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?
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.
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.
some of us were hoping for actual innovation, not more ads
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.
You know what's better than 20 bucks a month? 20 bucks a month and ads.
E.g like Amazon prime.
Castles made of sand...
Whats the solar of monetization?
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.
That ship has sailed for OpenAI long ago, because they burned money faster than an alcoholic sailor on shore leave. There is no sane way for them to ever recover.
Use ChatGPT for getting answers, and use Claude for detecting the ads in ChatGPT, or vice versa!
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.
- Social media
- ad blockers still being relatively niche
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.
Google's Gemini is SOTA and Google is valued at 4 trillion. Now it's ironic of course: Google became a 4 trillion thanks to ads. Which now allows Google to serve no ads in Gemini. It doesn't matter to Google that they're operating at a loss with Gemini: they can throw hundreds of billions at the problem over a few years, serving zero ads, while people make fun of the AI firms showing ads, like ChadGPT.
OpenAI is not just facing Anthropic and its "no ads" ad, it's also facing "we're a 4 trillion company and can run Gemini at a loss for decades" Google, "we pretend we'll put datacenters in space so that xAI can tap into the SpaceX warchest", openweight models which anybody can run on rented hardware for next to nothing compared to ChadGPT's price, etc.
It doesn't matter if others can survive without ads: all that matters is that they can survive long enough without ads so that OpenAI doesn't become another trillion dollar company.
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.
Source [video]: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1qeyty4/i_kind...
Saving this sentence for later.
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.
The point is that the language and nuance ends up being lost on a large portion of the audience.
I get what youre saying, but I do think its important for them to point out the ad is sandboxed.
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.
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 business case is the same: minimize your costs. All they have to do is dumb down the model so its cheaper to run.
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.
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.
Down-right joke really. The people who idolise them are incredibly delusional.
You definitely aren't too sticky a customer - you aren't even a customer to begin with!
> 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.
(other than aistudio which i wouldn't use even if i were forced to, laggy af!)
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.
> [...]
> 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...
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
Probably my favorite commercial of the whole superb owl, but so far I'm the only person I've met who feels that way.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AITrailblazers/comments/1qw2iar/ant...
Depending on your taste this is dumb mudslinging or a hilarious burn...
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?
> 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>
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 make the world a better place
They allow for innovation, giving new businesses a way to break in and reach customers
Lower cost to reach customers = lower product and service prices
For employees: do you think your employer has more or less budget for your salary if the cost to acquire a customer is higher?
People complain about the privacy invasion of tracking, and then in the next sentence get annoyed at the irrelevant products being pushed on them
We need better tracking! I should be able to show the exact people I built a product for that it exists
Imagine we were all able to create micro businesses for tiny markets to improve their life, and we had a cheap way to reach everyone in them
How many products or services out there could improve our experience in the world but we just don't know about them?
How is free video, written or audio content created without ads? People sure as hell hate directly paying for it
I love ads
This is economically illiterate. Advertising is not a discount mechanism. It is a tax on the consumer. When I buy a product heavily marketed on Instagram or Google, I'm paying for the product plus the auction bid price required to acquire me plus the margin of the ad-tech middleman (which are trillion dollar companies).
You are conflating "information distribution" with "persuasive surveillance." In a world without behavioral advertising, businesses compete on quality and reputation, not on who can exploit the most psychological vulnerabilities to manufacture demand.
As for innovation: The current ad ecosystem has killed organic discovery. You can't build a "micro-business" based on merit anymore. The winner SHOULD be the engineer who solved a hard problem efficiently. But instead the winner is the dropshipper who cracked the arbitrage spread between a cheap, garbage product and a highly manipulative Facebook ad campaign.
Edit: DONE!
That sounds like quite a lot to me.
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".
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.
Many people (such as Scam Altman) are happy to take short cuts and lie in your face in order to engage in wealth transfers.
Seems like a pretty safe bet they will block these too.
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).
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.
i personally would never touch chatgpt if i knew the answers were biased for certain companies.
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.
God, how stupid do they think we are?
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"
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.
OpenAI is now an ads company.
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.
But ads don’t have to ruin a great company.
A century or more ago, top tier journalistic institutions created norms of putting strong barriers between the reporting and advertising sides of the house. That kept trust with customers and made journalism a sustainable long term business.
So, It’s mostly Google that couldn’t keep its hands out of the cookie jar (not solely Google, but they’re an industry leader.) It really doesn’t have to go south, it’s not the default, but Google did set the tone for Silicon Valley in exactly the way wise journalism company leaders did for their industry in the late 1800s. If OpenAI has a long term view on this they’ll follow a journalism industry model instead of a cookie jar model - but they have to believe deep down that customer trust is worth more than ad dollars long term.
There are reasons to hope: OpenAI has more and fiercer competition than Google; including Chinese competitors that can’t be lobbied away. Qwen, DeepSeek, Mistral and Kimi all have free chat UIs!
I remain stubbornly optimistic.
What's the expected revenue from this?
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 hope this was intended as humor.
Free - $0
Go - $8 USD/month
Plus - $20 USD/month
Pro - $200 USD/month
...but thanks to the method OpenAI are using of showing ads based on conversation topics, they do know that user <a> was talking to ChatGPT about topic <x> on one day, topic <y> on another, and topic <z> on another day.
That's still a form of chat history, even if it's vague.
For now, or for ever?
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.
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.
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
> 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!
Everyone?!
Yes, everyone
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)
