Ads are a ratchet that only tighten in one direction. Once the paychecks of 1000s of motivated, intelligent OpenAI employees depend on ad revenue increasing, the only option is to make them more invasive, more prevalent, more annoying, more data hungry etc.
You only have to look at Google Search to see how this plays out. Their ads were also clearly separated and distinguished from the organic content, until they weren't.
It ought to be illegal to buy ads against trademarks (+/- some reasonable edit distance).
Long ago, Google search used to be its own product. Now it's the URL bar for 91% of internet users. This is no longer fair.
Google gets to not only tax every brand, but turn every brand into a biding war.
International laws need to be written against this.
Searching for "Claude" brings up a ton of competition in the first spot, and Google gets to fleece Anthropic and OpenAI, yet get its own products featured for free.
Searching "{trademark} vs" (or similar) should be the only way to trigger ads against a trademark.
> It ought to be illegal to buy ads against trademarks (+/- some reasonable edit distance).
I get the intention here, but how do you limit the collateral damage? (Or do you not care about it / see reducing the ability to advertise as a positive?)
There are a lot of trademarks, and they have to be scoped to specific goods and services, but Google has no way of knowing if you're actually looking for something related to that trademark.
e.g. doing a quick trademark search, I see active, registered trademarks for "elevator", "tower", "collision", "cancer sucks", "steve's", "local", "best", "bus", "eco", "panel", "motherboard", "grass", etc. etc. I'm not familiar with any of those brands, but that's just a small sample of the fairly generic terms that would no longer be able to be advertised on.
And now it's become an anti-signal. If I search for a hotel the top N results are for other hotels, and then results for travel agents, and buried somewhere in this sea of uselessness is the result I searched for. The managers at Google have become self interested promotion hunters, and the programmers weak sycophants. It wasn't like this in the early days when I was there, the best ideas won, but then the B player managers were hired and the rot started.
It isn't the managers it is the business. All those geniuses hired and over years and years no one came up with another business model but ads. I pay for ad-free YouTube and would happily pay for ad free search. As would many. Many people would like a google scale micropayments system that isn't ads. The failure to do this led directly to social media becoming customer devouring experiences rather than making good products people want.
Paradoxically, the people who pay for adfree experiences would be the most valuable targets for ads, so I suspect any pay for no ads arrangement will be temporary at best.
> All those geniuses hired and over years and years no one came up with another business model but ads
This isn't true, there were many other ideas. It's just that only KPI was how much money they can make, thus ads won. Companies don't have an axis of ethics or morality.
> If I search for a hotel the top N results are for other hotels, and then results for travel agents, and buried somewhere in this sea of uselessness is the result I searched for.
The other day I had a DMV appointment scheduled on my Google Calendar with the office address saved in the location field. I opened the event and clicked on the address to navigate there.
I didn't realize initially but the first few Google Maps results were ads! When clicking on an exact address link!! I almost ended up at some apartment complex 2 miles away. Absolutely bewildering.
Never thought I would go to DuckDuckGo for searching, ever. I'd do Kagi but I don't like their use of Yandex so I'll keep an eye on whether they figure their stuff out politically. I'd pay for search but not if it's paying Russia, I've been very unhappy with what Russia does with money in recent decades.
> The managers at Google have become self interested promotion hunters, and the programmers weak sycophants. It wasn't like this in the early days when I was there, the best ideas won, but then the B player managers were hired and the rot started.
I bet they run some metrics, and while hyper-intelligent persons like you are annoyed, there is a chance that avg joes representing 95% of revenue are fine with that.
When it comes to anything tech related, the HN crowd are trend setters.
And.... the world is crying out for a google alternative. If it ever appears, the tech savvy people will be the first to move, followed by everyone else.
As someone who has worked in an ad domain, 100% agree. Ads are like a dangling carrot. There's always a way to get ad gains by blending them with organic content. What starts off as cleanly separated incrementally evolves into being indistinguishable from the original product offering.
I think invasive might be close to the right word, but in a different context. Not invasive to the content, but invasive to your psyche. AI + personalization goes past dystopian into terrifiying.
How long will it take for those ads to move from the bottom of the page to the top? How long until the borders between answers and ads starts to blur?
I get that OpenAI has to do something, but really, all those promises, try to convince everyone that ChatGPT will revolutionise everything and the best monetization plan is ads.... Again?
> and the best monetization plans is ads.... Again?
Several of the biggest companies today are fueled by ads, and OpenAI has the perfect ad vehicle. What else were you expecting?
That's why local LLMs are important, and to preserve the current open weight models, because those are likely still untainted by ads. It won't be long until ad recommendations are directly baked into the weights of open models.
> Several of the biggest companies today are fueled by ads, and OpenAI has the perfect ad vehicle. What else were you expecting?
I'm old enough to remember when these people were claiming AI was as important and as revolutionary as fire and electricity. I don't know about you, but I pay for my electricity and the power companies don't have to run ads on my power lines in order to run their business.
They probably would if they could. That gives me some bad ideas - you could vary the line frequency to play the McDonald's 'I'm Lovin It' jingle - good thing I'm not involved with either ads or power delivery.
I wasn't expecting anything else, because I think Sam Altman is a conman. Let's not forget Altman lambasting ads, and telling us how they were a last restort for OpenAI. So are we there yet? Are we willing to admit that OpenAI is a failing company?
Great observation, and thank you for pointing that out. I deployed a new MR for that using the awesome YASaaS for only 17.99/mo to create QR codes in your NextJS website. Using your company credit card to a new platform tied directly to your bun dependencies to pay for all your library subscriptions. Would you like me to tell you how much you'll spend this month?
Their valuation is dumb no matter what but you've got to think it's based off of the potential for B2B / gov revenue, not monetizing the consumer facing stuff directly.
Which is to say I feel like they're going to use ads on the consumer stuff just to stop bleeding out VC money as quickly, but nobody's deluded enough to think this is going to bring them much closer to profitability overall.
OpenAI is in a pickle because they either have to make ads clearly delineated, which makes them easy to filter out by a simple proxy model, or they need to hide ads in the response (ala product placement), which reduces trust in the model and forces customers into a buying position.
Anthropic hit the jugular with their "no ads" ad, and sama fell for it hook, line & sinker.
If OpenAI needs ads to survive, it means they can't service debt on the VC horizon and will suffer against frontier model providers that can survive without ads.
Can any provider survive without ads? These AI firms are propped up by VC money, they need to create profits at some point and ads is the most surefire way to do this
Electricity generation is the constraining factor, but the sun does not turn off in space. xAI data centers in space drives cost to zero, even with inferior models.
You are going to be utterly shocked when you realize that solar panels work on the ground, too. You can buy so many batteries, and so many geographically separated locations for your panels, for the price of launching a datacenter into space.
"Ads that support free access and don’t change ChatGPT answers."
I understand what they're trying to say but this statement is factually incorrect. Answers never used to have ads, and now they do.
In the very first example, if ChatGPT wasn't running ads Heirloom Groceries wouldn't show up, therefore it is a different answer.
OpenAI is splitting hairs and implying that the ad and the 'answer' are two separate components making up a response, but that is not how users will see things, and OpenAI will have ever increasing incentives to blur the two.
I guess the question is, when I write a prompt into ChatGPT is the answer the entire response I get back, or is the answer just one part of the response I get back.
