OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads with Sponsored Agents

OpenAI's shareholders, and only them.

I doubt any consumer of ChatGPT wants ads, and even if they did, it would be a specific kind of ad. They specifically would not want ads if they cannot identify them as ads (like google has eventually done on the search page) or if they are not good ads.

They probably have the most amount of private amount of information about "you". Ads is a logical step for them, since subscriptions, at the current price, don't pay for the costs.

Advertisers want this.

Who wants any ads?

This is a solution looking for a problem, built to satisfy the creator instead of serving the buyer. This is exactly what PG warns against doing. One would think Sam would know this too.

If it helps the lower tiers of ChatGPT continue being free, I'd support it.

People that don't want to pay for everyday AI, which is most people.

Advertisers, for one.

> Who actually wants this?

I mean, not to be rude to this and all sibling commenters, but obviously everyone? I feel like this comment has no basis in reality.

People want things cheaper and they tolerate ads. Those two things put together means everything gets ads and gets cheaper? YouTube exists for free and costs billions to run. Companies A/B test ad tiers and paid non-ad tiers, and the results are always the same.

> Who actually wants this?

Sam Altman. It is his last resort, he said some time ago (which is not true, regulation/"slowing down the pace of AI" seems to be the latest).

Could be exploring old and new ways of monetization.

>Who actually wants this?

Investors

Nobody wants this. We only need them to offer propaganda as a service and the enshitification will be complete.

Is this not just connecting you with a sales rep? If so, who wants this is literally every mainstream consumer.

AFAICT the flow is click ad then get an agent that is grounded in the official sales resources. This should mean the agent has the latest and canonical product catalog, offers, etc. so the users own agent doesn’t need to search on the web.

Fun ideas - can my main agent invoke these as a sub-agent, so I can get offers from multiple competitors? Can I loop them into a conversation to debate their products and observe which wins on my objective function?

Concerns - of course if the harness injects (or can be prompt hacked to inject) personal information then it’s a big problem.

> OpenAI claims we’re near AGI and this is the best strategy they have? Oy vey!

Where did they say it’s the best? Obviously a short-term bridge strategy to drive “mundane” economic activity and juice the IPO. They are of course working on drug discovery and nuclear reactor plasma physics too. A good strategy has a portfolio of plays.

Tech companies have not had to answer to the law for a long time. We are now seeing that tech companies straight up break into each others servers and nobody is charged with any crime for it. I think it is safe to say that crime is legal for rich tech companies.

So who is liable? Nobody. This is a big tech company, to which laws do not apply.

It cannot be the AI vendor, according to what they say they are purely passive, think of them like a very large harness for their AI models.

It’s not the advertising companies of course, as you said they don’t control the system.

And it cannot be the models, because they don’t have personhood.

So, I guess it’s on nobody? Funny how those things happen to work, uh

/s

Liability... come on what's this pesky detail when it's an arm race with China (or whatever the weekly scapegoat is), don't you want the good guys to win? /s

Disagree, they need a lot of capital in the next couple years, and the more revenue they have today, the more data centers they can start building.

Also investors (particularly non-AGI-pilled) want to see revenue number go up, regardless of AGI. This juices the IPO.

Even if it's not necessary, it brings more money.

They'll have to find a smarter species to emulate first. My money's on the octopus!

Turns out, just like the Turing test, its easier to dumb down intelligent expectations than to improve intelligence.

AGI makes a lot better argument if everyone is in idiocracy.

What if their AGI/ASI told them the road to Humanity betterment (because you know that was OpenAI initial mission, just in case we forgot) was through more efficient ads ? /s

I agree with the general point on AI ads being a slippery slope and potentially creepy (though ChayGPT shows them as banners and if implemented honestly I don’t see anything misleading).

TFA is connecting you with an official sales rep after you click an ad. Maybe best to consider this a play to take over market share from the existing sales bots? (And thence likely support chatbots too.)

I think the level of invasiveness is probably closer to existing ads than you think. Not that that's a good thing, mind you, I think your disgust level here is probably pretty accurate to the level of personalized data that is currently being hawked by data brokers all over the internet.

Whats creepy to me is people telling all sorts of sensitive information to a chatbot and NOT expecting weird consequences. The level of cope is massive.

2036

Synthetic humans wearing the faces of your loved ones surreptitiously cross your path, and casually mention their favorite products and services.

I think we're already there with that stupid AI customer support widget every obnoxious website has now.

That's pretty much most T1 support already. I feel like all I do is talk to bots.

This is the lie advertisers tell themselves to be able to sleep at night.

Ads are cancer on content. No one wants them. They only serve to make the presentation of useful content worse.

In the long run, the problem they'll run into with this is that the the people who have enough disposable income to pay for those plans are the people that advertisers will pay the most to show ads to. This is the same reason why the ads on daytime television are mainly for structured settlement cash-outs, drug class actions, and injury attorneys rather than for something that the viewer would have to pay money for.

For now.

> How else are they to monetize text outputs?

I thought AGI was supposed to replace most knowledge workers and they'd pocket the savings that their customers enjoyed by not having to pay a work force. That's what their valuation is based upon.

By making more money from inference subscriptions than they lose on compute, training, and other costs?

They could stick to taking payment in exchange for service like some weird old-fashioned business, but I guess that doesn't get the sort of growth that justifies a trillion-dollar valuation.

Only a society which doesn't want anything, needs nothing, demands nothing can do without ads. While privacy invading ad tech is obviously a bad thing, ads - namely the thing used to introduce you and others like you to a new idea - is a good thing.

So you want software from people for free, hope you share also your work power with others for free.

I the end someone pays for open source and often it's some developer with his spare time.

Yes to open source, but yes to money for the developers.

ChatGPT is already free to use? What, do you expect them to keep providing this without any return?

Besides, who will pay for the compute of LLMs in your utopian future?

I think that’s the real plan. Grandma taps “find out more” and continues conversing with the helpful robot, unaware it has become the FurnitureCo sales robot.

Disagree. I pitched this exact model to Google Search when we first started making LLMs. The idea was the bots were separate clearly from the core model so you’ll know when you were having a branded experience or not. And it s useful beyond ads. It can be for customer service or MCP interaction with the service directly.

You can do that now. The problem with ads in an agentic environment is the AI would just ignore the best options and make up shit about worse options because a loss good restaurant with a big marketing budget paid it to say that. The whole idea of agentic workflows is only viable if the agent is truly independent and objective as best it can be.

You can already do that without ads.

The point of ads is that one of those services will pay openai so that their services will be more prominent than the others.

Yeah, but why would you trust the answers from a sponsored agent? Why would you assume it is giving you real, accurate, and complete information rather than selectively giving you what it thinks is most likely to make you click the "buy" button?