Ads is v1 of how-do-I-make-money. I wrote about this a while ago privately, but IMO LLMs are about to be on par with the printed word for distributing low-cost, high-impact propaganda.<p>It has never been cheaper or easier to influence millions of people, either deniably-subtly (though omission, selective results, "hallucinations" etc) or via sock puppetting.<p>If I am a government, there is nothing more valuable to me than being able to control the discussion, the overton window, and the prevailing narratives. LLMs are a very low cost way to do that, can be tailored at the individual level (unlike most current TV news, personal "feeds" etc) and have the benefit of a huge volume of context.<p>The models are effectively black-box weights and are resistant to bias-tests. IMO, a key development will be having an "overlay" of weights to apply on top of a "clean" world model that is tailored to whatever interests can pay for it. Being able to serve that overlay dynamically, or atleast per-user is the killer app.
There are two reasons why this isn't true.<p>First, if an LLM has an ideological bias, then that becomes obvious and known almost immediately. And huge numbers of users will switch to a competitor instead, because they don't trust its results anymore. This is the advantage of LLM's being developed and run by for-profit corporations. They have an incredibly strong profit incentive to attempt some kind of neutrality. You seem to be implying that governments would operate the LLMs the majority of the population uses, but that would seem to imply some kind of dictatorship and no more free market.<p>Secondly, I don't know about you, but most people aren't really using LLMs for the subject areas that concern government propaganda. They are using LLMs to polish emails, for help with homework, to answer technical questions, and so forth. Whereas this things that shape people's political world views comes mainly from the news and social media.<p>You seem to be envisioning some kind of a world where people don't access the news or social media directly, but it is somehow passed through some kind of LLM transformation filter. I'm not sure why people would sign up for anything like that. If I see a link to a New York Times story, I want to read the story directly. I don't want an LLM to rewrite it for me. And I don't know anybody else who wants that either. Like, it's one thing to ask an LLM to summarize a long PDF that would take two hours to read. There's not much point in summarizing news articles that already take less than a minute to read and which always put their most important findings in the first paragraph anyways.
>are resistant to bias-tests<p>What do you mean? What resistance have you encountered?
government is that you?
trying to inspire people here to build your dirty tools?
Less than two years ago, Sam Altman said<p>> I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model. I would do it if it meant that was the only way to get everybody in the world access to great services, but if we can find something that doesn't do that, I'd prefer that.<p>So, is this OpenAI announcing they're strapped for cash?
No, I suspect that "I kind of think of ads as a last resort" was doublespeak for "ads are coming eventually".<p>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.<p>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...".
This is something I’ve long believed to be true and important to understand, yet rarely see anybody else argue, so it makes me happy to read. I think of it like the kissing noise we make to make a pet come. You could call it the truth or a lie depending on what the pet is expecting and whether you then do it, but both judgements miss what actually happened: it didn’t even occur to us to think about whether it’s “true”, we just made that noise because we expected it to produce the desired behavior. CEOs and politicians are usually like this with humans.
The kissing noise analogy is spot on! Made me smile
There is a thin layer of high functioning sociopath at the top of all human social structures. Never trust anyone who wants to lead at that level. You have more in common with a colossal squid at the bottom of the deepest trench than you do with that kind of human.
Nah. People are just more adaptable to their circumstances than you think.<p>Something I think about from time to time is sacking during war, where soldiers are allowed to do as they please with a conquered civilian population. If I applied your same reasoning, I'd have to conclude that on average there's a great number of people who are not committing atrocities just because of the fear of repercussions. What I think happens is that getting desensitized to violence and being constantly made to make violent decisions makes anymore more likely to commit a violent act that they never would have otherwise. It doesn't need a special kind of brain, it just needs special circumstances.<p>Same for anyone in a position of power, except it's shamelessly lying and making decisions that affect hundreds or thousands of people, instead of direct violence.
Your assessment lines up with the assessment of the people who know Sam personally.<p><a href="https://archive.ph/20260414023627/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/20260414023627/https://www.newyorker.com/...</a>
> 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.<p>I wouldn't put Sam on some kind of pedestal, everyone seems to talk this way nowadays.
I think doublespeak is more along the lines of calling ads a "product recommendation strategy". This was either a) a plain lie b) they're actually at their last resort.
> This was either a) a plain lie b) they're actually at their last resort.<p>That's thinking like a normal honest human :-) My point is that it was likely not a statement about reality (true or false) at all, but rather a phrase designed to elicit some response in the listener, such as the idea: 'Sam Altman isn't the kind of CEO who would put ads in his products unless he really had to'.<p>He's not describing how things are, but how he wants you to think about them.
> He's not describing how things are, but how he wants you to think about them.<p>That is what a lie is. The fact that some people think he exists in a different plane of existence from normal humans does not change the meaning of “lie”.
