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.

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?

Ads, like AI, subsumes the product in which its embedded in.

OpenAI is now an ads company.

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.

"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.

"Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers will not have ads."

Saving this sentence for later.

"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.

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)

This could be a good new channel for advertisers. I didn't see any comment about this perspective.

Anecdotally, the quality of traffic from ChatGPT to one of my websites is much better than Google traffic, in terms of bounce rate and time on site.

If they managed to show ads in a carousel (like the video), it might get a better conversion rate compared to invasive Google ads (covering the organic results).

Though if OpenAI managed to embed the ads within the experience, that might work even better (conversion-based pricing). Examples would be having the shopping list from the grocery shop (in line with the recipe or the question), adding to the basket from ChatGPT, and pay.

In theory, they can even add a new GPTPay to simplify the journey.

Ads is not unlimited: Ad business is around 600-650 billion per year; but thats spreaded across Google, Meta & Co already? Will be interesting how much of the cake OpenAI will get :)

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 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.

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.

> 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...

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 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

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.

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...

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>

Good time to entirely delete my chatgpt account.

Edit: DONE!

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 will have to come up with new economic systems. 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. What are they going to do with it? 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? Or just make the concept of money irrelevant altogether?

Nope, a search engine with ads.

Have to wonder if the IPO push for this year is genuine now

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.

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?

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.

Does anyone know if there is an option to enable ads in the tiers which do not have them by default?

If this EVER shows up on a paid plan I'm out. Full stop.

I guess I'm the product. Again.

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.

> 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).

Kinda sad that in 3 decades into the tech industry the only viable business model is to build a moat and then sell ads

so perfectly personalized ads? the CPM on this is probably wild (for openai).

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.

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

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?

Are these Bing Ads or OpenAI has it's own Ad Platform now ?

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?

While the general census will be largely negative, it good for advertisers, i guess.

Will this make OpenAI profitable?

What's the expected revenue from this?

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.

> 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.

switching to gemini right now... this is insane! why should i pay openai to get unsolicited ads?!

"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."

Just wanted to mention the ads from Claude here :)

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

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.

Nope. I'm out. I might still use the API, but the monthly subscription is already gone and I'm on to Claude.

>Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers will not have ads.

For now, or for ever?

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?

> 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!

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!

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.

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)