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Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

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Re: Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

#541

Post by waltbosz »

Looks like they've turned the feature on. I just got an ad in the Android app. My account is plus subscription.

https://imgur.com/a/jmh8EN5

Context of the conversation, I was asking it to convert a photo into Studio Ghibli style and it objected to the blender in the image so I asked if it could do one with a mason jar instead of a blender. Then it started to generate the picture, then instead it displayed the ad.

... Edit ...

Looks like this may be a existing feature I didn't know about "shopping research" connector. I can't seem to turn it off in the app .

Re: Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

#542

Post by beefnugs »

klntsky wrote: post #533
blackjack_ wrote: post #531

I can drop in replace LLMs in my everyday usage. If OpenAI introduces ads, I will switch and never look back. They have no Moat, and right now the Chinese companies catch up shortly after the models are released… All these arguments about average people not knowing about other LLM companies can be fixed with a simple internet search or information sharing. No big deal.

Opensource LLMs are absolutely not on par with gpt-5 for any agentic workflows

They dont have to be, they just have to be smart enough to remove anything that sounds like a brand from a "good cloud model". This is barely beyond if-else if we start tracking all brands doing the advertising

Re: Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

#543

Post by samcat116 »

waltbosz wrote: post #541

Looks like they've turned the feature on. I just got an ad in the Android app. My account is plus subscription. https://imgur.com/a/jmh8EN5 Context of the conversation, I was asking it to convert a photo into Studio Ghibli style and it objected to the blender in the image so I asked if it could do one with a mason jar instead of a blender. Then it started to generate the picture, then instead it displayed the ad. ...…

I think this a popup for their shopping research promotion feature they added last week. I guess its a first party ad for their own new feature, but I don’t think its the third party ads that this article is talking about.

Re: Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

#544

Post by ggregoire »

jdoliner wrote: post #491

It's not totally obvious to me that you can get the economics of this to work. A Google search costs ~.04 cents to serve, whereas a frontier reasoning LLM request costs about 2 cents. The revenue from a Google search is also around 2 cents. So the margins are dangerously thin on an LLM. Now there's lots of variables that can be tweaked on this. So it's possible to get it to work. But there's a lot less room for error…

Every Google search request triggers a Gemini request tho.

Which is great… that's why I don't use chatGPT at all, having a LLM summary + a list of websites to deepen the search if I need, is just a superior user experience IMO.

Re: Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

#545

Post by beefnugs »

embedding-shape wrote: post #432
ipcress_file wrote: post #117

I love this. Now I'll be able to read student papers with ads in the middle. "Are you enjoying our exploration of state Shinto in late nineteenth century Japan? Visit Kyoto with Japan Airlines this summer! Use the code 'JAL26' for special savings!"

I know it's a joke, but the ads will surely be much more stealthy than that. Advertisers are gonna want to drive people to products and websites without it being clear it's actually an ad, like subtle ranking things differently, or trying to nudge users into some direction.

yikes.

"Oh no lonely teen you are absolutely correct! Borax does cause incredible harm to the human digestive system, enough to end whatever suffering you seem to be experiencing. Here is a coupon code for 10% off borax, and 20% off funeral services, and 20 cents of bonus crypto if you sign your parents up for InternetBeanz!"

Re: Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

#546

Post by EagnaIonat »

klntsky wrote: post #533
blackjack_ wrote: post #531

I can drop in replace LLMs in my everyday usage. If OpenAI introduces ads, I will switch and never look back. They have no Moat, and right now the Chinese companies catch up shortly after the models are released… All these arguments about average people not knowing about other LLM companies can be fixed with a simple internet search or information sharing. No big deal.

Opensource LLMs are absolutely not on par with gpt-5 for any agentic workflows

Tool calling I've found takes a bit of work, but Ollama with gpt-oss:20b/120b run on my laptop and work quite well for 90% of the stuff I do.

So it's only a matter of time.

Re: Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

#548

Post by doctorpangloss »

sfifs wrote: post #532
aurareturn wrote: post #14

- ~1 billion users in just 3 years - Extremely personal data on users - Novel way of introducing and learning more about sponsored products - Strong branding for non-techie people (most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are) - An app that is getting more and more addictive/indispensable I think OpenAI is going to kill it in ads eventually. This is why Meta and Google went all in on AI. Their lucrative di…

If there's one thing the history of mass internet servuces teaches us, it is that people switch to platforms with superior product/experience in an instant. Remember Lycos, Yahoo, & Hotmail? They all had strong userbases for their time who switched in an instant to Google Search & Gmail. Even with network effects, it is very difficult to compete without outright superiority - remember Orkut, MySpace, Google Plus or e…

Nah, people using Yahoo are still using it today. What happened was the growth of new users of the Internet in general was so massive, T+1 cohort’s early adopters outnumbered T cohort’s majority. the better product won, it’s just that the friction of switching didn’t matter. Switchers didn’t matter.

Re: Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

#549

Post by itopaloglu83 »

gmadsen wrote: post #535
aurareturn wrote: post #14

- ~1 billion users in just 3 years - Extremely personal data on users - Novel way of introducing and learning more about sponsored products - Strong branding for non-techie people (most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are) - An app that is getting more and more addictive/indispensable I think OpenAI is going to kill it in ads eventually. This is why Meta and Google went all in on AI. Their lucrative di…

The memories are the moat. Regardless of the current or future capability, most users already view chatgpt as a personal confidant that they are investing energy into building a relationship with. That will be a far stronger moat than anything else

I’ve had a couple of instances where when I describe a requirement, ChatGPT would not list an open source project like n8n and happen to only remember paid alternatives.

It’s an advertiser’s wet dream, being able to slowly creep and manipulate even the most uninterested people into using a product.

And it’s so personalized that ChatGPT may even refuse to tell you about products that are not paying them a cut and this can put out a company entirely out of business, because unlike search engines, the customer might not even learn about your product despite directly asking for it.

Re: Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

#550

Post by mk89 »

abustamam wrote: post #512
aurareturn wrote: post #14

- ~1 billion users in just 3 years - Extremely personal data on users - Novel way of introducing and learning more about sponsored products - Strong branding for non-techie people (most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are) - An app that is getting more and more addictive/indispensable I think OpenAI is going to kill it in ads eventually. This is why Meta and Google went all in on AI. Their lucrative di…

My wife and I have android phones. Google pretty much shoves AI down our throats. She probably doesn't know what gemini is but I know she's been using it probably without realizing she's using AI. And she never uses ChatGPT. Not saying that that makes Gemini better or more popular than Open AI in any way. But it just goes to show that more tech-normies use Gemini than you think.

I just had to fix the phone from a family member that used to shut it down by pressing and holding one of the side buttons, and now got instead an "ask gemini" pop-up.

It must be some "upgrade" I guess?

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