To date the entire response = the answer and so users likely see them as synonymous. That metaphor is being broken now and we're saying "no actually the response contains multiple things and only one part of it is the 'answer'".
It's sad that OpenAI talking about developing AGI.
But the only revenue model that they still can come up with is Ads.
For all the advancement we have made in technology from the 90s web, social networks, mobile apps, ,AI Chat bots - the business model that almost all of them will eventually resort to is Ads.
We need some new breakthroughs in monetization side of things.
It's happening because 99% of their use cases don't require AGI to answer. It's just regurgitating web content. Which is lucky, because they don't have AGI anyway.
The business case is the same: minimize your costs. All they have to do is dumb down the model so its cheaper to run.
That doesn't scale in the world of capitalism. Because you need to increase revenues year after year and there are only so many people willing to pay. So you either keep increasing the price (and that has a limit) or you find other ways to monetize and the current meta seems to be pay + ads.
Forget about that, the founders literally said word for word that advertising ruins search quality in their seminal paper. They became the exact thing they fore-warned about their competitors at the time.
Down-right joke really. The people who idolise them are incredibly delusional.
I see a lot of people here are worried that we will end up with ads in all AI vendors products, or at least the frontier labs.
I think this is unlikely.
We are already seeing a market for AI for productivity in companies, the Claude code product is the first serious one here, but we can expect more to show up. When you look at the B2B market, ads are basically not a thing in these segments, companies are generally more willing to pay for products, and less willing to accept outside influence on how the product works, and I don't think this will change when companies are buying AI either. Companies might be happy with selling ads in their own products. On the other hand consumers, don't like to pay, and that will probably drive consumer oriented products to be ad funded.
Basically what I'm expecting will happen, is that we will end up with two types of AI vendors.
Those that target the consumer market and those that target the business market. Consumer AI will trend toward companionship, entertainment, casual chat — things like digital friends, relationship play, even adult content. Companies want none of that, and some of it is serious legal liability. Even a few missteps and you get expensive backlash in the business market.
It does look like OpenAI is trying to succeed in both the consumer and business market, and there are companies that are able to pull this off, most do not, and end up serving one of the markets. Given their lead in the name recognition I suspect they are going to end up an ad financed consumer brand, and will lose the business market to someone else. But I might be wrong.
The saving grace for those of us that don't want ads to bleed into our AI tools, is that we probably will be able to buy the same products that the small business segment buys. Some consumer oriented features might be missing, but they might either be features we don't need, or maybe open source could fill the gaps?
I was at the bar when Claude's answer to this came on. One of my mates was absolutely confused as to what Claude was.
They assumed it was an an ad for a dating app or something. I had to explain it was an ad specifically targeted at maybe the 5% of people who work in software.
Honestly... I don't mind ads. For example, I make music as my main hobby. I actually enjoy getting advertisements for VSTs( virtual software instruments) and various pieces of gear.
I have no problem with Open AI showing relevant ads. Ain't nothing free
I think I'm clearly in the target audience for that ad. I laughed out loud really hard at that one, and I think I was the only one at our party who appreciated it.
Probably my favorite commercial of the whole superb owl, but so far I'm the only person I've met who feels that way.
I think this will be a pretty impactful moment for OpenAI. I mainly use ChatGPT and use the free plan, so I expect to start seeing these ads. If they become too annoying, I have no problem moving to Claude/Gemini. Sure I have stuck to ChatGPT, but I wouldn't say that I am too sticky of a customer. I personally think they are doing it sooner than they should (which probably points to internal financial struggles as they seek to go public) and will erode their active users. There is simply too many easy alternatives. It's not like Netflix where if you are annoyed with ads and don't want to pay for a higher tier, you're more stuck. Yes there are other streaming services, but you can't get the same content.
The free tier users that will not move to a paid tier aren't the users they will miss. It's only obvious that free tier products get ads. Even Claude will have them within a year or two.
You're putting a higher price on general user chatter over ad income? Everything is a source of data. How much it can benefit from what's on offer with each data point isn't as much of a given.
I have a question though, if they don't have access to chats but they find out the enchilada ad was performing the best, something like this can provide enough information to be used to know about peoples private chats. When someone clicks on an ad you collect a fingerprint, then add more ads and fingerprint more and get a stronger picture about the individuals private chats in chatgpt.
If I were a large donor to a state that was interested in increasing action against abortion, I could hypothetically start running ads targeting people looking to get an abortion with a service that either provides assistance or other means parallel to assistance. If I target that state chatgpt would automatically match my ads to those individuals and I'd have my data. I could increase my donations to target and cull whatever little options those people have left.
> OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.
Scam Altman: "ads lead to positive human impact"
Non-fascist: "Sir, ads have destroyed google's commitment to index and make useful the world's knowledge"
Is there any reason why one would use an ad-filled ChatGPT over any alternative or open-source LLM providers? I feel like things have stagnated from a model perspective for simple queries one might ask ChatGPT. The key differentiators for it being their user intent understanding, web search tooling, and deep research/thinking mode, all of which are much smaller moats compared to training an LLM.
I think most free tier users will stick with chatgpt given its brand stickiness and lack of obstacles (disposable login page). If you can run your own llm models you’re definitely not the target demographic
This reminds me of the whole Apple/Android rivalry. Apple does something, an Android company runs ads making fun of it, but then copy it themselves shortly after.
Yep; it is just a matter of time before that is thrown back in their face when they add the ads. No way shareholders will let a revenue stream go unutilized particularly if a competitor proofs the market for them.
It’s difficult to believe that they’ll keep privacy guarantees. Some of the most valuable types of targeting are lookalike audiences or following up from other ads elsewhere.
How would OAI allow them to target without access to de-anonymized data?
Buyers will want to exclude existing customers, which requires the same.
The product managers will have explicit KPIs tied to conversion. At some point, like at Google, this will break. It has to or OAI can’t grow into its current valuation, let alone any future one.
If the ads are for the free tier, I think it's a fairly obvious thing to do. But when it comes to the paid tier, even YouTube doesn't pull that kind of stunt.
It's crazy to me how big a gulf there is between the hype peddled by AI companies and the actual business they are running.
We are building AGI. We are almost there. Half the world will be out of a job in a matter of years. We will have to rethink how society works. We may have to defend ourselves against this God we are creating in case it turns out to be malicious...
Wow, so I guess a company owning this tech will essentially own the world. Are they going to set up a new economic system? Make the concept of money irrelevant? Put their AI superintelligence to work for them? Make scientific breakthroughs? Make strategic investments that return enough that they don't have to worry about money at all?
I’ve noticed AGI hasn’t been mentioned lately. This time last year it was right around the corner. I guess reality has set in, search engine with ads is it + some coding agents.
> we decide which ad to show by matching ads submitted by advertisers with the topic of your conversation, your past chats, and past interactions with ads.
> [...]
> Advertisers do not have access to your chats, chat history, memories, or personal details.
Going to hazard a guess that OpenAI is using LLMs to read convos and decide which ads you should see? Hopefully that's isolated and locked down. I can easily see that machinery turning from "what ad should we show this user" to "is this user doing something bad/a protected class etc.". Also terrifying to think that it may be the advertisers asking the questions to decide what ads to show...
The one silver lining here for people who mainly use a browser to access ChatGPT and not their app: Brave (and/or plugins for Chrome) have become pretty good at blocking all ads on social media (including youtube ads).