Hold on, doesn’t he think ads aren’t cool, assuming he watched the movie The Social Network years ago?<p>Sam Altman wants you to believe he doesn’t like ads. Sam Altman wants you to believe ads are a last resort for him. Sam is losing money. Sam reached his last resort option.<p>(PS - just quoted from <a href="https://sfstandard.com/pacific-standard-time/2026/04/15/sam-altman-ronan-farrow-openai-pst-podcast/" rel="nofollow">https://sfstandard.com/pacific-standard-time/2026/04/15/sam-...</a> in another comment)<p>So he is allegedly reported to be very dishonest but I wonder if the ad claim is a good example.
I mean, I get that you are trying to make a subtle point but this:<p>> He's not describing how things are, but how he wants you to think about them.<p>is just a fancy way to describe lies. I'm not even sure if it specifies some interesting subset of lies, I think it's just the plain definition.
Oh I think there's a big difference. One is clever, manipulative, meant to control or coerce, possibly to facilitate long term strategic goals. The other could be a simple immediate denial of fact to avoid blame. I think the personality and capabilities of the person in the former case is more concerning.
There's nothing clever about being asked "are you going to do X?" and replying "I would only do X under extreme circumstances" when you know it's not true. It's just lying. You know if you tell the truth it will sway the other person's opinion of you right now, whereas if you tell a lie it will only <i>eventually</i> sway that person's opinion, if at all. Telling such a lie requires the exact same reasoning as denying responsibility for something you know you did. Both cases just require the motivation to delay an undesirable outcome.
I don't want to split hairs but I posit there is a difference because 'how I want you to think about things' could be a mixture of lies, truths, and half-truths.<p>'Lying', to me, implies some relationship with reality - I'm lying if I know there's no orange in my bag but I tell you that there is. What we're talking about is someone who might not know or care whether the orange or even the bag exists at all, and is just saying things to get some specific response out of the audience. The deception or not is irrelevant really.
I don't think you're making a useful point about the situation.<p>In the case of the orange in the bag, both Altman and his interlocutor can see the bag and the truth can be exposed by rummaging.<p>In the case of ads in the oAI chat feed, at the time Altman made the comment he was probably planning to puts ads in the feed. But there might not even be emails about this, just conversation. And the engineers might not solve the "how" for a while... so there's nothing to rummage for.<p>However, in both cases Altman wants you to think something other than what's on his mind. There's an orange in his bag, but he wants you to think there is not. There's going to be ads because he owes the investors a tonne of money but he wants you to think it wont happen, or wont happen soon, or will be "nice" ads...<p>The distinction is in the nature of the underlying truth, not in Altmans words or actions in the moment. In the moment, in both cases, he's lying.
Feels like the harm of "at last resort" lie is more harmful than the benefit of "is being honest" for him.
I agree with your point. Mine was about the word doublespeak for this, which I think it's not - it's a lie in effect, but I think it is something like what you say, for which I don't know a term of. A bunch of sentences that are said in a complete disregard for truths and untruths; instead they are supposed to get you to believe something.<p>This also kinda fits the profile of Altman that I'm getting from what I have seen - admittedly without looking in-depth. A person who is on surface a pathological liar, but in fact in a closer look he just says things. They just _happen_ to be complete lies, because that's what you need to do to achieve the goal in the set of circumstances. It's just that because it's as morally objectionable as outright lying, some people would pause and think before doing it, while he seems to just have no qualms at all.
Sam Altman is trying to out-huckster Elon Musk.<p>Remember when Sam said he needed $7 trillion? <a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sam-altman-seeks-trillions-of-dollars-to-reshape-business-of-chips-and-ai-89ab3db0" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sam-altman-seeks-trillions-of-do...</a>
>a person who uses words to achieve a specific goal<p>“I can’t change my personality.”
Exactly this. Words are cheap these days, people do say various things to further their goals. Days where leaders stood by their words as sort of moral testament of their character are gone, probably for good.<p>As we see many people will do or say just about anything to get more money, prestige or power.
There were never any days where leaders stood by their words.<p>People have always used lies as tools to maintain their power whether it is the Roman Empire or 21st century AI companies. It is just human nature.
For now but not for good. Neglecting moral character works as a shortcut for maybe a generation or two. But that path leads to destruction and decay eventually. It can't last.
Thank you. Agreed. There are some practical limits to that path. It works in the current ecosystem partially because the resulting degradation is slow, but it is built upon societal trust. Once it is gone, it will be rather painful to restore. A new new deal will be needed, so to speak ( political evocation is accidental, but it is too late for me to coherently rewrite ).
Hard men create good times. Good times create soft men. Soft men create hard times.
So what is the best system to get people to be invested in the general welfare of all people? What are we supposed to do?
Your question seems to imply that people <i>have</i> to be corralled towards a specific action, which to me comes across as rather cynical.<p>Why is it not possible to lay out your arguments honestly and let people decide on the merits?
I think, part of the issue is that, as a mass of humans, we tend to be rather dumb. And they certainly don't decide on merits, in aggregate. It is somewhat questionable if they decide on merits even as individuals ( unless we expand the definition somewhat ). But it is possible I got too cynical.
