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.
this was one of the biggest problems of AdWords from beginning on: You could do brand-bidding unlimited, even today you see it every day: Search for brand X and competitor Y will show up with same words
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.
That has caused some companies hosting conferences to pay for some of those ad spaces in advance.
If I want them, I can use them. No need to justify ads for this use case.
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.
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.
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.
Steve Jobs looking back now is incredibly rare - someone who was wealthy but had the spirit of innovation to keep going again and again.
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.
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.
I know Anthropic made these ads about not having ads but Apple also made ads about thinking different, yet once they became successful they ended up thinking the same as every other business.
And once upon a time, Google did not do evil.
So yeah, the assumption unless shown otherwise is that things will get worse, and the user is just there to be sold whatever shit is paying most.
Their Go plan, which is paid, is getting ads.
Netflix?
Hulu?
Youtube?
Spotify?
Adobe?
Duolingo?
X?
Like if Netflix let showrunners inject ads into their shows and provided a technical platform for that, and the Stranger Things creators added ads to every episode... nobody would be like "it's not Netflix showing ads, it's the Stranger Things creators".
I don't think anyone has to worry about that.
If OpenAI plays their cards right, they can definitely end up in a similar position. Yeah a lot of programmers would probably pony up for Claude, but every lazy high schooler in the world would gladly hear about Raid: Shadow Legends to have ChatGPT do their homework for them.
Don't get me wrong it's definitely sucks, but man is it ever a profitable way to suck.
1. Focus on businesses and developers
2. Make money on productivity and API platform
Enterprises are particularly sensitive about their data being farmed (e.g. note that paid Google accounts don’t have their emails used for ads.)
Keeping that trust is not a differentiator and existentially important to Anthropic.
I think that, despite Anthropic's present statements, they will move to ads if ads prove successful for ChatGPT or Gemini.
It would be viewed as "leaving money on the table" by their board and shareholders if they didn't.
trust is lost in other ways.
1. many competitors
2. ways to pay for the subscription but no tier exists to remove ads
i can't even think of one.
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.
E.g like Amazon prime.
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.
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.
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.
Solar in space produces 30% more power, and doesn't turn off at night, meaning you don't need batteries. That means power costs, say, 25% of what it currently does measured against terrestrial solar and batteries.
The 75% electricity discount needs to pay for launch vehicles, specially designed satellites, and the inability to service the hardware or resell it when it's EOL for the data center.
It's a gamble. Maybe it'll turn out to be a slight edge, maybe it'll turn out to fail, but it's not a sure thing and it certainly isn't going to hugely decrease the cost.
Especially since they're competing against Google and their custom designed hardware that's far more power efficient for AI. It's not clear that NVIDIA running at a 75% dollar discount beats Google's best TPU in compute per dollar.
We can make chips faster than we can build power plants.
There are far too many variables still unknown to all parties. Anyone trying to say with certainty "X will lose", whether X is terrestrial or space based DCs, is lying and probably trying to sell you something.
90% of his predictions didn't materialize, he's full of shit, how do people keep falling for it over and over again?
Camera based fully self driving cars
Robotaxi fleets by 2020
Whatever the fuck were these tesla tunnels in LA
Humans on Mars by 2024
The sub 25k tesla
etc.
But watching him battling basic physics is very funny, not gonna lie.
Guess he is not as bright as he thinks he is.
Marginal cost of launches keep coming down for SpaceX with reusable rockets and lifetime of satellites is long.
Before downvoting, would you mind quoting the relative cost of batteries vs. solar panels for a 150kW solar-powered satellite?
OK.
At a good location (~25% capacity factor), you need about 600 kW of panels to average 150 kW. Utility-scale solar runs roughly $0.50–$1.00/W installed, so call it ~$450K–$600K. Overnight storage (say ~16 hours) requires ~2,400 kWh. Adding a buffer for cloudy days, say 4,000–7,000 kWh total. At roughly $200–$350/kWh (utility-scale Li-ion), that's ~$1M–$2M.
In a favorable orbit, capacity factor is ~90–100% (GEO or sun-synchronous), so you need roughly 160–170 kW of panels. Space-qualified solar panels historically cost $100–$300/W. Even optimistically at $50–$100/W with newer manufacturing, that's 167 kW * $100/W = ~$17M optimistically, or 167 kW * $200/W = ~$33M realistically. You also need space-rated power management, thermal systems, and radiation-hardened electronics.
Even ignoring launch costs entirely, space solar is roughly 10–20x more expensive than ground solar + batteries, driven almost entirely by the enormous cost premium of space-qualified solar panels. Ground-based solar is extraordinarily cheap now (~$0.50–1/W), while space-grade panels remain orders of magnitude more expensive per watt.
The ground option wins overwhelmingly. The space option would only start to make sense if space-grade panel costs dropped to near terrestrial levels, which would require a revolution in space manufacturing.
FYI you'd need 2x the solar panels of the ISS to run a single rack of NVIDIA GB300, and microsoft just built a datacenter with 4600 of these racks.
[1] https://sunwatts.com/150-kw-solar-kits/
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-space-launches-low-e...
[3] https://everydayastronaut.com/starlink-group-4-5-falcon-9-bl...
150kw is just enough to power a single gb300 rack, the rack alone weights 1500kg+
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.
Source [video]: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1qeyty4/i_kind...
Saving this sentence for later.
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.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/sam-altman-lose...
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.
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
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?
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...
> 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>
Edit: DONE!
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.
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
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.
What's the expected revenue from this?
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.
That sounds like quite a lot to me.
I hope this was intended as humor.
Free - $0
Go - $8 USD/month
Plus - $20 USD/month
Pro - $200 USD/month
So, you pay and get ads :-P
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
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.
For now, or for ever?
...is what OpenAI is betting on.
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.
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".
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
How is adding ads will get more people to use ChatGPT?
Same reason youtube is popular. Do you think it could have gotten to where it is now by gatekeeping it behind a payment?
> 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)