie people (most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are)
- An app that is getting more and more addictive/indispensable
I think OpenAI is going to kill it in ads eventually. This is why Meta and Google went all in on AI. Their lucrative digital ad business is in an existential threat.
I think people who kept saying there is no moat in AI is about to be shocked at how strong of a moat there actually is for ChatGPT.
All free LLM chat apps will need to support ads or they will eventually die due to worse unit economics or run out of funding.
PS. Sam just said OpenAI's revenue will finish at $20b this year. 6x growth from 2024. Zero revenue from non-sub users. What do you guys think their revenue will end up in 2026?