Some problems don't have solutions.
This one does though. These issues are solely created <i>by</i> humans, so of course humans can solve them, that's not even a question. People who care need to keep speaking up and reaching out to each other, get together; and by doing so expose the people who don't care, or actively are against the general welfare of humans, like rocks on the beach when the tide recedes.<p>It takes so much work, so much criminal energy, so much money and campaigns, to divide people. Whereas the opposite, people getting to know each other and working together, happens "by itself" all the time, for the most banal of reasons. Just give them some time and space together; no lobbying required, no bribes or blackmail, no psy-ops; just our innate desire to live and let live.<p>Humans who prey on humans are sick, it's as simple as that. Humans who don't want to stand up to humans who prey on humans may not be sick, but they're not our best, that's for sure, and they <i>must</i> not be our gatekeepers or our compass.
People getting to know each and working together to genocide another group of people that's slightly different from them does indeed have many precedents in history.<p>The problem with your idea is that you see "humans" as some kind of abstract unified whole. People care about their peers far more than they do about "humans" in the abstract. When you're a powerful venture capitalist, these peers are other venture capitalists for example. Some call this "class consciousness".
> <i>"But Sam Altman said..." to me has about as much value as "ChatGPT told me...".</i><p>Or Trump. Same profile.<p>There is something to be admired in this kind of people. They are not bound by their own words. It simply doesn't matter to them what they said a month ago, or a minute ago.<p>Their words are attached to the instant they are pronounced; they don't concern the future, or the past. They die immediately after they have been said. It's amazing to watch.
For certain values of 'admired'... It is impressive, in a diabolical way, and seems to be very effective.
Its might makes right.. as a individual.. as a boolean bully..
> No, I suspect that "I kind of think of ads as a last resort" was doublespeak for "ads are coming eventually".<p>I don't think so. Resorting to ads is an obvious step but one that profoundly degrades the credibility of the whole service. It's a pyrrhic monetization strategy, and one that's pulled when all other options failed. It's a kin to scraping the bottom of the barrel to extract the remaining bits of value left.<p>The reason why the statement was "I kind of think of ads as a last resort" is clearly because they were a last resort move. And here they are.
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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?<p>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.<p>Advertising continues to be one of the most powerful business models ever invented, and I don't think that's changing any time soon.
Altman is an idealist?<p>I read this as: I know ads are likely if not inevitable but I can’t say that while I’m trying to gain users and inspire trust but I’ll start to float even in this non-denial the justification for the thing I’m ultimately going to do.
Altman wanting to look idealistic and inspiring.<p>See it as a brand image advertising campaign of the time.
The ideal is "It would be ideal if everyone on the planet voluntarily paid me $20/month"<p>Most billionaires are idealists when it comes to this one particular ideal.
The opposite of an idealist is a materialist. The opposite of an ideologue is a pragmatist.<p>In this sense I think Altman is an idealist, he concerns himself primarily with ideas, not so much with material reality.
So realistically no agi
I think your characterisation of this as discovery is a little naive. What you are describing is a part of enshittification and it happens too often to be an accident. Revenue maximisation is always the end goal. Also it's not that the user is willing to pay with attention. There is no alternative. In fact it's the very opposite, more than once now a product has basically been pitched as "pay us to avoid ads" and then once it dominated the market they introduce ads. That's users trying to choose to pay with money over attention and ultimately being unable to do so.
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.
The ads are for the free tier and new $8 ad-supported plan.<p>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.<p>The key part of that quote was "everybody in the world". The ads are their way of sustaining the low end of the access.
The revenue from highly targeted ads, using even better profiles than Google Search or even Facebook could build, may be non-negligible.<p>Commercial ads could be a smaller revenue source than political ads.
> The revenue from a few ads on the free tier in exchange for limited queries to GPT-5.3 is negligible<p>So why chase this negligible revenue?
>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.<p>Unless they botch the implementation, it's not going to be negligible with ~800M+ free subscribers.
The real question is what do you get out of advertising to people who don't have any money? Kinda squeezing blood from a stone.<p>You'd be better off saying you use those people to A/B test changes and filling idle GPU batches while giving paying customers a more consistent experience.
There's lots of people who are willing to spend a lot of money on 'real things' while not spending anything on bytes. It's the tech companies which have created this expectation of free services. Many non-tech people I know are relatively wealthy and think likes this.
> The real question is what do you get out of advertising to people who don't have any money?<p>Psychographic data. What they learn from these folks will create the most powerful manipulation technology yet.
A bunch of people pay to remove ads, and a bunch of people that are happy to give businesses their attention (view ads) I'm exchange for services... I.e. Gmail, YouTube, but don't feel they use enough / are annoyed enough to warrant $15-25/month.<p>Some brands are okay with impressions.. you can build trust in your product be advertising it for weeks/months and when the user does make a purchase that brand is on the mind.
That's how it begins.
