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No, I suspect that "I kind of think of ads as a last resort" was doublespeak for "ads are coming eventually".

I would tend to think of someone like him as a person who uses words to achieve a specific goal, rather than someone who speaks whatever is truly on their mind. Whether those words are lies or truth or somewhere in between is irrelevant; what matters to them is the outcome.

It's likely a waste of time trying to unpick the meaning, because there is none. "But Sam Altman said..." to me has about as much value as "ChatGPT told me...".

Feels to me like idealism crossing into realism. OpenAI could be the next Google, or the next Facebook, or the next… I don't know, Netflix?

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.

Well - I think the writing was on the wall when they announced they were going to be for-profit. Slippery slope and all that, but I’m sure some of this is because they’ve been giving out free tokens for years.

That's not how I read that sentence at all. Maybe I've just been speaking VC for too long.

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."

The ads are for the free tier and new $8 ad-supported plan.

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.

I also remember him saying that on ig lex friedman podcast. In my opinion, they will only try this on a handful of users and see if it works out or not, just like Anthropic removed Claude code from the pro plan for a very small percentage of users just for testing purposes. It will all boil down to how people respond to the ads rollout.

For somebody so smart, surrounding by people so brilliant, in the very heart of the Silicon Valley, and somehow not learning from the 1 startup that become one of the largest corporations even, namely Google, is a pretty dumb move.

Context : Brin/Page said the same, they didn't like nor want ads, only if it was the last resort. Well, guess which World we all live in now.

Who can resist the temptation of profit? One always has to make money

Oh no ... Sweet summer child. Whatever the revenue is, whatever profit there is, whatever cash buffer any corporate has, you can be sure of one thing: they need this to go up and to the right...

It became almost a perfect science to optimize your behavior: this is why you end up, bit by bit with enshitiffied products all around you where basically the pain of using that product is just at the threshold of you actually bashing it against the wall.

ChatGPT is just one of them, like Google search, your TV serving ads or ...

Or, Sam did not speak the truth back then, and always had ads in his mind. I think that was the strategy from the get go.

"last resort" doing some heavy lifting in that quote.

Sam Altman is the guy fired for lying. Why believe what he claims?

Charitably, it seems that we have yet to find, as a species/society, anything more effectively profitable than ads. I cannot blame those who come to this conclusion so long as no more powerful and proven motivator yet exists. I hate it, but I understand.

more like "Sam Altman said"

I think you're missing that Sam Altman is very smart. If OpenAI really were on the verge of becoming massively profitable due to their next-gen AI, he would not want that information leaking. If Sam Altman acts differently in the world where profits are on the horizon, that information leaks prematurely. Thus, he has to act as if OpenAI is strapped for cash, whether or not it is.

The keyword is "glamorization": https://www.lesswrong.com/w/consistent-glomarization

I bet he also drunk a refreshing Coca-Cola beverage during his gaming sessions.

Excellent ChatGPT result.

The model already advertises because they where trained on massive data’s that refers big brands.

Ask for suggestions for a new pair of shoes. What brand do you think it will suggest Nike, Adidas or some random small one?

I've had two people reach out to me asking about one of my services. They both said ChatGPT recommended it to them.

My service does kind of exist. It's a small tool I created for a client while retaining full rights to the tool. So I created (vibe coded) a site around it, making it look like an established service. Even ran google ads for it for a while.

The service still doesn't show up on google with relevant search terms. There hasn't been another client. I forgot about the service. And then ChatGPT started recommending it to people.

I wonder what I did to achieve this. Did vibe coding the business page inject it into ChatGPT's training data?

On the positive side, LLMs are trained based on real data so the default is for it to tell you what data showed. Companies will certainly enforce their influence but it's extra effort against the enormous amount of data, just like with trying to censor sensitive topics. Any context used for ads means less context for the user to use which in turn negatively affects their usefulness.

The worrying kinds of ads won't be from SEO tricks doing sneaky things without OpenAI's approval. OpenAI will just quietly take money from people who will pay to have the AI causally promote their products or their talking points in the output or suppress mentions of competing products or talking points in the output. Maybe they won't even take money for this and the people running OpenAI will do it themselves to promote or censor whatever they want. Either way, it won't look like ads to the user. It's just what happens when greedy people gain control over how other people get their information.

I experimented with this way back when custom GPTs were first released (looks like late 2023). There are a few / commands you can use to suggest what product to inject, how overt, etc and a generic /operator command to send whatever you like 'out of band' from the chat.

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...

