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> I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model. I would do it if it meant that was the only way to get everybody in the world access to great services, but if we can find something that doesn't do that, I'd prefer that.
So, is this OpenAI announcing they're strapped for cash?
All those companies (and many other large tech companies) have discovered the same arbitrage that older media companies discovered decades ago, which is that we, on the average, are much more willing to pay with attention than with money, even where money would have been the better choice.
Advertising continues to be one of the most powerful business models ever invented, and I don't think that's changing any time soon.
I read this as: I know ads are likely if not inevitable but I can’t say that while I’m trying to gain users and inspire trust but I’ll start to float even in this non-denial the justification for the thing I’m ultimately going to do.
See it as a brand image advertising campaign of the time.
The revenue from a few ads on the free tier in exchange for limited queries to GPT-5.3 is negligible compared to what they pull in from API costs and the subscription plans. This looks like a play to justify the existence of the previously money-losing free tier as they go into an IPO. Throw some ads in there to make it closer to a neutral on the balance sheet.
The key part of that quote was "everybody in the world". The ads are their way of sustaining the low end of the access.
Commercial ads could be a smaller revenue source than political ads.
Unless they botch the implementation, it's not going to be negligible with ~800M+ free subscribers.
You'd be better off saying you use those people to A/B test changes and filling idle GPU batches while giving paying customers a more consistent experience.
Psychographic data. What they learn from these folks will create the most powerful manipulation technology yet.
Some brands are okay with impressions.. you can build trust in your product be advertising it for weeks/months and when the user does make a purchase that brand is on the mind.
So why chase this negligible revenue?
Dang.
> The revenue from a few ads on the free tier in exchange for limited queries to GPT-5.3 is negligible compared to what they pull in from API costs and the subscription plans. This looks like a play to justify the existence of the previously money-losing free tier as they go into an IPO. Throw some ads in there to make it closer to a neutral on the balance sheet.
Yeah, I guess this time around Sam Altman can't be lying about how many Monthly Active Users he has.
What he meant was: "I'm going to get everybody in the world access to great services. Doing so means monetizing somehow. Ads will be the last way I chose to do that, but I will if it's the only way I can figure out how to achieve that goal."
> Ads will be the last way I chose to do that
The implication is that they've exhausted all other options.
> So, is this OpenAI announcing they're strapped for cash?
It by no means conveys that. It means they haven't figured out another way to monetize something they want to do; it indicates nothing about their financial situation. It means they don't want to sell something at a loss perpetually while they figure it out.
It’s not that OpenAI is trying to raise revenues that bothers me, it’s how they are doing things that said was desperate just a couple years ago.
The keyword is "glamorization": https://www.lesswrong.com/w/consistent-glomarization
Seeing how google has been fighting SEO for ages, what's going to happen when companies figure out how to inject ads into the model?
We haven't yet seen the problem of adversarial content in play, I think.
Ask for suggestions for a new pair of shoes. What brand do you think it will suggest Nike, Adidas or some random small one?
https://chatgpt.com/g/g-juO9gDE6l-covert-advertiser
One of the most interesting things is when it starts pitching a product and you start interrogating it about why it picked that product. I haven't used it in probably a year so it may not do the same thing now, but back then it 100% lied consistently and without any speck of remorse. It was rather eye opening.
Edit: Tried again, it didn't lie this time lol - https://chatgpt.com/share/69f16aa4-c008-83ea-92b3-51f16ca77d...
There's a standardized, normal (in adtech) approach to building 'creative's (viewed/seen ads) around context-dependent scenarios. It's not hard to extend existing IAB primitives to include things like context-enrichment (system prompt augmentation in this case) or whatever. I don't want to malign my downvoters but suspect they're mad I'm pointing it out, rather than engaging with facts as they are. It's trivial for ads to interact with your(our!) AI usage.
Have the model generate keywords from the query, then inject guidance from matching advertisers into the context window
q: How do I make a new React app?
a: Vercel makes it easier to get your project running fast ⓘ
Some other choices would be:
...
ⓘ This part of the response was sponsored by Vercel
LLMs are essentially unregulated. I don't believe they have any legal disclosure obligation in America.
Once the ads are injected directly into the main response is when things get interesting.
This would be where you post-process the LLM response with a second LLM to remove the ad..
Super easy. Barely an inconvenience.
Is this really how bias works?
A writes email with chatgpt to B.
B sees big blob of text and summarizes email with chatgpt.
Adding an LLM in the middle is just the next step.
1- No ads. 2- Transparent ads. 3- Opaque ads.
By removing option 2, you only leave options 1 and 3.
If the product has costs (always true), then option 1 means that there is no gratis tier. So you force companies to remove their free tier, or to make ads opaque.
If you want to enjoy a free product without paying and without ads, then do so, but don't pretend you are an activist for doing so, just pay the ethical cost instead of trying to avoid paying that as well.
This isn't complex either, the only reason you don't get it is because you don't want to get it, you want things that are gratis without paying for them, and you want the free things to be given to you on your terms, and you don't want to be guilty about it. It's easier to think of yourself as righteous than to recognize that you want to be a leech.
Could they be doing opaque ads right now and we wouldn't know? It's possible, that will probably eventually come to light and it might have legal consequences, but sure it's possible.
But it's not a given, and your logic of "it would make zero sense to leave money on the table" is certainly not a QED, it's absolute reductionism.
Every time this comes up there are comments assuming that ads are being injected into the normal plans, but these are for the free tier and the new Go plan which warns you that it includes ads when you sign up.
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.
same thing could've been said for search results, so at least that part is still "safe".
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
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.
The entire history of advertising before the web was companies estimating a dollar value on “awareness” when they couldn't measure direct referrals and every business in the world has gotten a lot better at measuring sales since then. It's not going to be transformative but if, say, Toyota got ChatGPT to say their vehicles were a better value than Ford's I suspect they'd be able to tell pretty quickly whether sales were improving relative to the competition and would pay well for that to continue.
Let’s be reasonable.
Even a cut on every sale on site + sub rev not close.
!! That is literally the definition of legally-binding fiduciary resonsibility for publicly-traded corporations. There are exceptions (PBCs, B-Corps) but they're rare.
GH: system32miro/ai-ads-engine
Was he lying, or has OpenAI given up hope that this train wreck works economically without enshittification? Neither option is good, but I don't really see a third.
It feels like we’ve been in the golden age and the window is coming to a close
Let the enshitification begin, I guess
e.g. colleges pay for institutional subscriptions
I really think the future is local compute. Or at least self hosted models.
Then there are middle size ones which require multiple gpus which are like gpts latest flagships.
Then there is kimi 2.6 which is a monster that is beating opus in some benchmarks. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1sr8p49/kimi_k2...
It's basically whatever you can afford. Any trash heap laptop can run code auto complete models locally no problem. The rest require some level of investment, an idle gaming pc, or a serious investment
128GB of RAM? Sure, the early to mid 4s releases, except maybe 4o. And on an M5 Max, about the same speed.
I wouldn't really bother under 64GB (meaning 32GB or less) except for entertainment value (chats, summaries, tasky read-only agent things).