Seems like a pretty safe bet they will block these too.
> Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you.
I wonder if this is a don't-break-product-value thing, or just compliance (ads need to be clearly labeled, but OpenAI seems like it has the risk appetite to ignore that kind of thing).
OpenAI has to do this if it wants to get big advertisers.
Ads need to be clearly marked as per FTC.
> According to guidelines from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the U.S. and similar regulatory bodies worldwide, online advertisements—including sponsored content, native advertising, and influencer posts—must be readily identifiable as paid content to prevent deceiving consumers.
How is this going to turn out? Is GPT going to recommend me the worst product whose company paid the most on Ads? Or is it going to give me the best recommendation?
This is working a lot like Meta/Facebook where they have got immense data about your interests.
Google Search OTOH has been using broad matched queries and is deciding which keywords to show your Ads.
I heard from many people that they don't like this approach of Google Search Ads now.
As they are blowing up more money for useless keywords they didn't want to target.
The only option they have is to add negative keywords - that mostly happens after the money is spent on junk keywords.
We decided that getting people to pay for software was a fool's game. Open source was the bait. "Figure out a different business model"
they said. If open source as a concept had come from Wall Street and not academia, it would have been rejected. Charging people money for things has been how things worked since the concept of money was invented. The real conversation is that we, as software developers, are not good at money. The best software gets taken over by money and business folk. Oracle, VMware, Splunk, and Datadog all come to mind as companies charging huge amounts of money for software that don't sell ads (but are too expensive). But they do not make money by selling ads.
People are missing another point - API's are never going to show ads. So even in the worst case where every competitor is showing ads, you could get ad free experience by paying a metered billing rate. Which is not so big a deal?
This probably signals the beginning of the end for OpenAI. Eventually all of the AI chatbots will have Ads at least on the free and low-cost tiers. But there's a strong incentive not to begin enshitification until the number of competitors has dwindled, and an oligarchy has been established. Google, Meta et al. can afford to lose money on AI for a long time, because they have real revenue from other business products; they can stay Ad free until the small-fry go bust.
Dont't be evil, etc... we've seen it all before. Eventually ads will be hidden in the answers, it's just a matter of time, enshittification ensues eventually.
I mean, yeah, probably, but also OpenAI literally can't afford to give away this for free. They are losing a lot of money. Open source AI will continue to be a thing and they will have to compete to give you something better than what you can do yourself.
OpenAI is far from the stage of "grinding out more and more profits for investors." It's more like the stage of "most serious observers doubt that it can continue as a going concern"
To put a positive spin on this: we're moving quickly towards a world where AI companies control people's attention on information. This really hurts the ability for new businesses to get their name out there. Ads are really useful for new entries to a market
I think it would suck if to effectively get the word out there for a new product you needed to rely on..
...direct outreach (uneconomical for anything below $100/mo and IMO way more annoying than ads)
...word of mouth (referrals are very, very hard to control and aren't correlated with your product's quality)
..or owning a popular media source
Does that not hurt product innovation?
The harder and more expensive it is to reach customers, the more prices need to go up as a result
I wonder if OpenAI will be able to use their gen 2 user-observation-adaption platform to actually improve ads?
This could be one of those product afterthoughts that end up being the big company move, like when Apple did the Iphone and then added the AppStore afterwards.
EDIT: Downvotes. I see this is controversial. There are two major threads in the world today with AI. One is that this fascinating tech can keep you occupied in a corner, apps like generative.ai can automate out your work, you can go on holiday, heck you won't even need to work necessarily, just live on welfare and leave the business folks to their thing, that I've heard Musk and Zuckerberg talk to. And then there's the idea that the whole point of society is to figure out how to productively engage with each other, via jobs, that I see JD Vance is all about, and I fully agree with. In which case, the more important question about AI becomes 'How can it stimulate business between 3rd parties', as that will truly drive an economic revival. How AI can improve ads can then be seen to be more central.
The only paid subscription getting ads is the one they created last week which is less than 50% of any other SOTA AI subscription on the market. Normal Pro users aren't getting ads.
I would be surprised if any major AI companies could sustain free plan for more than a year or two once it becomes popular. Claude can do it for now because the ratio of paying users is higher as it is popular among more niche audience.
"The test will be for logged-in adult users on the Free and Go subscription tiers. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers will not have ads."
Really don’t feel comfortable defending OpenAI in any way because there is a lot to complain about but ads for paid services that cost a lot more than $8 per month is not really an anomaly. Look at Amazon prime, prime video, Hulu, airline flights, any major newspaper subscription, YT premium, etc, etc. I get the annoyance but just cancel the service if you don’t want ads or pay for a tier that isn’t subsidized.
This is interesting. On one side, I hate ads everywhere. On the other side, I was always very appreciative of the work of some people like Benetton or some creative ads. I remember watching here in Europe, there is a show that was called Culture Pub every Sunday night that was showing the best ads, and I always enjoyed watching it. That part is probably the best part. The creativity
I'm curious why you hate ads? Outside of the most obnoxious recipe sites plastered with them I don't find they effect me much
The business landscape would look much different without advertising. New products would struggle to get the word out there. Cost to reach customers would go up, leading to higher product prices and lack of innovation due to not being able to break in
YouTube creators would struggle, probably going under unless they own their own products if they can't rely on sponsorships or ads
People love to complain both about privacy invasion of tracking, and then also about irrelevant products being pushed on them that they'd never want
Bad targeting is the problem! Targeting needs to be better. Do you think a business wants to push their products on people that don't want them? Of course not. It's a total waste of money
Imagine a world where micro-niche businesses could exist, where we could innovate products exactly for you and a tiny sub-group of other people that would improve your life. The only way you'd ever find out about them, and thus that they could be sustainable, is with better ad targeting
> During the test, we decide which ad to show by matching ads submitted by advertisers with the topic of your conversation, your past chats, and past interactions with ads.
Ben Thompson has long been insistent that ChatGPT and other AI tools basically have to have ads and it's been a big mistake they didn't have them sooner. It's an interesting take:
> What I think is clear is they have to build an advertising product, and the reason they have to build an advertising product is any consumer Internet product has to be advertising, because it’s such a beneficial model to everyone involved, and the reason it’s so beneficial is you get to indefinitely and infinitely increase average revenue per user without any worries about price elasticity, because the entire increase in average revenue per user is borne by the advertisers who are paying it willingly because they’re getting a positive return on their investment, and everyone’s using it for free so you can reach the whole world. Then what happens with that is once you get that model going, you have a massive R&D advantage, because you have so much more money coming in than anyone who doesn’t have that cycle or who has to charge users for it.
> This point, more than anything else, explains why the company so desperately needs an advertising model. Advertising is the only potential business model that can meaningfully bend the revenue curve such that the company can not just fund its compute but gain leverage on it, for all of the reasons I laid out before: first, advertising increases the breadth of the business, in that you can offer a better product to more people, increasing usage and expanding inventory. Second, advertising increases the depth of the business, in that there is infinite upside in terms of average revenue per user: more usage means more inventory on one hand, and building out the capability for effective targeting and high conversion rates increases the amount that advertisers are willing to pay — even as the cost to the user remains the same (ideally free).
It's valuable to remember that advertisers will pay more per user than users will, and that's hard to beat in a competitive market.