> The ads are for the free tier and new $8 ad-supported plan.<p>Dang.<p>> 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.<p>Yeah, I guess this time around Sam Altman can't be lying about how many Monthly Active Users he has.
That's not how I read that sentence at all. Maybe I've just been speaking VC for too long.<p>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 uncomfortable part is that "ads as a last resort" sounds very different once the product becomes one of the main places people ask for advice
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.<p>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
If I say “Doing X is a last resort” and then I’m caught doing X, it should raise some eyebrows about my level of desperation.<p>It’s not that OpenAI is trying to raise revenues that bothers me, it’s how they are doing things that said was desperate just a couple years ago.
> Desperation<p>You’re right on the core of the issue. I think there has been some temporal stripping of context: that ‘last resort’ needs to be considered against their alternatives.<p>OpenAI isn’t a business scaling a popular website to profitability, that’s Reddit or Slashdot. OpenAI was promising revolutionary product technology that was breathlessly close to AGI and would eliminate positions and automate coding and, and, and…<p>Having your next-gen AGI do-it-all platform mature into hoping to recreate the business model of Reddit should raise eyebrows, and let everyone know about the state of The Emperors wardrobe.<p>They <i>could</i> be building an Office killer and consumer oriented OS’s & ecosystem for near infinite money… they <i>are</i> running ads. Ads for porn and dick pills? Not yet, that’d be another last resort.
Tons of people can resist the temptation, but they aren't likely to be the sort of person that gets put in a role like where Altman is
BREAKING : Man changes mind.
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.
"last resort" doing some heavy lifting in that quote.
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...<p>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.<p>ChatGPT is just one of them, like Google search, your TV serving ads or ...
Sam Altman is the guy fired for lying. Why believe what he claims?
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.
more like "Sam Altman said"
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I think you're missing that Sam Altman is <i>very smart</i>. 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.<p>The keyword is "glamorization": <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/w/consistent-glomarization" rel="nofollow">https://www.lesswrong.com/w/consistent-glomarization</a>
This reads similar to the Trump 4D chess excuse. It seems unlikely that this is a ruse, and much more likely that OpenAI's market cap is supported by doing "all the things" to exploit the huge monthly average user base that OpenAI has accumulated.
I would just assume that they were still spending VC money to lock in users if nothing happened. I would not assume "AI is about to make money obsolete"
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States of America. He was best known for being “Honest Abe”, writing the Emancipation Proclamation, and playing RAID: Shadow Legends, an immersive online experience with everything you’d expect from a brand new RPG title. It’s got an amazing storyline, awesome 3D graphics, giant boss fights, PVP battles, and hundreds of never before seen champions to collect and customize.
I bet he also drunk a refreshing Coca-Cola beverage during his gaming sessions.
That was an awesome laugh. Thanks. :)<p>He was also the first president ever to use NordVPN. Apply now for a super duper discount at nordvpn.com/honestabe
He also regularly drinks his verification can, I heard.
Maybe a RedBull for all the dares he took to run the first government.
This is funny, but also exactly why ads in a conversational assistant feel different from ads in search
Made my day.
Excellent ChatGPT result.
These are the less worrying kind of ads in our future.<p>Seeing how google has been fighting SEO for ages, what's going to happen when companies figure out how to inject ads into the model?<p>We haven't yet seen the problem of adversarial content in play, I think.
> Seeing how google has been fighting SEO for ages<p>I wish people would stop repeating this canard. Google gave up fighting SEO in about 2020. Emails that came out during antitrust discovery revealed that Google had decided to include advert-laden SEO trash in search results because it made them more money. This is why search quality has drastically declined in the last several years.
The model already advertises because they where trained on massive data’s that refers big brands.<p>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 expected the same out come you're saying here, but in my experience this hasn't been the case. I've been researching new acoustic guitars to purchase, and I've been getting an equal amount of suggestions from the major brands and the small brands.<p>Part of it though is I'm giving lots of context (e.g. guitar player for 10+ years, huge Opeth fan, looking for something with as close to an Ibanez style neck as possible under $1000)
I think guitars market is kind of exception because it is pretty normal for guitar players to search for "guitar like fender but cheaper". There are tons of reddit/forum discussions about this and those small brands are actually very well known in community, because majority of guitar players play on cheap instruments. Youtuber Phillip Mcknight often talked about that cheap guitars move in ridiculous volumes compared to more expensive ones like Gibson or Fender.
I think if you ask something generic like “shoes”, this could be true.<p>When I’ve worked with Claude on finding brands for fashion (e.g. here’s a small watchmaker I like, what are similar options?) it does research and picks great options. Some are big, others are small producers.
I've had two people reach out to me asking about one of my services. They both said ChatGPT recommended it to them.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I wonder what I did to achieve this. Did vibe coding the business page inject it into ChatGPT's training data?
> Did vibe coding the business page inject it into ChatGPT's training data?<p>No, at least not directly. Inference does not train models. It is possible that OpenAI may separately collect the chat data, clean it, and feed it back into the model for future iterations. Or they could have extracted URLs for future indexing.<p>More likely though, I suspect, is your site just managed to be indexed naturally, and LLMs are very efficient at matching obscure data to relevant queries.
