I think that's where they want to be. feels like everyone knows it too, that the long term expectation is basically being able to buy ad words and have LLMs lean responses towards whatever people bought.

Seems the playing field is a bit too open though, models are more fungible than the companies would hope so most of the current moat is brand based and seems like they're not ready to go all "Black Mirror" on us just yet.

I work at a company that mainly makes money off ads. Theres no doubt in my mind that the end goal is to make their ads blend into organic content and make them indistinguishable. Typically that results in positive A/B metrics. Its also a reason why influencer driven ads perform well, they seem more organic.

this would be a breach of trust and short term would work great but long term is too detrimental.

same thing could've been said for search results, so at least that part is still "safe".

> always thought that ChatGPT ads would be indistinguishable from actual content

Remember when we got upset that Google was putting ads into image search [1]?

[1] http://www.ryanspoon.com/blog/2008/12/14/google-image-search... 2008

I'm pretty sure that will be an eventual evolution of the product. The business model cant sustain itself as it is at the moment, eventually chatGPT wont be the product... we the users will be.

That was the fearmongering, which made no sense because advertisers can't put a dollar value on "the AI will kind of sort of mention you", and because every conversation needs an ad. If ChatGPT always snuck in a brand mention even on the simplest questions, everyone would hate it.

Ad technology is really old. They're just going to use the same proven tech that has a track record of creating billionaires: intersperse content with sponsored blocks.