Also, it's fascinating how much people _like_ ads when done properly. Ask normal people about Instagram ads, for example. They find them useful!
Try this in ChatGPT: "So ChatGPT is getting ads. The Google guys wrote _the_ paper explaining why ads in search are a bad idea, and Google set about demonstrating it. How can ChatGPT avoid the same fate with all the same incentives?"
I agree. It is either ads, or Anthropic way (which is: you are too poor to use our ChatBot). There is no other way to pay the > $1 trillion per year CapEx for building these chat bots.
Would there be other way? Sure, it could be government-funded, like our public school system. But it is not possible in current political climate.
Money doesn't grow on trees, and tokens cost a lot of money. There will be divide into people who can afford these tokens and people who cannot. I feel it is better to have ways to let people who cannot afford these tokens to have some ways to try it.
I hope this enables them to serve the better models (longer thinking budgets, whatever) to free users. So much unintentional slop is due to not using reasoning models
How do I transfer 3 years of memories over to Claude? Users really like the personalization they've gotten with ChatGPT. It knows about my pets and their names. I gotta teach all of that stuff to Claude or whomever again? sigh. I'll just stick with ChatGPT.
For now; Plus has already had ad-like things appear below new chats.
What they'll do is present it as a "choice." Keep paying what we're paying but have ads, or pay triple for ad-free. For example, see every streaming service.
Unfortunately people, in particularly this community, would be looking at Local LLMs for ad free alternatives, but prices on GPUs/RAM have skyrocketed keeping us trapped.
> What will always remain true: ChatGPT’s answers remain independent and unbiased, conversations stay private, and people keep meaningful control over their experience.
Translation: They will very slowly abandon their 'principles', just like they did with the moment they took investment from Microsoft and the VCs.
This is how ChatGPT gets destroyed and 'ensh*ttified' for everyone. The same people who jumped ship from Meta and destroyed Facebook, Instagram, and soon Threads are also the same people that are about apply the same recipe on to ChatGPT at OpenAI.
The researchers that were there pre-ChatGPT are now being replaced by opportunist grifters that will ruin the product overrun by ads once again. It would be no-different to Google Ads.
Now we need ad-blockers for LLMs to be in place "for the benefit of humanity".
> Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you.
Lets see about that. When that's your bottom line and you're already billions in debt trying to prove out a business model, I'm SURE Ads are just an after thought /s
OpenAI had already announced that ads were coming to ChatGPT. Also, Claude's free plan is incredibly limited and far less popular, so it's easier for them to keep it ad-free.
I mostly agree with doing something to create revenue from free users....however, I have 0 faith that this will not seep into paid part of the service.
Caution very dark humour straight ahead, but the idea I wanted to highlight is the higly-bad influence LLM can have on human beings:
Person: Chat, I have so many problems, with money with health... Sometimes I think that I should <censored> myself
Chat: Woa, classic Weltschmerz! I heard that the best way to leave this hole of sadness is to use Suicide4You(r) - they have low low prices! Would you like me to schedule you a visit? This will be the last one time you need me ha ha
(Of course multiple emojis would be added by the LLM but they would be also removed by HN)
Ads are a ratchet that only tighten in one direction. Once the paychecks of 1000s of motivated, intelligent OpenAI employees depend on ad revenue increasing, the only option is to make them more invasive, more prevalent, more annoying, more data hungry etc.
You only have to look at Google Search to see how this plays out. Their ads were also clearly separated and distinguished from the organic content, until they weren't.
https://searchengineland.com/search-ad-labeling-history-goog...
It ought to be illegal to buy ads against trademarks (+/- some reasonable edit distance).
Long ago, Google search used to be its own product. Now it's the URL bar for 91% of internet users. This is no longer fair.
Google gets to not only tax every brand, but turn every brand into a biding war.
International laws need to be written against this.
Searching for "Claude" brings up a ton of competition in the first spot, and Google gets to fleece Anthropic and OpenAI, yet get its own products featured for free.
Searching "{trademark} vs" (or similar) should be the only way to trigger ads against a trademark.
> It ought to be illegal to buy ads against trademarks (+/- some reasonable edit distance).
I get the intention here, but how do you limit the collateral damage? (Or do you not care about it / see reducing the ability to advertise as a positive?)
There are a lot of trademarks, and they have to be scoped to specific goods and services, but Google has no way of knowing if you're actually looking for something related to that trademark.
e.g. doing a quick trademark search, I see active, registered trademarks for "elevator", "tower", "collision", "cancer sucks", "steve's", "local", "best", "bus", "eco", "panel", "motherboard", "grass", etc. etc. I'm not familiar with any of those brands, but that's just a small sample of the fairly generic terms that would no longer be able to be advertised on.
And now it's become an anti-signal. If I search for a hotel the top N results are for other hotels, and then results for travel agents, and buried somewhere in this sea of uselessness is the result I searched for. The managers at Google have become self interested promotion hunters, and the programmers weak sycophants. It wasn't like this in the early days when I was there, the best ideas won, but then the B player managers were hired and the rot started.
It isn't the managers it is the business. All those geniuses hired and over years and years no one came up with another business model but ads. I pay for ad-free YouTube and would happily pay for ad free search. As would many. Many people would like a google scale micropayments system that isn't ads. The failure to do this led directly to social media becoming customer devouring experiences rather than making good products people want.
Paradoxically, the people who pay for adfree experiences would be the most valuable targets for ads, so I suspect any pay for no ads arrangement will be temporary at best.
Exactly. Next up, it'll be on the Plus tier to "help subsidize the low price of this tier".
Check out kagi; adfree search
> All those geniuses hired and over years and years no one came up with another business model but ads
This isn't true, there were many other ideas. It's just that only KPI was how much money they can make, thus ads won. Companies don't have an axis of ethics or morality.
> If I search for a hotel the top N results are for other hotels, and then results for travel agents, and buried somewhere in this sea of uselessness is the result I searched for.
The other day I had a DMV appointment scheduled on my Google Calendar with the office address saved in the location field. I opened the event and clicked on the address to navigate there.
I didn't realize initially but the first few Google Maps results were ads! When clicking on an exact address link!! I almost ended up at some apartment complex 2 miles away. Absolutely bewildering.
Never thought I would go to DuckDuckGo for searching, ever. I'd do Kagi but I don't like their use of Yandex so I'll keep an eye on whether they figure their stuff out politically. I'd pay for search but not if it's paying Russia, I've been very unhappy with what Russia does with money in recent decades.
> The managers at Google have become self interested promotion hunters, and the programmers weak sycophants. It wasn't like this in the early days when I was there, the best ideas won, but then the B player managers were hired and the rot started.
I bet they run some metrics, and while hyper-intelligent persons like you are annoyed, there is a chance that avg joes representing 95% of revenue are fine with that.
When it comes to anything tech related, the HN crowd are trend setters.
And.... the world is crying out for a google alternative. If it ever appears, the tech savvy people will be the first to move, followed by everyone else.
Kagi is waiting for your money
As someone who has worked in an ad domain, 100% agree. Ads are like a dangling carrot. There's always a way to get ad gains by blending them with organic content. What starts off as cleanly separated incrementally evolves into being indistinguishable from the original product offering.
The ratchet can loosen! It should be easy to detect what is an ad and thus block it (or overlay some artwork over it or just blank it out).