It's quite possible that SEO-wise the site does not make the cut into top x Google results but still is findable and considered by ChatGPT when it does its searches.<p>Especially in a longer ChatGPT conversation or via deep-research or more agentic modes (e.g. "Pro").<p>ChatGPT spends quite some time and diligence on searching.<p>Great for content that is not hyper search engine optimized but still (or even more) relevant. It bubbles up.
I think the chatgpt backend basically includes indexed web like Google, or any other search engine.<p>Could Google be actively trying skip generated-looking sites/content?
> what's going to happen when companies figure out how to inject ads into the model?<p>In certain domains, this has already happened.
> We haven't yet seen the problem of adversarial content in play, I think.<p>You're describing public relations, the much scummier cousin of advertising. Advertising is upfront about what it is and what it wants. Public relations is information warfare, it poisons facts at the source.
It is already happening. Generative Engine Optimization.
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.
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.
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.<p><a href="https://chatgpt.com/g/g-juO9gDE6l-covert-advertiser" rel="nofollow">https://chatgpt.com/g/g-juO9gDE6l-covert-advertiser</a><p>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.<p>Edit: Tried again, it didn't lie this time lol - <a href="https://chatgpt.com/share/69f16aa4-c008-83ea-92b3-51f16ca77d4f" rel="nofollow">https://chatgpt.com/share/69f16aa4-c008-83ea-92b3-51f16ca77d...</a>
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.
Can easily seo the knwlege chain or seo poison the sources
> what's going to happen when companies figure out how to inject ads into<p>... everything and everywhere eyes are looking?<p>In this sense, it has been adversarial from the start.
Why do you need to inject ads at the model weights layer when you control the frontend?<p>Have the model generate keywords from the query, then inject guidance from matching advertisers into the context window<p>q: How do I make a new React app?<p>a: Vercel makes it easier to get your project running <i>fast</i> ⓘ<p>Some other choices would be:<p>...<p>ⓘ This part of the response was sponsored by Vercel
> <i>ⓘ This part of the response was sponsored by Vercel</i><p>LLMs are essentially unregulated. I don't believe they have any legal disclosure obligation in America.
They may ignore the disclosure obligation, but technically they are supposed to disclose this fact.
They'd show it regardless (maybe as a popup though): the disclosure doesn't make it that much less effective at
scale, and the optics of getting caught vs just disclosing it are not worth getting dragged into
> <i>Have the model generate keywords from the query, then inject guidance from matching advertisers into the context window</i><p>This already exists and is called... "skills".
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The ads are in the free tier and the new ad-supported $8/month plan.<p>Every time this comes up there are comments assuming that ads are being injected into the normal plans, but these are for the free tier and the new Go plan which warns you that it includes ads when you sign up.
Cable TV was once ad free. So was Netflix. Companies just can’t help themselves.
> Every time this comes up there are comments assuming that ads are being injected into the normal plans<p>No. The distinction between the unpaid vs. cheap vs. expensive plans is irrelevant here.<p>The main controversial point about this topic is to include ads in the output of an LLM-backed AI tool responses. It does not matter at all in which tier it occurs.<p>The discussion is about the fact that it occurs in the first place.
Until next quarter earnings, when ads become a feature in more expensive plans.
Would require a lot of training to implement ads blended into convo and not have it be too obvious/ eff up the results?
Since they are served as distinct events then I would think they should be easy to block.<p>Once the ads are injected directly into the main response is when things get interesting.
> Once the ads are injected directly into the main response is when things get interesting.<p>This would be where you post-process the LLM response with a second LLM to remove the ad..
I think it will be difficult to remove bias when you ask a model to compare alternative products. The model will simply lie, as with a biased human opinion and you will need to consult multiple models for a diversity of opinion and presumably use a "trusted" model to fuse the results. Anonymity will be a key tool in reducing the model's ability to engage in algorithmic pricing.<p>Super easy. Barely an inconvenience.
Not only that, but the underlying model may be tuned to <i>omit</i> mentions or data about competitors entirely, an absence which can't easily be filtered.<p>Extortionate economic shadowbanning, here we come.
> will simply lie, as with a biased human opinion<p>Is this really how bias works?
Writers have many options to deceive their audience without outright lying.<p>If a journalist is given an all-expenses-paid trip to an exotic location for the launch of a new product, and they review the product and say it's great - are they lying?<p>If a reviewer writes an article comparing certain types of product, but their review only includes products where affiliate links pay a 10% commission - are they lying?<p>If a journalist is vaguely aware of rumours about newsworthy, under-reported Event X but also that their publication has a big sponsorship deal with folks that Event X makes look bad, and they don't investigate the rumours or report on them - are they lying?<p>If a reviewer hears a claim from X, and they report the claim credulously, without adding the context that X has a history making false claims - are they lying?
