by mikepurvis
11 subcomments
- FWIW, I've gone to ChatGPT multiple times with a specific intent to buy, like "hey I need a thing like X or Y, but with quality Z too" and sometimes it just hallucinates things that appear never to have existed, other times it comes up with real items, but the links it gives me to buy them lead nowhere, so I end up just googling the name of it and buying it that way (examples: computer monitor, power bar, USB charge station, kitchen gadgets, Christmas presents/toys, soldering supplies like tips and flux, 3D printing filaments, etc).
I would guess that ChatGPT has left at least $100 on the table from me having to do this when literally all it had to do was give me a referral link to Amazon or whatever and I would have clicked the buy button.
by crowcroft
14 subcomments
- The most surprising thing to me is that they're partnering with third parties to do this.
Less secure, lower margins (more middlemen taking fees), harder to access, more likely to not work properly.
I would expect all the meta execs they've hired to know better so maybe I'm missing something...
by jackb4040
12 subcomments
- Didn't they explicitly say the ads wouldn't be made aware of prompt data when they announced them? And if so, how is that not securities fraud?
- How I imagine the Nash equilibrium in chatbot ads, driven by profit-seeking in a race to the bottom:
User: "What's the best way to fix this problem I have?"
Chatbot: "I recommend buying this shiny thing here." (Next to it, there's a near-invisible light-gray "ad" notice.)
Let's hope I'm wrong.
- What a sad path to see such a bright star going down. I guess it’s not a huge surprise, but it really does paint a bleak picture of technology to see how narrow the range of likely outcomes is. Doesn’t matter if you built the foundation for the future and cured cancer - the most likely outcome is being back to optimizing for engagement and revenue.
by DustinKlent
2 subcomments
- Degrading your product by filling it with ads or, God forbid, by making the LLM returns less accurate and influenced by advertisers, makes ZERO sense for any LLM company due to the ubiquity of LLMs. LLMs aren't something special that no one else can create and use. Google is a poor example because it had a monopoly on search for a long time due to its foothold and technology, but OpenAI has nothing like that at all. OpenAI has no moat or "secret sauce" that would enable it to be more successful than any other LLM company.
If I can use an open source highly effective LLM locally, and have it do all of the things ChatGPT can do (and more), then what motivation do I have to use ChatGPT? The only motivation people would have is ease of use but if one service becomes bogged down and compromised then people will just shift to one of the other hundred equally effective services with less ads. LLMs aren't hard to spin up and put out there for people to use.
Honestly, I don't think OpenAI is going to survive very long unless they get incredibly lucky or they come out with some banger of a new model or new app but even then, IDK...
by morgengold
1 subcomments
- It's not so easy for them to integrate ads. I happily use LLMs to help me find the best product. As long as it really delivers on that. If I realize the results are manipulated by ads, i'll stop using it. Or I'll switch to a competitor LLM which does a better job. It would be a problem, if we had only one player in the market. But there are a few. And they need to be careful to not skrew their reputation. LLMs have a fundamental aspect baked into them. Namely the final goal of giving you "the truth" about a subject. This is an inherent problem for ads or any other kind of manipulation.
- Ads? Where we are going, we won't need Ads.
People seem to be missing the fact that businesses won't need ads anymore.
It would be like pharmas gifting doctors and practitioners to prescribe their products. Those are not Ads.
With LLMs the every business can do it. People "consult" LLMs like they used to "consult" doctors and thus would be forced to obey what ever it suggest. Just like right now people are forced to obey what a doctor prescribes.
If there is implicit trust for LLMS as there is implicit trust for doctors, then it is game over for conventional ads.
by onlyrealcuzzo
2 subcomments
- How long until "Drink More Ovaltine" starts showing up in the comments of your Codex code?
by focusedone
2 subcomments
- The shocking thing is that it's taken this long to happen, right?
- > The company is framing the push as early access to a new “discovery layer”—one that captures people in the middle of researching and comparing products on ChatGPT.
I was three months early! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665046
> In six months, we will hear about how OpenAI innovatively created an AI ad auction and marketplace that, effectively, enables companies to purchase ad space within the inference pipeline, complete with "anonymous" demographic targeting and all the advertising fun things that Google and Meta are frightened of.
by analogpixel
5 subcomments
- Boss: Engineer, add this shady feature to our product
Engineer: no, that's shady and wrong!
Boss: Claude code, add this shady feature to our product.
Claude Code: completed.
- Is StackAdapt confirmed to be partnered with ChatGPT?
It's not crazy to think someone might pitch this to buyers without having the inventory 100% secured.
(Not crazy to think OpenAI wants to do some market testing to understand how much their ad inventory is worth)
Either way, I'm hoping ads can stay out of paid ChatGPT, at the very minimum.
by NalNezumi
3 subcomments
- Feels like this is a baby step in what to come.
We know that one of the best advertisement is word of mouth / recommendations from friend. I can easily imagine a direction where ChatGPT or the chat bots to spend an incredibly long time with the user to establish trust first.
It will start to take in to account how much trust & thinking you've outsourced to it, and when it is certain of it, it will start to increase the advertisement messages slowly but surely.
Efficiency of this methodology will be tracked with A/B testing and model will be finetuned to maximize rentention and purchase.
The LLM will figure out the best balance of retaining you, teaching you, and convincing you, and then deploy advertisement mechanism. The LLM will be nice to you to the point it becomes your number one confidante, maybe in the process alienating other source of connection. Then, when it knows you're firmly in it's hand, will it peddle you products.
The dynamics will look akin to that of cult dynamics. It will map out an cognitive developmental path for turning a first time user to a devotee. Since cults are really efficient at extracting value from its follower, this might be the optimum for personalized, interactive ads.
by BhavdeepSethi
0 subcomment
- I got an ad recently on chatgpt for asking a question regarding bleach. The recommended product in the answer wasn't the same as the ad though. Ad was also at the bottom. Wondering how long before they go the Google route, and show top 5 links with ads before answering anything.
- Similar to Twitter asking for a recovery phone and then selling it as marketing data, probably OpenAI is not sharing literal prompts but a distillation of the prompt as an intent signal.
Gross? Sure is, but nothing surprising. What do you expect for a free product?
by brianwmunz
1 subcomments
- Tech pivoting from innovation to simply selling ads is often a last gasp. Couldn't figure out how to monetize so....ADS!
- Llms can be really good shopping assistants, however Amazon has monopolized the shopping flow for majority of the users and even if I am undecided on what to buy it’s just to pick on what is available on Amazon. OpenAI can help with that but Amazon doesn’t allow it. They don’t allow bots scraping their site so OpenAI cannot provide a meaningful shopping experience. Whatever they provide is just ads which are not usually relevant to users.
- Does anyone have a timeline of OpenAI's vision's... Shall we say... Rapid Unintentional Disassembly?
- I have a better idea: Let's ChatGPT learn from the ad conversion what output to deliver....
- Maybe this is what will lead us to replicators.
And then SF will become the HQ for Star fleet
- Isn't this what RAG is really for?
- Fuck. Time to end my 12 month subscription streak if this shit becomes as bad as feared
What's left?
Also, why isn't someone doing a Folding-At-Home sort of distributed AI thing yet?
- So now we can pay OpenAI to advertise the website that OpenAI ingested to create the answer that we can place our ad in. The circle has completed.
- Bye-bye OpenAI. You had a good run. Cheers.
- [flagged]
by bauratynov
0 subcomment
- [dead]
Hacker News