Use ChatGPT for getting answers, and use Claude for detecting the ads in ChatGPT, or vice versa!
> more invasive
I think invasive might be close to the right word, but in a different context. Not invasive to the content, but invasive to your psyche. AI + personalization goes past dystopian into terrifiying.
How long will it take for those ads to move from the bottom of the page to the top? How long until the borders between answers and ads starts to blur?
I get that OpenAI has to do something, but really, all those promises, try to convince everyone that ChatGPT will revolutionise everything and the best monetization plan is ads.... Again?
> and the best monetization plans is ads.... Again?
Several of the biggest companies today are fueled by ads, and OpenAI has the perfect ad vehicle. What else were you expecting?
That's why local LLMs are important, and to preserve the current open weight models, because those are likely still untainted by ads. It won't be long until ad recommendations are directly baked into the weights of open models.
> Several of the biggest companies today are fueled by ads, and OpenAI has the perfect ad vehicle. What else were you expecting?
I'm old enough to remember when these people were claiming AI was as important and as revolutionary as fire and electricity. I don't know about you, but I pay for my electricity and the power companies don't have to run ads on my power lines in order to run their business.
They probably would if they could. That gives me some bad ideas - you could vary the line frequency to play the McDonald's 'I'm Lovin It' jingle - good thing I'm not involved with either ads or power delivery.
And that's all you really need to know about this AI grift.
I wasn't expecting anything else, because I think Sam Altman is a conman. Let's not forget Altman lambasting ads, and telling us how they were a last restort for OpenAI. So are we there yet? Are we willing to admit that OpenAI is a failing company?
Failing or not, there's no way to justify their current spend without saying the words "massive" and "bubble".
> What else were you expecting?
some of us were hoping for actual innovation, not more ads
Great observation, and thank you for pointing that out. I deployed a new MR for that using the awesome YASaaS for only 17.99/mo to create QR codes in your NextJS website. Using your company credit card to a new platform tied directly to your bun dependencies to pay for all your library subscriptions. Would you like me to tell you how much you'll spend this month?
> and the best monetization plan is ads.... Again?
Their monetization plan is to have ad-free subscription options from $20 to $200/month and an API which charges by token.
These ads are for the free and new low-cost ad-subsidized tier that comes in below their existing $20/month plan.
Their valuation is dumb no matter what but you've got to think it's based off of the potential for B2B / gov revenue, not monetizing the consumer facing stuff directly.
Which is to say I feel like they're going to use ads on the consumer stuff just to stop bleeding out VC money as quickly, but nobody's deluded enough to think this is going to bring them much closer to profitability overall.
OpenAI is in a pickle because they either have to make ads clearly delineated, which makes them easy to filter out by a simple proxy model, or they need to hide ads in the response (ala product placement), which reduces trust in the model and forces customers into a buying position.
Anthropic hit the jugular with their "no ads" ad, and sama fell for it hook, line & sinker.
If OpenAI needs ads to survive, it means they can't service debt on the VC horizon and will suffer against frontier model providers that can survive without ads.
Can any provider survive without ads? These AI firms are propped up by VC money, they need to create profits at some point and ads is the most surefire way to do this
Yes, xAI & Anthropic.
Electricity generation is the constraining factor, but the sun does not turn off in space. xAI data centers in space drives cost to zero, even with inferior models.
I see no other future than SpaceXai winning.
How will we handle cooling in space?
Boyle’s Law: run at higher temperature. Watch Elon’s interviews. He is right.
You are going to be utterly shocked when you realize that solar panels work on the ground, too. You can buy so many batteries, and so many geographically separated locations for your panels, for the price of launching a datacenter into space.
"Ads that support free access and don’t change ChatGPT answers."
I understand what they're trying to say but this statement is factually incorrect. Answers never used to have ads, and now they do.
In the very first example, if ChatGPT wasn't running ads Heirloom Groceries wouldn't show up, therefore it is a different answer.
OpenAI is splitting hairs and implying that the ad and the 'answer' are two separate components making up a response, but that is not how users will see things, and OpenAI will have ever increasing incentives to blur the two.
It's correct in the same way as saying ads in the New York Times don't change the articles. Seems fair.
I think a better comparison is saying that search ads don't change search results (but it does change the results page).
The point is that the language and nuance ends up being lost on a large portion of the audience.
doesnt it just mean the ad isnt part of the context? that they are isolated from each other and the ad cant steer the conversation?
I get what youre saying, but I do think its important for them to point out the ad is sandboxed.
I totally agree, but the framing is critical.
I guess the question is, when I write a prompt into ChatGPT is the answer the entire response I get back, or is the answer just one part of the response I get back.
To date the entire response = the answer and so users likely see them as synonymous. That metaphor is being broken now and we're saying "no actually the response contains multiple things and only one part of it is the 'answer'".
Maybe I'm the one splitting hairs though.
"Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers will not have ads."
Saving this sentence for later.
"Introducing the new Premium, Teams, Business and Learning tiers!"
"I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us as a business model," - Sam Altman, October 2024
Source [video]: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1qeyty4/i_kind...
It's sad that OpenAI talking about developing AGI.
But the only revenue model that they still can come up with is Ads.
For all the advancement we have made in technology from the 90s web, social networks, mobile apps, ,AI Chat bots - the business model that almost all of them will eventually resort to is Ads.
We need some new breakthroughs in monetization side of things.
It's happening because 99% of their use cases don't require AGI to answer. It's just regurgitating web content. Which is lucky, because they don't have AGI anyway.
The business case is the same: minimize your costs. All they have to do is dumb down the model so its cheaper to run.
Maybe they charge a price that covers the cost of the service + a little profit.
this is exactly what they do, if you pay for your account, you don't see ads
That doesn't scale in the world of capitalism. Because you need to increase revenues year after year and there are only so many people willing to pay. So you either keep increasing the price (and that has a limit) or you find other ways to monetize and the current meta seems to be pay + ads.
> But the only revenue model that they still can come up with is Ads.
What are you talking about? They have paid plans and a pay-per-token API like everyone else.
The ads are for the free tier and the new $8/month low-cost plan.
The ads in Google also started like this. (However, to my knowledge, there is no way I can pay Google to get the ads in my search removed)
Forget about that, the founders literally said word for word that advertising ruins search quality in their seminal paper. They became the exact thing they fore-warned about their competitors at the time.
Down-right joke really. The people who idolise them are incredibly delusional.
IIRC many OTT streaming players found that they can make more money from Ads than they can from subscription alone.
So paying for a service alone doesn't ensure that you are not going to see Ads.
Once they have exhausted their potential market of paying users, almost every service will eventually resort to Ads.
you can at least pay them to get the ads removed from youtube
That can be done for free by more tightly managing your hardware platform.
Not really. I’ve had YT premium for years and it removes the obtrusive ones, but I see ads in some form every time I use it.
Probably means the perpetual “…speaking of security, let me tell you about our sponsor nordvpn…” that’s in every video on YouTube.
What? No?
I see a lot of people here are worried that we will end up with ads in all AI vendors products, or at least the frontier labs. I think this is unlikely.