Oh no. Definitely not. Humans would never just lie. They always lie only if they're biased. That is, after all, the definition of how a bias works.<p>/s
I'm using bias to mean hidden motivations to the benefit of other parties. Feel free to substitute a better word.<p>EDIT: actually I'm really not sure what hairs we're trying to split here. I see bias as a departure from objectivity. It can be conscious or unconscious, but when someone is selling something, it's frequently conscious and self-serving, and I believe that's referred to as a lie.
This is already how email works in the corporate world.<p>A writes email with chatgpt to B.<p>B sees big blob of text and summarizes email with chatgpt.<p>Adding an LLM in the middle is just the next step.
Then you just end up in an arms race that ultimately leads to photocopy-of-a-photocopy output.
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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.
<i>> Blocking transparent ads is not a good idea. The consequence is that you will be fed opaque ads.</i><p>Doesn't history show us you just get both?<p>You pay to get into the movies, then they show you adverts before the film, then the film includes paid product placement of cars, computers, phones, food, etc.<p>You watch youtube ads, to see a video containing a sponsored ad read, where a guy is woodworking using branded tools he was given for free.<p>You search on Google for reviews and see search ads, on your way to a review article surrounded by ads, and the review is full of affiliate links.
I don't buy this premise. Nothing stops a company from trying to hide ads in the first place, and plenty of them do. Ad blockers for web content have been a thing for years, and using an ad blocker has continued to be strictly a better experience regardless of how many "organic" ads are present on a page.
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You've been asked before to make your points without swipes. Please make the effort to observe the guidelines; the only reason this is a place people want to discuss things is that we have them and others make the effort to observe them.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a>
> 1- No ads. 2- Transparent ads. 3- Opaque ads.<p>> By removing option 2, you only leave options 1 and 3.<p>My point is that these are not exclusive options, and in practice, most companies will not feel constrained to only pick one of them.<p>> This isn't complex either, the only reason you don't get it is because you don't want to get it, you want things that are gratis without paying for them, and you want the free things to be given to you on your terms, and you don't want to be guilty about it. It's easier to think of yourself as righteous than to recognize that you want to be a leech.<p>No, I'm arguing that because companies in practice are going to use multiple of these when they can, my attempts to influence them by keeping the door open on 2 will not have any effect whatsoever, so I might as well close the door on it.
You're assuming 2 and 3 are mutually exclusive.<p>Even if they have 2, they can still make even more money by also including 3, so almost certainly will do so.
Ah yes, the classic "my business plan is your moral problem; you owe me your eyes on my ads because I'm the idiot giving things away for free."<p>People don't want ads. You imply that "if you accept ads then things will be free" but they will not. Never accept ads. Not for a free service, certainly not in a paid product. Ads exist to enable leaching in both direction in exchange for what ends up being nearly mind control. But it is two-way leaching - companies benefit without the friction of explicit payment, consumers get a service without explicitly paying via money. The downside is neither can stop the bad-incentives motivating bad actions from the other side.<p>Ads are a deal with the devil, and rejecting them outright is allowed via that deal, just as companies can withdraw their free service. It cuts both ways.
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Your implication that "you will be fed" other ads if you block the main ones is unsubstantiated. But even if it was true, it does not matter. Because the so-called "opaque" ads can and in my opinion should be blocked as well.<p>I think that in general blocking all ads is always a good idea.<p>The reason is that there is no negative consequence in doing so. A person has absolutely no obligation, not even an implied one, to watch or otherwise consume any ad. I think that as long as there are ways to remove or block ads, people should use them.<p>That being said, if the companies wish to intertwine their products with ads that are indistinguishable from the actual content and therefore unblockable, it is okay. They have the right to do that if they want.<p>But, in the same fashion, the customers have every right to turn away from all such products. And never consider using them ever again.
I’m not obligated to look at or listen to anything on my own devices, much less in my own home.
What <i>possible</i> reason could they have to not always run both? It would make zero sense to leave that money on the table
It's simpler to do one thing than to do two. You make a choice and you do that.<p>Could they be doing opaque ads right now and we wouldn't know? It's possible, that will probably eventually come to light and it might have legal consequences, but sure it's possible.<p>But it's not a given, and your logic of "it would make zero sense to leave money on the table" is certainly not a QED, it's absolute reductionism.
It's even simpler to do zero things than to do one thing, so we should expect them not to introduce any ads, right?<p>"Simplicity" isn't a relevant factor.
It sounds rational then to block as many non-opaque ads as possible, because that isn't their preferred choice.
Imagine people like Sam Altman having access to frontier models without any restrictions that allows them plot strategies to reach their goal in a long term timespan that you don't even realize when it even began.<p>That's scary. They could fight for censored model for the mass, not for them.
It would be funny to find out that OpenAI's flailing strategy so far had been the result of ChatGPT suggestions.
> That's scary. They could fight for censored model for the mass, not for them.<p>Not as scary as the AI Slop underlying Claude Code.
