alt Hacker News> - If it works and prints money like it should, then OpenAI is on a path to become the next Mag 7 company. All the money they raised makes sense.
Makes sense for whom? Certainly not the users. The entire purpose of ads is to change your behavior in ways that benefit someone else. In ad-based search, ads are at least visually separable (and blockable) but in a conversational AI they are indistinguishable and corrupt the entire trust relationship. When your chat "assistant" has a financial incentive to steer you toward certain products or answers every response becomes suspect. The users are no longer getting the best answer but the most profitable one as we witnessed this happen in search over last 2 decades. Not a way to build a long lasting business.
I like your attitude, but there is potentially a major business in there if they can get users to tolerate it. (Major business meaning greater than the GDP of most countries.)
Over 75% of Google's revenue is ads. A bulk of that from Google Search ads.
I just don't think the ads will be natural. And I think OpenAI has been testing this in quiet and is now "changing course" because the results didn't look great. Hypothesis, of course, but it lines up with the signals we're getting.