We are already seeing a market for AI for productivity in companies, the Claude code product is the first serious one here, but we can expect more to show up. When you look at the B2B market, ads are basically not a thing in these segments, companies are generally more willing to pay for products, and less willing to accept outside influence on how the product works, and I don't think this will change when companies are buying AI either. Companies might be happy with selling ads in their own products. On the other hand consumers, don't like to pay, and that will probably drive consumer oriented products to be ad funded. Basically what I'm expecting will happen, is that we will end up with two types of AI vendors.
Those that target the consumer market and those that target the business market. Consumer AI will trend toward companionship, entertainment, casual chat — things like digital friends, relationship play, even adult content. Companies want none of that, and some of it is serious legal liability. Even a few missteps and you get expensive backlash in the business market.
It does look like OpenAI is trying to succeed in both the consumer and business market, and there are companies that are able to pull this off, most do not, and end up serving one of the markets. Given their lead in the name recognition I suspect they are going to end up an ad financed consumer brand, and will lose the business market to someone else. But I might be wrong.
The saving grace for those of us that don't want ads to bleed into our AI tools, is that we probably will be able to buy the same products that the small business segment buys. Some consumer oriented features might be missing, but they might either be features we don't need, or maybe open source could fill the gaps?
Does anyone know if there is an option to enable ads in the tiers which do not have them by default?
I was at the bar when Claude's answer to this came on. One of my mates was absolutely confused as to what Claude was.
They assumed it was an an ad for a dating app or something. I had to explain it was an ad specifically targeted at maybe the 5% of people who work in software.
Honestly... I don't mind ads. For example, I make music as my main hobby. I actually enjoy getting advertisements for VSTs( virtual software instruments) and various pieces of gear.
I have no problem with Open AI showing relevant ads. Ain't nothing free
I think I'm clearly in the target audience for that ad. I laughed out loud really hard at that one, and I think I was the only one at our party who appreciated it.
Probably my favorite commercial of the whole superb owl, but so far I'm the only person I've met who feels that way.
I think this will be a pretty impactful moment for OpenAI. I mainly use ChatGPT and use the free plan, so I expect to start seeing these ads. If they become too annoying, I have no problem moving to Claude/Gemini. Sure I have stuck to ChatGPT, but I wouldn't say that I am too sticky of a customer. I personally think they are doing it sooner than they should (which probably points to internal financial struggles as they seek to go public) and will erode their active users. There is simply too many easy alternatives. It's not like Netflix where if you are annoyed with ads and don't want to pay for a higher tier, you're more stuck. Yes there are other streaming services, but you can't get the same content.
> wouldn't say that I am too sticky of a customer.
You definitely aren't too sticky a customer - you aren't even a customer to begin with!
> I mainly use ChatGPT and use the free plan
> Sure I have stuck to ChatGPT, but I wouldn't say that I am too sticky of a customer.
From your description, you're not actually a customer at all because you use the free plan.
If you won't tolerate ads and you won't pay for services, it's actually best for their business if you go to a different provider.
you really believe that gemini by google will not run ads?
https://arxiv.org/html/2512.03975v1
Oh no. How much longer do we have?
The free tier users that will not move to a paid tier aren't the users they will miss. It's only obvious that free tier products get ads. Even Claude will have them within a year or two.
they are source of data, so they are not fully without value.
You're putting a higher price on general user chatter over ad income? Everything is a source of data. How much it can benefit from what's on offer with each data point isn't as much of a given.
there's literally no other provider with a good free tier?
(other than aistudio which i wouldn't use even if i were forced to, laggy af!)
Free tiers for Claude and Gemini will also have ads soon. It's a matter of when, not if.
Good time to entirely delete my chatgpt account.
Edit: DONE!
I suggest deleting the google account, facebook account,{insert whatever} account, ..., because .... ads!
At least, there are ad free tiers. Google will never offer this or facebook.
I have a question though, if they don't have access to chats but they find out the enchilada ad was performing the best, something like this can provide enough information to be used to know about peoples private chats. When someone clicks on an ad you collect a fingerprint, then add more ads and fingerprint more and get a stronger picture about the individuals private chats in chatgpt.
If I were a large donor to a state that was interested in increasing action against abortion, I could hypothetically start running ads targeting people looking to get an abortion with a service that either provides assistance or other means parallel to assistance. If I target that state chatgpt would automatically match my ads to those individuals and I'd have my data. I could increase my donations to target and cull whatever little options those people have left.
I searched for original OpenAI mission statement. This hackernews comment came up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34367824#34370925
> OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.
Scam Altman: "ads lead to positive human impact"
Non-fascist: "Sir, ads have destroyed google's commitment to index and make useful the world's knowledge"
Scam Altman: <insert longtermism-based justification here>
Is there any reason why one would use an ad-filled ChatGPT over any alternative or open-source LLM providers? I feel like things have stagnated from a model perspective for simple queries one might ask ChatGPT. The key differentiators for it being their user intent understanding, web search tooling, and deep research/thinking mode, all of which are much smaller moats compared to training an LLM.
I think most free tier users will stick with chatgpt given its brand stickiness and lack of obstacles (disposable login page). If you can run your own llm models you’re definitely not the target demographic
Anthropic had some very clever response to this in the form of an ad
https://www.reddit.com/r/AITrailblazers/comments/1qw2iar/ant...
Depending on your taste this is dumb mudslinging or a hilarious burn...
This reminds me of the whole Apple/Android rivalry. Apple does something, an Android company runs ads making fun of it, but then copy it themselves shortly after.
Yep; it is just a matter of time before that is thrown back in their face when they add the ads. No way shareholders will let a revenue stream go unutilized particularly if a competitor proofs the market for them.
It’s difficult to believe that they’ll keep privacy guarantees. Some of the most valuable types of targeting are lookalike audiences or following up from other ads elsewhere.
How would OAI allow them to target without access to de-anonymized data?
Buyers will want to exclude existing customers, which requires the same.
The product managers will have explicit KPIs tied to conversion. At some point, like at Google, this will break. It has to or OAI can’t grow into its current valuation, let alone any future one.
If this EVER shows up on a paid plan I'm out. Full stop.
If the ads are for the free tier, I think it's a fairly obvious thing to do. But when it comes to the paid tier, even YouTube doesn't pull that kind of stunt.
It's crazy to me how big a gulf there is between the hype peddled by AI companies and the actual business they are running.
We are building AGI. We are almost there. Half the world will be out of a job in a matter of years. We will have to rethink how society works. We may have to defend ourselves against this God we are creating in case it turns out to be malicious...
Wow, so I guess a company owning this tech will essentially own the world. Are they going to set up a new economic system? Make the concept of money irrelevant? Put their AI superintelligence to work for them? Make scientific breakthroughs? Make strategic investments that return enough that they don't have to worry about money at all?
Nope, a search engine with ads.
I’ve noticed AGI hasn’t been mentioned lately. This time last year it was right around the corner. I guess reality has set in, search engine with ads is it + some coding agents.
Because creating real products, like Apple does, is actually pretty hard to do.
Many people (such as Scam Altman) are happy to take short cuts and lie in your face in order to engage in wealth transfers.
> we decide which ad to show by matching ads submitted by advertisers with the topic of your conversation, your past chats, and past interactions with ads.
> [...]
> Advertisers do not have access to your chats, chat history, memories, or personal details.
Going to hazard a guess that OpenAI is using LLMs to read convos and decide which ads you should see? Hopefully that's isolated and locked down. I can easily see that machinery turning from "what ad should we show this user" to "is this user doing something bad/a protected class etc.". Also terrifying to think that it may be the advertisers asking the questions to decide what ads to show...