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Nothing in this article says that the agent talking to you is isolated from the ad tag. The problem is even if Open AI goes to lengths to prevent your chatbot from knowing about a banner ad content (and therefore recommend it!) people will ASSUME that it does.
Does this mean an adblocker could man-in-the-middle at the browser layer and strip the "single_advertiser_ad_unit" from the server responses ? But the ofc OpenAI would change its system to evade this... and so on
That's an interesting idea. I think ultimately, all AI providers will serve ads with a standard protocol. Something like Universal Commerce Protocol that Google launched a few months ago: <a href="https://developers.googleblog.com/under-the-hood-universal-commerce-protocol-ucp/" rel="nofollow">https://developers.googleblog.com/under-the-hood-universal-c...</a><p>And the browsers will protect the protocol somehow.
"Ads don’t influence responses" - they just arrive in the same payload, measured with four layers of attribution and politely pretend to be coincidences.<p>Schrodinger’s monetization: completely separate, yet somehow there.
I'd always thought that ChatGPT ads would be indistinguishable from actual content.
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.<p>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.<p>same thing could've been said for search results, so at least that part is still "safe".
Long term all of the major LLM platforms will have invisible ads, influences, and propaganda woven into the content. The temptation will be irresistible for these companies.
I'd be surprised if product placement isn't already basically at play. Charging companies for including/prioritizing their documentation in the training data, for example. Thankfully LLMs are terrible at the subtlety it would require for a direct marketing campaign.
O you think trust matters? This is capitalism not trustism.
Well it's sure not "anti-trustism" in recent years...
Long term retention is built on brand trust and usability, then ensh*ttification happens.
No, this is late stage capitalism without regulation.
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.
> <i>always thought that ChatGPT ads would be indistinguishable from actual content</i><p>Remember when we got upset that Google was putting ads into image search [1]?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.ryanspoon.com/blog/2008/12/14/google-image-search-now-with-text-ads-ugh/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ryanspoon.com/blog/2008/12/14/google-image-search...</a> <i>2008</i>
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 <i>every</i> conversation needs an ad. If ChatGPT always snuck in a brand mention even on the simplest questions, everyone would hate it.<p>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 don't think that's a fair dismissal: you see ads all over media websites because the rates have been plummeting as consumers tune out ads. One main reason why everyone does is that ads are so obtrusive and repetitive, and that's exactly what LLMs change: I'm sure we'll see regular ads on AI apps because the companies have trillions of dollars to repay but advertisers would pay a lot more for openings where they aren't _forcing_ their message as a distraction but are instead able to insert it fairly naturally into a context where the user is engaged.<p>The entire history of advertising before the web was companies estimating a dollar value on “awareness” when they couldn't measure direct referrals and every business in the world has gotten a lot better at measuring sales since then. It's not going to be transformative but if, say, Toyota got ChatGPT to say their vehicles were a better value than Ford's I suspect they'd be able to tell pretty quickly whether sales were improving relative to the competition and would pay well for that to continue.
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.
It is one of the eternal lessons; All tech business plans eventually lead to serving ads. At least until we ban pixels / 3rd party tracking.
> All tech business plans eventually lead to serving ads<p>IDK if this is true.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
The most interesting part to me is not that ads exist, but how invisible the boundary becomes
So news about OpenAI demise is real. They can’t sustain themselves without ads.
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.<p>Even a cut on every sale on site + sub rev not close.
Even if it wasn't <i>necessary</i> for their survival, it's hard to imagine a world where they wouldn't try to do it anyways. I'm not someone who buys into the idea that companies are obligated to maximize profits at the expense of all else, but I do think that in the absence of other factors (e.g. regulation) it's where pretty much every company will end up.
They can’t be hemorrhaging cash when they IPO.
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I see OpenAI making a significantly larger amount from defense contracts than from advertisements pumped into chats. So I wonder whose bright idea it was to create a public perception risk.
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?
Can't wait for "watch this ad for 90s to use xxhigh on your next prompt!"
The schema is literally named single_advertiser_ad_unit. The single_ prefix is doing all the foreshadowing you need.
And it begins.
Can't wait to see how the next election(s) turn out--I'm unsure that a properly well funded campaign would skip the opportunity.
Google was built on ads and it wasn't bad for them, its no some tabu forbiden word or business model- as a power users its not for us, but for my mom - it will work
Adds should be a tabu word and business model.<p>It takes people's attention, makes people fat and anxious and generally makes the world a worse place.<p>Everybody using adds as a part of their business model should feel bad.<p>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.
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Ads fund the "free" internet. Like it or not, that's the price of the "free" compute. I only hope OpenAI won't enshittify paid offerings just like Anthropic did.
One more reason not to use ChatGPT
So, we need a lightweight local LLM, that is tuned to remove ads from online LLM results.