Can easily seo the knwlege chain or seo poison the sources

It's not an issue of how - there's a great ADM with markup/down supported already, waiting for system prompts to be injected in realtime via the same online auction system that powers banner ads and smart tv content. There's got to be some latent resistance to the idea for now - but it's so easy to do, it'll happen.

Why do you need to inject ads at the model weights layer when you control the frontend?

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

It would be funny to find out that OpenAI's flailing strategy so far had been the result of ChatGPT suggestions.

> 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..

you can block these URLs: |bzrcdn.openai.com^, ||bzr.openai.com^ It won't blanket block everything but will significantly reduce telemetry collected.

Blocking transparent ads is not a good idea. The consequence is that you will be fed opaque ads.

Cable TV was once ad free. So was Netflix. Companies just can’t help themselves.

Would require a lot of training to implement ads blended into convo and not have it be too obvious/ eff up the results?

Until next quarter earnings, when ads become a feature in more expensive plans.

It’s interesting what optimizations this might spawn.

They may not be tweaking the responses for a specific advertisement just yet, but what if they steer the model towards mire “ad friendly” responses?

I think that's where they want to be. feels like everyone knows it too, that the long term expectation is basically being able to buy ad words and have LLMs lean responses towards whatever people bought.

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.

this would be a breach of trust and short term would work great but long term is too detrimental.

same thing could've been said for search results, so at least that part is still "safe".

I work at a company that mainly makes money off ads. Theres no doubt in my mind that the end goal is to make their ads blend into organic content and make them indistinguishable. Typically that results in positive A/B metrics. Its also a reason why influencer driven ads perform well, they seem more organic.

> always thought that ChatGPT ads would be indistinguishable from actual content

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

That was the fearmongering, which made no sense because advertisers can't put a dollar value on "the AI will kind of sort of mention you", and because every conversation needs an ad. If ChatGPT always snuck in a brand mention even on the simplest questions, everyone would hate it.

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.

I'm pretty sure that will be an eventual evolution of the product. The business model cant sustain itself as it is at the moment, eventually chatGPT wont be the product... we the users will be.

> All tech business plans eventually lead to serving ads

IDK if this is true.

The boulevard of dreams is full of failed/misguided ad-based business plans. Contempt for the business model is sometimes the reason. An implicit assumption that all you need for success is traffic and a willingness to dirty yourself.

There are only a handful of success stories. Most involved a pretty deliberate and tenacious attempt. Success typically involves some very specific and strategic positioning. Data. intent. scale.

No one but Google had google's scale for search ads. 5-10% of the market just isn't enough. You do need tracking but the model works OK even without much targeting. Intent is built in, and that makes up for targeting. But the scale required for viability is very high.

Facebook ads didn't work until (a) they had pushed the envelope on targeting (to make up for lacking intent) and (b) scale was massive. Bing, reddit, etc.... They never had good ad businesses.

Every single MBA can show for at least one quarter revenue is up after they introduced ads. They do not care what happens after if they can plan their career around that.

I wish I had the optimism that you did about companies being willing to stop at just doing one dubious thing or another for money when there's nothing stopping them from doing both.

Maybe the negative press from ads is better than the negative press from powering murderbots?

Never in any world were any of the top AI labs not going to sustain themselves with ads. It has always been a timing issue.

Even a cut on every sale on site + sub rev not close.

They can’t be hemorrhaging cash when they IPO.

Haven’t seen any ads in them, though on paid versions

Do you have some source I could read on this? I don't really use Gemini but I would be interested to know more.

Adds should be a tabu word and business model.

It takes people's attention, makes people fat and anxious and generally makes the world a worse place.

Everybody using adds as a part of their business model should feel bad.

As an extention of this there is no moral issues with using add blockers, despite what the businesses living of adds try to tell you.

Bad for them how? I would argue it has destroyed the value of Google as a tool. Sure it makes them tens of billions of dollars a quarter, but it has ruined the service in the end.

The ads are only for the free and $8/month plans. They basically added an ad-supported super discount level that you can ignore if you’re paying for the normal plans.

options 1 and 2 are not mutually exclusive

Can you restate this? I don't understand.

They don't serve them to me, either, because I don't use GPT-5.3 on the free tier or Go plan where these ads show up.

How do you pick up new paying users without letting people use the service for free for a while first? Freemium is popular because it works well.

How do you expect the spend & COGS for free LLM inference to be funded? For users who don't want to pay, or maybe can't pay?

It has begun ever since they nerfed chatgpt4 before releasing 4o

In the past month local models have been ramping up in major way meanwhile the namesake providers have upped prices, went offline randomly, and started doing slimier and slimier things.

I really think the future is local compute. Or at least self hosted models.

The arc of the technological universe is short, but it bends toward enshitification.