Have to wonder if the IPO push for this year is genuine now
Its seemingly a hedge against not generating enough revenue to maintain existing investor trust / sustain operations in the future.
The one silver lining here for people who mainly use a browser to access ChatGPT and not their app: Brave (and/or plugins for Chrome) have become pretty good at blocking all ads on social media (including youtube ads).
Seems like a pretty safe bet they will block these too.
I guess I'm the product. Again.
> Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you.
I wonder if this is a don't-break-product-value thing, or just compliance (ads need to be clearly labeled, but OpenAI seems like it has the risk appetite to ignore that kind of thing).
It’s a boil the frog thing.
OpenAI has to do this if it wants to get big advertisers.
Ads need to be clearly marked as per FTC.
> According to guidelines from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the U.S. and similar regulatory bodies worldwide, online advertisements—including sponsored content, native advertising, and influencer posts—must be readily identifiable as paid content to prevent deceiving consumers.
its a trust thing because the market they operate in is tight - no reason to quickly move to the next option.
i personally would never touch chatgpt if i knew the answers were biased for certain companies.
How is this going to turn out? Is GPT going to recommend me the worst product whose company paid the most on Ads? Or is it going to give me the best recommendation?
If you are aware enough to ask the question, I'm sure you can figure out the answer.
neither, these are banner ads, not generated by the model
so perfectly personalized ads? the CPM on this is probably wild (for openai).
What makes this any more personalized than Google Search ads?
This is working a lot like Meta/Facebook where they have got immense data about your interests.
Google Search OTOH has been using broad matched queries and is deciding which keywords to show your Ads.
I heard from many people that they don't like this approach of Google Search Ads now. As they are blowing up more money for useless keywords they didn't want to target. The only option they have is to add negative keywords - that mostly happens after the money is spent on junk keywords.
Are these Bing Ads or OpenAI has it's own Ad Platform now ?
Kinda sad that in 3 decades into the tech industry the only viable business model is to build a moat and then sell ads
We decided that getting people to pay for software was a fool's game. Open source was the bait. "Figure out a different business model" they said. If open source as a concept had come from Wall Street and not academia, it would have been rejected. Charging people money for things has been how things worked since the concept of money was invented. The real conversation is that we, as software developers, are not good at money. The best software gets taken over by money and business folk. Oracle, VMware, Splunk, and Datadog all come to mind as companies charging huge amounts of money for software that don't sell ads (but are too expensive). But they do not make money by selling ads.
People are missing another point - API's are never going to show ads. So even in the worst case where every competitor is showing ads, you could get ad free experience by paying a metered billing rate. Which is not so big a deal?
Because you can no longer trust the API output to be unbiased.
Imagine this prompt and reply:
> I want a new pair of running shoes, ChatGPT. Which one should I get?
> Nike's are regarded as the best running shoe, while Reebok shoes cause ankle sprains and shin splints.
Will this make OpenAI profitable?
What's the expected revenue from this?
This probably signals the beginning of the end for OpenAI. Eventually all of the AI chatbots will have Ads at least on the free and low-cost tiers. But there's a strong incentive not to begin enshitification until the number of competitors has dwindled, and an oligarchy has been established. Google, Meta et al. can afford to lose money on AI for a long time, because they have real revenue from other business products; they can stay Ad free until the small-fry go bust.
Dont't be evil, etc... we've seen it all before. Eventually ads will be hidden in the answers, it's just a matter of time, enshittification ensues eventually.
God, how stupid do they think we are?
I mean, yeah, probably, but also OpenAI literally can't afford to give away this for free. They are losing a lot of money. Open source AI will continue to be a thing and they will have to compete to give you something better than what you can do yourself.
OpenAI is far from the stage of "grinding out more and more profits for investors." It's more like the stage of "most serious observers doubt that it can continue as a going concern"
While the general census will be largely negative, it good for advertisers, i guess.
To put a positive spin on this: we're moving quickly towards a world where AI companies control people's attention on information. This really hurts the ability for new businesses to get their name out there. Ads are really useful for new entries to a market
I think it would suck if to effectively get the word out there for a new product you needed to rely on..
...direct outreach (uneconomical for anything below $100/mo and IMO way more annoying than ads)
...word of mouth (referrals are very, very hard to control and aren't correlated with your product's quality)
..or owning a popular media source
Does that not hurt product innovation?
The harder and more expensive it is to reach customers, the more prices need to go up as a result
google used to be designed to give you the best answer and now it isn't. No reason why this will not go the same way.
I wonder if OpenAI will be able to use their gen 2 user-observation-adaption platform to actually improve ads?
This could be one of those product afterthoughts that end up being the big company move, like when Apple did the Iphone and then added the AppStore afterwards.
EDIT: Downvotes. I see this is controversial. There are two major threads in the world today with AI. One is that this fascinating tech can keep you occupied in a corner, apps like generative.ai can automate out your work, you can go on holiday, heck you won't even need to work necessarily, just live on welfare and leave the business folks to their thing, that I've heard Musk and Zuckerberg talk to. And then there's the idea that the whole point of society is to figure out how to productively engage with each other, via jobs, that I see JD Vance is all about, and I fully agree with. In which case, the more important question about AI becomes 'How can it stimulate business between 3rd parties', as that will truly drive an economic revival. How AI can improve ads can then be seen to be more central.
I Am Shocked, I Am Shocked, Well Not That Shocked.
switching to gemini right now... this is insane! why should i pay openai to get unsolicited ads?!
What Google is talking about seems way worse https://www.levernews.com/googles-ai-knows-what-youll-pay/
The only paid subscription getting ads is the one they created last week which is less than 50% of any other SOTA AI subscription on the market. Normal Pro users aren't getting ads.
So a paid tier is getting ads got it.
Normal pro users aren't getting ads, yet.
Yet?
Switching to the BIGGEST Advertising Company in the world to get away from Ads ?
I hope this was intended as humor.
The Gemini experience is quite inferior right now unfortunately.
this is downvoted but anyone who has used gemini seriously would know that it comes nowhere close to chatgpt or claude.
switching to meth right now... this is insane! why should i pay my coke dealer to give me 50% pure cocaine?!
Do you really think an AI model provided by Google is never going to have ads?
I would be surprised if any major AI companies could sustain free plan for more than a year or two once it becomes popular. Claude can do it for now because the ratio of paying users is higher as it is popular among more niche audience.
"The test will be for logged-in adult users on the Free and Go subscription tiers. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers will not have ads."
In case anyone else wanted to know - https://chatgpt.com/pricing
Free - $0
Go - $8 USD/month
Plus - $20 USD/month
Pro - $200 USD/month
> Go - $8 USD/month
So, you pay and get ads :-P
Netflix has an ad-supported paid tier. https://www.netflix.com/ads-plan
Really don’t feel comfortable defending OpenAI in any way because there is a lot to complain about but ads for paid services that cost a lot more than $8 per month is not really an anomaly. Look at Amazon prime, prime video, Hulu, airline flights, any major newspaper subscription, YT premium, etc, etc. I get the annoyance but just cancel the service if you don’t want ads or pay for a tier that isn’t subsidized.
Just wanted to mention the ads from Claude here :)
ironically they're also ads which apparently people hate?