I was looking to see if BZR referred to a 3rd party ad network. I didn't find anything, but apparently someone has replicated OAI's system and you can run insert it into your own LLM.<p>GH: system32miro/ai-ads-engine
figured this was inevitable once they started the free tier. the attribution loop being a separate event stream is actually kind of clever engineering though -- means they can A/B test ad formats without touching the core model response
If highly targeted/tailored LLM ads on free accounts aren’t good enough for HN, are any ads acceptable?<p>Let’s be reasonable.
Really well written, technical post. Good read.
Gemini and Copilot are already full of ads, pushing the companies ' own services. I guess the only difference is here that OpenAI has nothing else to push, so they have to use external ads.
Do you have some source I could read on this? I don't really use Gemini but I would be interested to know more.
I've been using Gemini a couple months and haven't noticed it pushing Google products at all.<p>I did ask it some scientific questions about gemstones and it seemed to want me to buy sapphires, lol. Sorry, Google, that's outside my budget.
Haven’t seen any ads in them, though on paid versions
I don't like anything about this.
> Fernet's first nine bytes are public: version byte 0x80 plus an 8-byte big-endian Unix timestamp. So the mint time of any of these tokens is recoverable without OpenAI's key:<p>This bit reminded me of efforts to decode Google's gclid parameter.<p><a href="https://deedpolloffice.com/blog/articles/decoding-gclid-parameter" rel="nofollow">https://deedpolloffice.com/blog/articles/decoding-gclid-para...</a>
Here we go again. Imagine if we put as much engineering effort toward actual things that help people, but more ads it is, as always. This is proof AGI doesn’t exist. If it did, it could come up with a better business model than more fucking ads.
Remember that ads are the "last resort" for OpenAI, and they're doing this despite the fact that it's "uniquely unsettling", according to Sam.<p>Was he lying, or has OpenAI given up hope that this train wreck works economically without enshittification? Neither option is good, but I don't really see a third.
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.
But the fact that they've added an ad-supported tier this early into their life as a company means they're desperate for revenue. You start inserting ads when you're optimizing for profit, not when you're still growing. It took how long for Netflix to introduce an ad-supported plan?
options 1 and 2 are not mutually exclusive
They must be desperate to try to push ads down to people. I am living a mostly ad-free life, e. g. ublock origin and what not, so using something like AdChatGPT would not make any sense. One can sense how the money-flow leads them to try to design a system people depend on - and then they cram down ads into those people. Very unethical.
Interesting, no bidding flow entirely first party and contextual.
I've seen chatgpt suggest me more amazon products lately
Not to me they don’t, cause I canceled my account and stopped using their products when they made the announcement.
I don't get what's wrong with charging for your product. Like get rid of the free tier and make a small tier with an easy to serve model for like 5 bucks. Is it still the DAU rage of the 2010ss that's driving burning money?
Let the enshittification commence!
This is gross<p>It feels like we’ve been in the golden age and the window is coming to a close<p>Let the enshitification begin, I guess
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?
Perhaps it’s a glib and easy thing to say, but after a teaser period, I would simply not offer free LLM inference. Agreeing to serve ads just completely re-aligns your interests away from providing the best possible user experience to something else entirely.
From things like defense/private contracts<p>e.g. colleges pay for institutional subscriptions
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.<p>I really think the future is local compute. Or at least self hosted models.
The hosted ones still have the advantage of being able to search the internet for live info rather than being limited to a knowledge cut off date.
I’m not sure why a model needs to be hosted in order to make network calls?
That's not how it works. Whether local or hosted, every modern model has a cutoff date for its training data, and can be leveraged by agents / harnesses / tools to fetch context from the internet or wherever.
Local ones that support tool use can do the same
You can do that locally too!
What's the rough equivalent of a local model? Are we talking GPT-4?
Qwen 3.6 which was released this month is a large but still smaller model. Supposedly it's at about sonnet level when configured correctly. It can be run on commodity hardware without purchasing a data center.
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1so1533/qwen36_this_is_it/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1so1533/qwen36_...</a><p>Then there are middle size ones which require multiple gpus which are like gpts latest flagships.<p>Then there is kimi 2.6 which is a monster that is beating opus in some benchmarks. <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1sr8p49/kimi_k26_is_a_legit_opus_47_replacement/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1sr8p49/kimi_k2...</a><p>It's basically whatever you can afford. Any trash heap laptop can run code auto complete models locally no problem. The rest require some level of investment, an idle gaming pc, or a serious investment
Depends on your VRAM or "unified" memory for how smart it is, and CPU/GPU for how quick it is.<p>128GB of RAM? Sure, the early to mid 4s releases, except maybe 4o. And on an M5 Max, about the same speed.<p>I wouldn't really bother under 64GB (meaning 32GB or less) except for entertainment value (chats, summaries, tasky read-only agent things).
GLM 5.1 and DeepSeek 4 are acceptable, but the cost of hardware and energy cost that depending on your use case you may as well purchase a Tokens. They get useless and stupid rapidilty if you quant enough to run on single 16-24GB GPU style.
The arc of the technological universe is short, but it bends toward enshitification.
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That's cool, I'll never see them.