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?

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.

Source [video]: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1qeyty4/i_kind...

Saving this sentence for later.

I understand what they're trying to say but this statement is factually incorrect. Answers never used to have ads, and now they do.

In the very first example, if ChatGPT wasn't running ads Heirloom Groceries wouldn't show up, therefore it is a different answer.

OpenAI is splitting hairs and implying that the ad and the 'answer' are two separate components making up a response, but that is not how users will see things, and OpenAI will have ever increasing incentives to blur the two.

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.

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

How would OAI allow them to target without access to de-anonymized data?

Buyers will want to exclude existing customers, which requires the same.

The product managers will have explicit KPIs tied to conversion. At some point, like at Google, this will break. It has to or OAI can’t grow into its current valuation, let alone any future one.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AITrailblazers/comments/1qw2iar/ant...

Depending on your taste this is dumb mudslinging or a hilarious burn...

We are already seeing a market for AI for productivity in companies, the Claude code product is the first serious one here, but we can expect more to show up. When you look at the B2B market, ads are basically not a thing in these segments, companies are generally more willing to pay for products, and less willing to accept outside influence on how the product works, and I don't think this will change when companies are buying AI either. Companies might be happy with selling ads in their own products. On the other hand consumers, don't like to pay, and that will probably drive consumer oriented products to be ad funded. Basically what I'm expecting will happen, is that we will end up with two types of AI vendors.

Those that target the consumer market and those that target the business market. Consumer AI will trend toward companionship, entertainment, casual chat — things like digital friends, relationship play, even adult content. Companies want none of that, and some of it is serious legal liability. Even a few missteps and you get expensive backlash in the business market.

It does look like OpenAI is trying to succeed in both the consumer and business market, and there are companies that are able to pull this off, most do not, and end up serving one of the markets. Given their lead in the name recognition I suspect they are going to end up an ad financed consumer brand, and will lose the business market to someone else. But I might be wrong.

The saving grace for those of us that don't want ads to bleed into our AI tools, is that we probably will be able to buy the same products that the small business segment buys. Some consumer oriented features might be missing, but they might either be features we don't need, or maybe open source could fill the gaps?

> OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.

Scam Altman: "ads lead to positive human impact"

Non-fascist: "Sir, ads have destroyed google's commitment to index and make useful the world's knowledge"

Scam Altman: <insert longtermism-based justification here>

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

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

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

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

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.

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).

God, how stupid do they think we are?

OpenAI is now an ads company.

But ads don’t have to ruin a great company.

A century or more ago, top tier journalistic institutions created norms of putting strong barriers between the reporting and advertising sides of the house. That kept trust with customers and made journalism a sustainable long term business.

So, It’s mostly Google that couldn’t keep its hands out of the cookie jar (not solely Google, but they’re an industry leader.) It really doesn’t have to go south, it’s not the default, but Google did set the tone for Silicon Valley in exactly the way wise journalism company leaders did for their industry in the late 1800s. If OpenAI has a long term view on this they’ll follow a journalism industry model instead of a cookie jar model - but they have to believe deep down that customer trust is worth more than ad dollars long term.

There are reasons to hope: OpenAI has more and fiercer competition than Google; including Chinese competitors that can’t be lobbied away. Qwen, DeepSeek, Mistral and Kimi all have free chat UIs!

I remain stubbornly optimistic.

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.

What's the expected revenue from this?

I think it would suck if to effectively get the word out there for a new product you needed to rely on..

...direct outreach (uneconomical for anything below $100/mo and IMO way more annoying than ads)

...word of mouth (referrals are very, very hard to control and aren't correlated with your product's quality)

..or owning a popular media source

Does that not hurt product innovation?

The harder and more expensive it is to reach customers, the more prices need to go up as a result

That sounds like quite a lot to me.

Translation: They will very slowly abandon their 'principles', just like they did with the moment they took investment from Microsoft and the VCs.

This is how ChatGPT gets destroyed and 'ensh*ttified' for everyone. The same people who jumped ship from Meta and destroyed Facebook, Instagram, and soon Threads are also the same people that are about apply the same recipe on to ChatGPT at OpenAI.

The researchers that were there pre-ChatGPT are now being replaced by opportunist grifters that will ruin the product overrun by ads once again. It would be no-different to Google Ads.

Now we need ad-blockers for LLMs to be in place "for the benefit of humanity".

For now, or for ever?

Lets see about that. When that's your bottom line and you're already billions in debt trying to prove out a business model, I'm SURE Ads are just an after thought /s

> What I think is clear is they have to build an advertising product, and the reason they have to build an advertising product is any consumer Internet product has to be advertising, because it’s such a beneficial model to everyone involved, and the reason it’s so beneficial is you get to indefinitely and infinitely increase average revenue per user without any worries about price elasticity, because the entire increase in average revenue per user is borne by the advertisers who are paying it willingly because they’re getting a positive return on their investment, and everyone’s using it for free so you can reach the whole world. Then what happens with that is once you get that model going, you have a massive R&D advantage, because you have so much more money coming in than anyone who doesn’t have that cycle or who has to charge users for it.

https://stratechery.com/2026/ads-in-chatgpt-why-openai-needs...

> This point, more than anything else, explains why the company so desperately needs an advertising model. Advertising is the only potential business model that can meaningfully bend the revenue curve such that the company can not just fund its compute but gain leverage on it, for all of the reasons I laid out before: first, advertising increases the breadth of the business, in that you can offer a better product to more people, increasing usage and expanding inventory. Second, advertising increases the depth of the business, in that there is infinite upside in terms of average revenue per user: more usage means more inventory on one hand, and building out the capability for effective targeting and high conversion rates increases the amount that advertisers are willing to pay — even as the cost to the user remains the same (ideally free).

It's valuable to remember that advertisers will pay more per user than users will, and that's hard to beat in a competitive market.

Also, it's fascinating how much people _like_ ads when done properly. Ask normal people about Instagram ads, for example. They find them useful!

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)