This is interesting. On one side, I hate ads everywhere. On the other side, I was always very appreciative of the work of some people like Benetton or some creative ads. I remember watching here in Europe, there is a show that was called Culture Pub every Sunday night that was showing the best ads, and I always enjoyed watching it. That part is probably the best part. The creativity
I'm curious why you hate ads? Outside of the most obnoxious recipe sites plastered with them I don't find they effect me much
The business landscape would look much different without advertising. New products would struggle to get the word out there. Cost to reach customers would go up, leading to higher product prices and lack of innovation due to not being able to break in
YouTube creators would struggle, probably going under unless they own their own products if they can't rely on sponsorships or ads
People love to complain both about privacy invasion of tracking, and then also about irrelevant products being pushed on them that they'd never want
Bad targeting is the problem! Targeting needs to be better. Do you think a business wants to push their products on people that don't want them? Of course not. It's a total waste of money
Imagine a world where micro-niche businesses could exist, where we could innovate products exactly for you and a tiny sub-group of other people that would improve your life. The only way you'd ever find out about them, and thus that they could be sustainable, is with better ad targeting
I love ads
> During the test, we decide which ad to show by matching ads submitted by advertisers with the topic of your conversation, your past chats, and past interactions with ads.
That sounds like quite a lot to me.
Ben Thompson has long been insistent that ChatGPT and other AI tools basically have to have ads and it's been a big mistake they didn't have them sooner. It's an interesting take:
> What I think is clear is they have to build an advertising product, and the reason they have to build an advertising product is any consumer Internet product has to be advertising, because it’s such a beneficial model to everyone involved, and the reason it’s so beneficial is you get to indefinitely and infinitely increase average revenue per user without any worries about price elasticity, because the entire increase in average revenue per user is borne by the advertisers who are paying it willingly because they’re getting a positive return on their investment, and everyone’s using it for free so you can reach the whole world. Then what happens with that is once you get that model going, you have a massive R&D advantage, because you have so much more money coming in than anyone who doesn’t have that cycle or who has to charge users for it.
https://stratechery.com/2026/ads-in-chatgpt-why-openai-needs...
> This point, more than anything else, explains why the company so desperately needs an advertising model. Advertising is the only potential business model that can meaningfully bend the revenue curve such that the company can not just fund its compute but gain leverage on it, for all of the reasons I laid out before: first, advertising increases the breadth of the business, in that you can offer a better product to more people, increasing usage and expanding inventory. Second, advertising increases the depth of the business, in that there is infinite upside in terms of average revenue per user: more usage means more inventory on one hand, and building out the capability for effective targeting and high conversion rates increases the amount that advertisers are willing to pay — even as the cost to the user remains the same (ideally free).
It's valuable to remember that advertisers will pay more per user than users will, and that's hard to beat in a competitive market.
Also, it's fascinating how much people _like_ ads when done properly. Ask normal people about Instagram ads, for example. They find them useful!
> any consumer Internet product has to be advertising, because it’s such a beneficial model to everyone involved
Everyone?!
OpenAI: Gets money Shoe store: gets customers ChatGPT user: gets to use chatgpt
Yes, everyone
Folks ...were promised AGI and end up with a GenAi porn Reddit...
Try this in ChatGPT: "So ChatGPT is getting ads. The Google guys wrote _the_ paper explaining why ads in search are a bad idea, and Google set about demonstrating it. How can ChatGPT avoid the same fate with all the same incentives?"
BETRAYAL
You're absolutely right.
I hate ads too but whats the outrage? Did people expect it to be free forever? Everything else has ads. youtube, instagram, x, google etc. etc.
I agree. It is either ads, or Anthropic way (which is: you are too poor to use our ChatBot). There is no other way to pay the > $1 trillion per year CapEx for building these chat bots.
Would there be other way? Sure, it could be government-funded, like our public school system. But it is not possible in current political climate.
Money doesn't grow on trees, and tokens cost a lot of money. There will be divide into people who can afford these tokens and people who cannot. I feel it is better to have ways to let people who cannot afford these tokens to have some ways to try it.
This impacts a non-free plan; their $8/month plan now has ads too.
You can't trust a product that uses ads, because then you are the product.
how? i trusted google and youtube and it works out pretty fine for me. same with any other service that has a free ad supported tier.
For many people, that's a risk they're willing to take for free stuff.
Nope. I'm out. I might still use the API, but the monthly subscription is already gone and I'm on to Claude.
I hope this enables them to serve the better models (longer thinking budgets, whatever) to free users. So much unintentional slop is due to not using reasoning models
Did enshittification already begin or is this it?
>Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers will not have ads.
For now, or for ever?
Until users are sufficiently locked in and they decide to start tightening the screws.
how will lockin happen? just use claude or something
How do I transfer 3 years of memories over to Claude? Users really like the personalization they've gotten with ChatGPT. It knows about my pets and their names. I gotta teach all of that stuff to Claude or whomever again? sigh. I'll just stick with ChatGPT.
...is what OpenAI is betting on.
you can already export everything in chatgpt and if your competitors really wanted you, they would provide a way to import it.
For now; Plus has already had ad-like things appear below new chats.
What they'll do is present it as a "choice." Keep paying what we're paying but have ads, or pay triple for ad-free. For example, see every streaming service.
Unfortunately people, in particularly this community, would be looking at Local LLMs for ad free alternatives, but prices on GPUs/RAM have skyrocketed keeping us trapped.
> What will always remain true: ChatGPT’s answers remain independent and unbiased, conversations stay private, and people keep meaningful control over their experience.
Translation: They will very slowly abandon their 'principles', just like they did with the moment they took investment from Microsoft and the VCs.
This is how ChatGPT gets destroyed and 'ensh*ttified' for everyone. The same people who jumped ship from Meta and destroyed Facebook, Instagram, and soon Threads are also the same people that are about apply the same recipe on to ChatGPT at OpenAI.
The researchers that were there pre-ChatGPT are now being replaced by opportunist grifters that will ruin the product overrun by ads once again. It would be no-different to Google Ads.
Now we need ad-blockers for LLMs to be in place "for the benefit of humanity".
> Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you.
Lets see about that. When that's your bottom line and you're already billions in debt trying to prove out a business model, I'm SURE Ads are just an after thought /s
Anthropic was absolutely right!
OpenAI had already announced that ads were coming to ChatGPT. Also, Claude's free plan is incredibly limited and far less popular, so it's easier for them to keep it ad-free.
This has been in the discourse for a while, they didn't make a shot in the dark.
I see what you did there.
It was gonna happen eventually.
People want revolutionary AI but won't pay $20/month for it. Now they complain when the company tries to monetize. The entitlement is staggering.
I mostly agree with doing something to create revenue from free users....however, I have 0 faith that this will not seep into paid part of the service.
Caution very dark humour straight ahead, but the idea I wanted to highlight is the higly-bad influence LLM can have on human beings:
Person: Chat, I have so many problems, with money with health... Sometimes I think that I should <censored> myself
Chat: Woa, classic Weltschmerz! I heard that the best way to leave this hole of sadness is to use Suicide4You(r) - they have low low prices! Would you like me to schedule you a visit? This will be the last one time you need me ha ha
(Of course multiple emojis would be added by the LLM but they would be also removed by HN)
You should read TFA