Our approach to advertising

Enshittified, the bright golden AI age began to brown, and regression to the mean once again cast another bleak spell onto humanity. And with that, just as quickly as it broke, another AI winter began. As it turns out, those datacenters were just there to generate shareholder value.

It’s probably best not to become too reliant on this technology. We all know where it is going.

I think we all knew this was coming but I thought they'd wait a few more months.

That sweet, sweet ad revenue. How can anyone resist?

Are they going to offset cancellations with ad revenue?

I'm out.

unfortunately it had to happen. if anything, i'm surprised it took this long given the sheer volume of funding they've burned through on Free users

Why now?

I mean, they certainly know that introducing ads with be a huge motivation for consumers to seek other options.

The primary differentiator of OpenAI is first mover advantage; the product itself is not particularly unique anymore.

IMHO consumers will quickly realize that switching to an alternative AI provider is easy and probably fun.

This seems premature to give up their moat in the name of revenue. Are they feeling real financial pressure all of the sudden? Maybe I'm missing something. Looks like a big win for Google and Anthropic.

Obviously disappointing, but not entirely shocking given how much capital they've already burned through. Convincing individual users to pay $8/mo was never going to even out the balance sheet.

Just let me pay to not get ads and for all tiers keep them external to the LLM output

Well, I draw the line here. If I see an ad, or feel like I'm being sold an advert in my chat with ChatGPT I am canceling.

somewhat unrelated, but I've been playing this game with Amazon; when they pop open Rufus and start spewing text at me, I remove everything from my cart, and see how many weeks I can go without shopping at amazon; my current record is 3 weeks, but I think I can do better.

More related, I pay for Kagi, because google results are horrible.

More related, Chatgpt isn't the only model out there, and I've just recently stopped using 5 because it's just slow and there are other models that come back and work just as well. So when Chatgpt starts injecting crap, I'll just stop using them for something else.

What would you do if every time you walked into Walmart and the greeter spit in your face and told you to go F yourself, would you still shop there?

So now they're competing with Google.

Big G will crush them. No "ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity." Just doing a desperate money grab.

Stuff like this is more reason to build locally, not just depend on the cloud.

Worth askkng, What is the best local LLM solution (including agents) in 2026?

If you had told me in 2011, when I first started discussing artificial intelligence, that in 2026 a trillion dollar company would earnestly publish the statement “Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity; our pursuit of advertising is always in support of that mission”, I would have tossed my laptop into the sea and taken up farming instead.

That's 1/3rd the screen real estate. Can we have longer phones please.

Stop glazing google

I actually use chatgpt for creating recipes from time to time. I wouldn't be too offended if there's an 'add to amazon' cart button or similar type of add.

What I'm not okay with is being served adds using codex cli, or codex cli gather data outside of my context to send to advertisers. So as long as they're not doing that, I won't complain.

If they start doing that, I'll complain, and I'll need to more heavily sandbox it.

The moment I see an ad in ChatGPT I’m moving to a different model.

If no services remain I’ll run one of my own in the cloud or my server.

Fuck. Ads.

calling it now: people are going to a use a layer of LLM on top of this in a browser extension that takes the ChatGPT text and removes the ads from it.

AI is a blender for human culture: it shreds our culture into slop, dumps it into uniform briquettes and adds a bright plastic wrap with ads.

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no company can survive without advertising. when google first launched, it was the same. chatgpt will follow a similar path, and half a century from now, the cycle will still continue in the same way. advertising, regardless of scale, is the art of turning data into revenue. even if this planning seems insignificant for a company’s future today, it will most likely become its greatest advantage.